Jakarta in the Time of Cholera

I’ve definitely encountered my share of sketchy food abroad. From clandestine dog meat in rural Guangxi to nationally famous duck blood soup in Nanjing, China can offer as many culinary feats of strength as you desire. Bar the dog meat, I have never shied away from the dingy noodle house or the dumpling slinging street peddler. And I have managed to avoid any serious stomach issues. Not so in Indonesia.

Visiting Jakarta for the first time in early 2020, I went in with the same mindset I had in China: try everything authentic. This included the prolifically available fried chicken, delicious streetside drinks served in plastic bags, and Knödel-like Bakso meatballs. And for the first week of my street food sampling, I had no problems whatsoever.

Then suddenly, violently, I woke with something feeling amiss in my stomach. Thus began a relentless expulsion of fluids that would leave me skeletal within eight hours and, without immediate emergency treatment, dead in sixteen hours.

The merciless nausea left me riling on the floor, with every sip of water sending me into bouts of tremoring heaving. I was losing fluids fast, and I realized this was no ordinary traveler’s diarrhea. Experiencing the worst pain of my life, I finally conceded that it was time to go to the hospital,  immediately. Riding in a Gojek (Indonesia’s superior version of Uber), I summoned all my willpower to not mess up the driver’s back seat. I felt every bump and curve of that suburban Jakartan road as we crawled to the hospital in rush hour traffic.

At the packed hospital waiting room, I slumped in the last open chair. My pain was so intense that I felt justified to almost scream for assistance. I pondered the growing prospect of not being treated soon and instinctively knew that my condition was grave. With my next wave of nausea, I decide to make sure I was noticed in that waiting room. I got a hospital bed soon afterwards.

When checking my vitals, the doctors quickly realized how serious my situation was and hooked me to dual IVs in my wrists, counteracting the dangerous water loss that I had suffered. I assumed that I would go home later that night after a round of rehydration, but my tests revealed the culprit of my illness: cholera, or a similarly deadly combination of bacterial and fungal infections. In all, I would have to stay in that hospital for almost a week.

Initially, I had two main concerns regarding my hospital stay. In all honesty, the sanity conditions in the emergency room were worrying, with dirty bathrooms, broken sinks, and no toilet paper. I feared that contamination of my IVs would be another risk during my stay. Luckily, the hospital moved me to another part of the building, which was more private and much cleaner. My other concern was communication trouble with the doctors and nurses. At the time, I spoke no Indonesian, and most of the staff’s English was limited.

Over the course of the week, I received excellent care from the hospital staff and started feeling better. The hospital food was surprisingly delicious, and I could eat without any worry. I never learned what it was exactly that made me so sick, but cholera is both food and water borne. Jakarta suffered from severe flooding just days before we arrived. The very house we were staying in had suffered flood damage as well. In all, the doctors pumped six bottles of liquid antibiotics into my arm, and my list of prescribed medications was a matrix of doses and timetables for ingestion.

Here’s the real kicker. I did not have health insurance at this time in Indonesia, and I dreaded what the bill was going to be. An emergency room visit, plus five days in the hospital, plus all the medication I received, plus round the clock care from doctors and nurses came out to a grand total of…. $524. Just imagine what this would’ve been in the United States!

While it might sound a bit cliché, I came out of all of this with a new appreciation for life. I will never underestimate the importance of sanitary food and drink overseas, that’s for sure! It can literally be a life-or-death matter. Fast forward a month or so, and I was appreciating the beauty in Bali.

A torrential rainfall started to patter the familiar tune on our angled rooftop. I got it in my head to swim in the hotel pool during the rain. I ran down the stairs. I couldn’t contain my excitement. The water molecules on the stone tile formed a hydroplane of weightlessness underneath my fake Gucci flipflops. I slipped. The stone step came up like a knife and gashed my shin wide open. I took one look at the fresh wound and knew… back to the hospital I go.

This time it wouldn’t be a dramatic visit, in and out within an hour, but I couldn’t swim for a month. In Bali.