A. J. Windless
   
         
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The Lockdowns Sent Me to Emergency (Page 3 of 3)
   
         
   
At one point one of the nurses leaked to me that I would be able to go home Thursday. My temperature when I go to the shopping malls in Bangkok is usually about 36.2, but Wednesday night it reached 37.2 and they decided that was enough of a reason to keep me. I was pretty disappointed when I found that I could not go home Thursday. My temperature reached even higher to 38 Thursday night, but Friday they said I would be able to go home. I had worried all week about what my bill would come to, whether my credit card would cover it, and whether I would be allowed to leave as a result. I was quite relieved to find that the final tally was 45,000 baht.

I put that on my credit card and now I am home. It has taken me a long time to write this story because at first it was very difficult for me to sit on a chair and work on my laptop. It was hard to sit and not have problems with sitting on my enlarged scrotum. Every day I  have had to go to a clinic and have my bandage changed and my wound cleaned. It has been 10 days now and tomorrow I will go to have my stitches removed. I didn't know they even still did that. I thought that all stitches nowadays just automatically dissloved over time.

In the U.S. hernia surgery is a very simple outpatient proceedure. It is performed with a laparoscope and has a very tiny non-evasive wound. Had it not been for the ruling by the Thai government that hernia surgeries were "non-essential" and could not be performed during the lockdown, that's the type of very simple surgery I would have had. Instead, for two years I lived in pain, inconvenience, and the ever present danger of strangulating my small instestine. Finally my hernia got so unmanageable that it became an emergency and I now have a large incision across the bottom of my stomach and my scrotum is swollen with fluid. All the fluid puts pressure on my bladder giving me limited control of how long I can hold my urine.  Fifty times a day I find myself running quickly to the bathroom. Having my intestines in my scrotum for years has put a tremendous amount of pressure on my balls, who knows what the long term effects of that will be. I just hope I don't end up with stomach cancer or any other complications as a result of this prolonged ordeal.
   
         
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