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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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