Susan and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: November 2nd - 3rd, 2023

Susan in the hospital :(

Susan said her back felt better in the morning, so we took both our empty backpacks and a bunch of grocery bags and walked down the hill towards the main road, ready to haul back a big load of supplies. It was too early for us to have breakfast at the guesthouse, but we figured it should be easy enough to find some coffee and food in the city, and caffeine headaches usually don't set in until the afternoon anyway. We weren't sure how we'd pay for the bus with no bus card (maybe our credit card would work?), but that was a future problem. It became a farther future problem when, still walking out of camp, saw the one morning bus cruise down the road beneath us - looks like we're taking the 2 mile to the next bus stop in Akdamlar.

We got to the stop and waited around for maybe 40 minutes, unsure if a bus would actually come, when to our relief the TK-21 came rumbling by, did a u-turn, and picked us up, and our Mastercards even worked to pay the toll. The bus herked and jerked down the road as we took our seats - any bits of suspension had long since been worn down by drivers slamming the gas and the brakes multiple times per city block - but Susan thought she'd be more comfortable seated than standing. It filled up with more passengers and Susan filled up with more pain from her back. I looked over at one point and she had tears on her cheeks, and I tried to tell her that we could just get off the bus at any stop and figure out something else, maybe go to a hospital, but she kept saying that it would be OK, that she could manage to stay on the bus.

But after about half an hour, Susan broke. She grabbed my leg and started breathing differently, a little faster and more shallow. Looking over at her I saw her eyelids start to flutter. "Susan? Susan? Are you okay? Susan??" She couldn't respond; instead, her eyes rolled up and her head lolled over to the side and she was unconcious. *Shit*.

"Susan! Susan, can you hear me?! Susan!!" I panicked a little bit, my mind racing to what the worst possible outcomes might be (is she paralyzed? will she wake up?), and how I couldn't even call the emergency services (whose number I didn't know anyway) because my phone didn't have signal. Luckily some of the other passengers noticed something was going wrong and did their best to help me, but of course I couldn't really understand any of the advice and shouting. They kept trying to hand me water, which I tried to splash on Susan's face, but that didn't help at all. Meanwhile the bus kept going, and I couldn't tell if the driver had any idea about the medical emergency happening behind him. I didn't know how to ask him to stop or if he did how we would even manage to call an ambulance. An overriding sense of powerlessness kept me from making any real decisions.

After probably 20 seconds that felt like an eternity, a younger woman came over and lifted Susan's legs up so that her feet were up on the seat across from and facing us. Her chest still moved so it was apparent she was still breathing, and after only a few more seconds Susan's eyes blinked open and looked confusedly at the faces around her. I told her she'd passed out and honestly she didn't even seem that surprised. Susan could talk, remembered where she was, and could still move and feel all her extremities, so my fears of a catastrophic back injury seemed unfounded... but I could tell she still felt like someone was twisting a knife in her back. She did seem stable and lucid as long as her feet stayed up, though, so that seemed like the best option until we'd get off the bus.

As the bus filled up with more passengers we got several annoyed sounding remarks from people pointing at her feet, and we did our best (but probably failed to) explain that her back was failing and that having her feet up was the only thing keeping her conscious. (Later, Scott insightfully pointed out that they might have just been upset that her *shoes* were on the other seat, not necessarily that she was taking it up. Oops!) Meanwhile, I'd finally convinced Susan that we needed to go to an emergency room, and identified a hospital that the bus would drive past on its route. I nervously switched my gaze back and forth between the blue location dot on my phone, watching for our stop, and Susan, watching for any signs that she might lose consciousness again.

Finally, after another eternity, the bus pulled up to the hospital stop and we managed to get off, and I held Susan's arm as we hobbled towards the entrance; with nearly every step her mouth twisted a bit and she let out small gasps. Susan managed to explain her situation to one front desk, who then directed us to the emergency room, a few blocks around the corner in a different building. So we continued to hobble over there, and much to our relief as we tried to talk with their intake desk an "international patient liason" came up to do a little translating. Her English translation skills were far from perfect but it was still a huge improvement.

At first it seemed like they might outright turn us away because Susan had left her passport at the guesthouse; thank goodness they were still willing to make things work with just the picture of her passport I had on my phone and the original copy of mine. We went to an initial screening room, now worried that they would turn us away because of the difficulty explaining Susan's symptoms - it's difficult to get back problems treated seriously in your native language, let alone in a totally foreign one. We kept insisting that she'd gone unconcious and that we really needed help. Of course they insisted she sit while they measured some tests and entered some things into the computer... and within minutes Susan almost fainted again, preemptively lowering herself down to the grey-ish linoleum of the hospital floor to avoid toppling out of the chair. This bumped us up the triage chart and they brought out a gurney; I helped Susan to get on it and thankfully laying on her back seemed to ease the pain. They wheeled her back to a room equipped with better emergency services and found a space to squeeze her in between a few official curtained stalls, then hooked her up to an IV solution (which we were only about 85% sure didn't have painkillers in it), drew some blood, asked a few questions, and ran an EKG.

And then... time to wait. We gathered from the interpreter that they wanted to run some blood tests and look at the EKG results, and would come find us when that stuff was ready. Maybe in a couple hours. At this point we'd been up for about 3 hours without anything to eat or drink (and most tragically, without any coffee), so I decided to head out into Antalya in search of provisions... as long as they took a credit card. Wandering out of the hospital to the busy city streets felt pretty surreal, as I struggled to understand anything around me and my mind raced around what might happen. At least Susan was safe in the hospital now, right? It's not like they'd let something happen to her? But then again, when you can't communicate with the doctors, having a tube in your arm isn't exactly reassuring. No one had even attempted to ask us about allergens or whether Susan had had any food that day (but they did repeatedly ask if she might be pregnant). No one had even touched or palpated her back. No x-rays. What would blood tests tell them about her back? What if she passed out again and they put her under an anesthetic?

I managed to find a cafe that advertised "tost" and "kahve" - that'll do. After several minutes of confused back-and-forth I finally figured out how to ask for the food and coffee to go, and much to my relief they ran my card through a reader to pay. I got back to Susan, successful from the hunt, and we very much enjoyed our first cups of Turkish coffee, packaged with care in the little paper cups you see at dentist offices topped with scraps of cellophane.

So we waited, and waited, and waited... no wifi in the hospital, and still without a working phone, so we passed the time playing the dot game in Susan's notebook and discussing how all this might turn out. We were both pretty cynical that the doctors would come back with some tidy explanation and cure, probably the best case scenario would be a referral for physical therapy - do we even keep traveling? Should we try to go back to the US? How mobile would Susan be once we left the hospital? I was definitely gravitating towards breaking the glass and taking an emergency exit back to the States, but Susan seemed optimistic that she'd recover and it'd be worth sticking around this part of the world. Go figure.

About 4 hours went by and we were getting pretty sure the hospital had forgotten about us, despite Susan taking up ostensibly vital real estate in the emergency ward. So I started wandering around bothering hospital staff, running Google Translate off my phone, first trying the two young EMTs staffing a desk in the ward, who then directed me to a room across the hall where they processed the tests. A desk there bounced me to another desk against a different wall, where I waited in what I thought was a line but eventually realized was a disorderly blob when a couple other people jostled ahead of me. Finally I got to the front and managed to convey to the doctor behind the desk that we'd been waiting hours and hours for some test results, which she printed out and handed over to me, managing to convey that most things were normal. At this point a woman waiting in the line who spoke English took pity on me and started helping with some translation, confirming that the results were all normal except for a couple values slightly out of range.

Our newfound MVP NPC went back across the hall with me and helped inquire with the staff what was going on with Susan, as I stood near Susan's bed looking befuddled with a roll of papers in my hand. We must have caused enough of a nuisance because eventually the official interpreter came back and relieved the good Samaritan of duty. Eventually we figured out... more tests. They drew more blood and I helped Susan hobble to a bathroom for a urine sample. More tests meant more waiting so I headed out to find more food, this time not walking obliviously past the canteen conventiently located at the far side of hospital parking lot. Now equipped with the magic word to ask for take-out, the transaction went a lot smoother.

After we scarfed down a couple round breads filled with something that tasted pizza-esque, the staff came over and confirmed that Susan's back was still in a lot of pain. As they switched out the IV bag they added something extra to it; Susan and I exchanged nervous glances and I tried translating a few different phrases in my phone before finally confirming that it was some painkillers. Susan is *very* sensitive to drugs, so even though they reassured us it was a small amount ("çucuk, çucuk") neither of us was sure whether this was a good idea. Maybe 10 minutes went by and Susan said she started to feel nauseous, so I scurried over to the desk and figured out how to ask them to turn the IV off. At least this maybe made the time pass easier for Susan; I sat next to the bed for the next couple hours, twiddling my thumbs and alternating stares between the floor and the ceiling.

I'd spied the "international patient desk" on my last trip out for food, and finally grew impatient enough to go flag down our interpreter for an update. I followed her back to the test result desk, where sure enough Susan's latest results had been waiting, and she passed them off to one of the doctors on staff. Some discussion revealed that Susan had signs of a UTI (pretty nice to have caught that early) but all the other test results were normal. So they wrote a script for an antibiotic, a painkiller, and prepped us to leave. The next place for us to go was physical therapy, and they made sure to emphasize we needed a *private* PT because as foreigners we shouldn't be accessing public facilities (we were pretty lucky they'd even admitted Susan to the public hospital we wandered into). And we were very lucky the hospital accepted a card to pay, and that Turkey has a more reasonable healthcare system than the US - nearly 8 hours in the emergency room, several rounds of labwork, painkillers, and an IV drip cost us a grand total of about $65. Full price.

So, with dusk falling and the streets and buildings lighting up, Susan steadied herself on my arm and we shambled out of the emergency room doors, in a better state than when we'd arrived but far from feeling safe and sure. It was far too late to try to get back to Peak Guesthouse, and tomorrow might involve finding an English-speaking private physical therapist anyway, so we knew we'd need to stay the night in Antalya. Not to mention that we weren't sure Susan would survive a ride up the canyon. And ahead of all that, we needed an ATM and a pharmacy.

We slowly shuffled towards a pharmacy also in the direction of a few hotels (the ATMs are in every direction), me still carrying our nested backpacks, their emptiness testifying to a day gone off the rails. Even in November it felt like a summer's night in Omaha, albeit less humid, and the small pharmacy we found sweltered inside. The husband and wife running the shop were extremely helpful, and the man spoke English very fluently, so we communicated more effectively with him than with anyone in the hospital; they looked at Susan's test results, and the prescriptions, and asked Susan about her symptoms, and while the antiobiotics seemed on point they decided to totally diverge from some of the other prescriptions and give her a painkiller more targeted to stomach cramps and kidney stones. They also encouraged us to come back tomorrow and talk to their doctor directly.

During all this Susan sat at first, but then, in the midst of several other customers milling about and asking for their own help in the small hot shop filled with stale air, Susan started to pass out again, preempitively lowering herself down to sample another Turkish floor. Luckily she found a corner and could stay out of the way. To his credit, the pharmacist was willing to kneel down and talk to her on the floor, and offered us a little water. (In retrospect, we realized that at this point the fainting might not have been a back issue so much as a "we've barely had any food or water all day and Susan's body is all out of whack and it's hard to breathe in this space even for healthy people" issue, but again, no one ever asked Susan about her intake/outtake that day.)

After Susan was up and stable and we'd spent what seemed like an awful lot of money on questionable medical supplies, we continued our slow walk to look for a hotel, stopping by a couple places marked on Google Maps (thank God for offline maps) that, in the dark, appeared as nothing more than run-of-the-mill apartments. Finally, we found the Palme Otel, where to our relief a man was waiting at the front desk and more than happy to use Google Translate to help us get into a room. Finally, the edge came off a little bit, and we felt a little safety; here was an air-conditioned space with wifi and beds, where Susan could lay on something other than linoleum and they would even feed us breakfast.

Yet the day wasn't done - we needed water (serious medical issues aside both my and Susan's stomachs hadn't been feeling right for a while and we didn't want to push it with the local water), a toothbrush and cell phone charger (for an unexpected night out!), and DINNER. So I left Susan to her own devices and headed out to a nearby market and shops, and it occasionally popped into my head that Susan would be completely helpless if she passed out in the room. At the little electronics store the shopkeeper tried hard to upsell me on a slightly nicer USB charger, but also seemed genuinely concerned about the very frazzled American tourist in his store and talked to me about what was happening with Susan. He gave me a little cross necklace someone had left in his store (because it's not his religion but I really ought to pray to something) and even called a restaurant for us to arrange a kebab delivery up to our hotel room. The kindness of strangers.

I hustled back to the hotel to beat the food Susan didn't know would be coming and found her having a surprisingly upbeat conversation with her mom. Turns out this runs in the family - Susan's mom is also disposed to back trouble, and in her 30's had an acute issue that caused so much pain she went unconcsious and Susan's dad had to drive her to the hospital. So Susan got a diagnosis from her mom - all the signs and symptoms were strikingly similar - as well as a PT regimen to help heal from this injury and prevent any further ones. And overall, the prognosis was pretty good, but we knew the recovery would be lengthy. Apparently sitting was one of the worst things Susan could do for her back, valuable info since that had been our default move when Susan's back felt like giving out, but you never realize how many places people are expected to sit until you're not allowed to. Still, it assuaged some fears about dire injuries or needing to cancel the trip immediately (although I made sure to keep that on the table over Susan's protests); it was a chronic use type of thing that would take some chronic effort to heal.

The food arrived so Susan ended the call and we got to enjoy some spicy Adana kebab served with flatbread and a few delicious mystery sides. We made a plan for the next day but also both desperately needed to turn off our brains, so we flipped on the hotel room TV to try to find a Turkish program we could vaguely understand. What seemed to be a version of "Whose line is it anyway?" improv fit the bill, as we got to laugh at several men trying to fit inside a wardrobe and galumph across the stage to avoid being seen by another actress. Finally, it was time for some rest.

In the morning Susan actually felt a little better, much to our relief. The hotel served a very nice Turkish breakfast, although we had a hard time explaining why Susan couldn't sit at the table. Our plan was to split up - Susan would loiter in the hotel room until check-out (turns out she took the chance to get a lot more familiar with the TV stations), and then wander over to Dokumapark (Google says it's a "cat park"??) to hang out (i.e. stand or lay in the dirt) for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, I would scurry around Antalya to check off as many of our errands as I could and definitely go grocery shopping.

Part of my to-do list: Shopping for about 20 meals

I wandered out into the streets of Antalya in the already warm morning much less on edge than my last solo escapade, optimistic because Susan wasn't in a hospital bed with a tube in her arm, and started the long walk to a shopping center. Much to my surprise the backpack had to go through an x-ray scan and myself through a metal detector to enter the mall. Stop number 1 was a Turkcell office, and after a lot of paperwork my phone finally had a new SIM card! We had messaged Aysel the night before that we wouldn't be back that night, and I felt a wave of relief as my phone started to ping with messages from her, asking if Susan was OK and where she could find us to give us a ride back to the guesthouse (Aysel was *quite* concerned). I might have grown up without smartphones, but dang do they make life easier.

Next up was the 5M Migros (Turkish WalMart?) for a bevy of miscellaneous supplies, followed by a stop in a second mall for some other goods (now ready for the security measures at the entrance I looked a little less like a tourist) and hunting down a machine to give me a bus card (in a struggling interaction where I very much looked like a tourist). At the second mall I picked up a small "corn-in-a-cup" for a snack and to bring to Susan, because we're Nebraskans and it really amused me that in Turkey I could just buy a small cup of corn from a kiosk in a mall.

It was getting close to one in the afternoon, and with one backpack already full I headed to the cat park, figuring Susan would be there by now since she had to leave the hotel at noon. Of course, we hadn't done anything smart like actually establish a meetup time or a certain area of the sprawling cat park to rendezvous in, so I wandered around for about 15 to 20 minutes, thinking of how if Susan had gone unconscious in the hotel lobby or out in public somewhere I'd have to go on a scavenger hunt through Antalya's hospitals.

But eventually I spotted the blue shirt and green cap and smiled as I approached the table she'd posted up at, of course with a feline friend to keep her company. I handed off the full backpack, we considered the messages from Aysel, and it looked like we'd get picked up about 4:30 PM, and with plenty to before then I raced off, leaving Susan with nothing but her journal and the cats to entertain her for the rest of the day. A long, hot walk brought me to another mall, this one with a Decathlon that sold canisters of camping gas (which we needed due to the awkward "kitchen" situation at the guesthouse). A long, hotter walk led back to the park, where I dumped the gas canister and scurried back to the 5M Migros (conveniently right next door to the park) to do the grocery shopping. But much to my amusement I saw a brave little hedgehog who was managing to stake out a life among the prowling (albeit well-fed) cats of Dokumapark.

There's Susan! Of course with a new friend :).

A hedgehog among the cats

The grocery list was overwhelming, and the new-country-grocery-store game is definitely more fun with a sidekick. At first I carefully considered the different items and options, but as time grew short I started just grabbing the easiest things that looked like they'd fit our needs and did my best to gather enough food to last us the next 8 - 10 days at the guesthouse. (Yes, we could have just eaten guesthouse food the whole time, but (1) lunch was super unreliable and (2) that would have wrecked our already strained budget.) The cashier looked confused and unamused with the obvious foreigner bringing up a shopping cart brimming with cookies and ramen, but the nice man behind me used his Migros card to get me the sale prices and I was on my way back to Susan with several very heavy grocery bags.

I had actually managed to get nearly everything done, and adequately supplied we went to the park entrance to wait for our ride, Susan plodding slowly because of her back and me waddling under the weight of all our groceries. But it felt like we were back to a good spot; a working phone, local currency, a bus card, and our own food - such independence! I left Susan with all the bags and wandered across the street to look for a snack when Ocan pulled up right behind me, so I jumped in and we took off. Susan might have been a little concerned at seeing me get in a random white car and speed away in the wrong direction, but Ocan quickly pulled a U and we came back to get her and load up all the baggage.

I took the front seat so that Susan could lay down in the back, but I still spent the entire ride worried she'd develop crippling pain and faint again, and with every sudden stop or jarring pothole in the road looked back to make sure she was still with us. But the journey was uneventful, and soon enough I was carrying several awkward bags up to our tent and trying to sort through food and goods (like the shiny new blue tarp we bought to protect the tent from the beating sun).

Aysel was very concerned but very happy to see us back, and Susan had the fun of explaining to all the other guests what the hell happened (and why we were back here to climb instead of going home, even though we'd spent all yesterday in a hospital). But her "doctor" had explained the issue, given her some PT exercises, and even told her she could climb so long as the climbing wasn't painful - we just didn't tell anyone that person happened to be "doctor Mom". Crawling in and out of the tent certainly wasn't ideal for Susan, but we were back, and after a long (long) detour finally ready to be settled. I spent a decent few minutes staring at the stars and thinking about everything and nothing before getting in the tent that night.