A few weeks ago, I go to my (or rather, my wife's) general practitioner, Dr. Glasser, to get a shitload of shots for our trip. I'm a dude (yeah, no shit) and as a dude, I basically never go to the doctor - even if I had a tumor the size of Uranus in my actual anus, I'd probably still be going, "Ahh, I'm fine. Don't worry about it." Fortunately, Maya (the Jewish hypochondriac that she is) won't stand for this, and so she sent me off to her doctor, Dr, Glasser, for some preventive medicine. Unfortunately, Dr. Glasser fucking sucks, as you will soon learn.
So I go in, tell him our whole itinerary, get three different shots (the typhoid vaccine, some other vaccine I can't remember, and another one), a TB test, and a general check-up blood test. He says I should schedule another appointment in a week or so to get two more shots and a prescription for anti-malarial pills. A week or so passes and I come back into the office. When he opens the door and calls my name, the first thing he says on seeing me is "Why are you here again?" I'm like, "I have to get a couple more shots." He's like, "Really?" Uhhh...what?! It's like I stepped into an alternate universe or something. Dude, you told me to come in and get more shots. It's not like I have a fetish for getting hypodermic needles stuck into my arm and I'm trying to scam you into jabbing me a few more times, or something.
We get to his private office, he looks over my files, asks me again where I'm going, and he's like, "No, you don't need any more shots." "What about the rabies vaccine?" I ask specifically. "You're not planning on doing any veterinary work over there, are you?" he chuckles. "Then no, you don't need that." I'm like, "O...K... Well, I still need a prescription for some anti-malarial pills." He's like, "You guys aren't planning on trekking into the jungle or going off into the swamps, are you? You're basically just going to stick to the tourist areas, right?" I'm like, "Pretty much..." to which he responds, "Well, you really shouldn't have to worry about malaria then." Cue jaw falling to the floor. Basically, I end up having to beg him to prescribe me some anti-malarial shit, and then having to further beg him to prescribe me some general just-in-case antibiotics. Needlessly to say, I walk out of the appointment very confused.
I talk to Maya that night, and we think about what other shots I was supposed to get. And she's like, "I really think you need a polio booster." So the next day, at work, I call Doc Glasser and ask him if I can come in for a polio booster. He's like, "Sure, if you really want to. But it's really only advised if you're going to [insert country name], [insert country name], [insert country name], Southeast Asia..." Are you kidding me?!
So I come back in, get my polio booster. Maya goes in, to get a few shots and anti-malarial and antibiotic prescriptions of her own. She has to beg him for those as well, and he ends up prescribing even less to her than he did to me. We both decide we need to get a second opinion about all this shit.
Maya, bless her, does some research and finds this place, Traveler's Medical Service on 57th St. and Madison, and we go in for a pre-travel consultation. To make an already long story short(er), the woman there, Dyan (who's super cool), tells us that our doctor prescribed us the wrong antibiotic (Southeast Asia is resistant to the type he gave us) and not nearly enough anti-malarial pills (and the most expensive type at that). She also says that if we had come in sooner (at this point, there's only two weeks to go before our departure) she would have advised us to get the Japanese encephalitis vaccine and, wait for it, the rabies vaccine (Are you fucking with me?!), both of which are multiple-shot procedures that have to be spread over more than two weeks. On the rabies front, she adds that when she was in Thailand a few years ago (and not doing veterinary work), she was actually bit by a homeless dog that snuck up on her while she was waiting for a train... And then, on the morning news some other day, we'll see a woman (also not a vet) talking about what a great, inexpensive vacation spot Thailand is - "I did get bitten by a monkey while I was there," she notes. "But Bangkok is great."
The moral here is obvious. Don't trust your general practitioner for pre-travel medicine...especially if your doctor's name is Glasser. We ended getting new prescriptions for different antibiotics, and for different and way more anti-malarial pills. And we've started the Japanese encephalitis vaccination process (a gross little trivia point: The vaccine is made from mouse brains) even though we don't have enough time to get all the necessary shots before we leave, with plans to get the third and final shot when we're in China.
Man, we haven't even left yet, and the (mis)adventures are already in full fucking swing.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
bone breaker
So, this being the cruelest and most unfair of all possible worlds, the year that Maya and I finally find the nerve, money, time, etc. to tour Southeast Asia, the area gets hit with the worst outbreak of Dengue fever (commonly known by the terrifying, though very metal name "bone breaker") in, oh, just 10 fucking years. Read this report posted on MSNBC a few weeks ago and pray for us, you heathens:
Asia hit by dengue fever outbreak
Mosquito-borne virus killed 1,500 in 1998’s major outbreak, 1,391 this year
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:23 p.m. ET July 30, 2007
HANOI, Vietnam - Dengue fever is raging across Asia, prompting the World Health Organization to warn that the region could face the worst outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus in nearly a decade.
The disease, commonly called the ’bone breaker’ illness because of the excruciating joint pain it causes, has flared everywhere from ultramodern Singapore to poor Vietnam. There are four different types of dengue, but none have a cure or vaccine.
Cambodia is now one of the most worrisome spots, where the disease has attacked about 25,000 people and killed nearly 300 children this year. That’s about three times more than the number of cases for all of 2005, according to WHO.
Sick children have overwhelmed ill-equipped hospitals there, forcing babies burning with fever to wait for beds outside with IV drips attached to their arms.
The last major outbreak to hit Southeast Asia was in 1998, when about 350,000 cases were reported in the region, including nearly 1,500 deaths. Indonesia and Thailand were not included in that tally.
John Ehrenberg, WHO’s regional adviser on vector-borne diseases, said it could potentially reach that level this year.
“It looks like it might be a bad year,” he said. “I think we’re in the building-up stage, but it could very well peak by August or September.”
A jump in cases
Malaysia has seen a 50 percent jump in cases this year over the same period in 2006, with more than 1,000 patients admitted every week for the past month and 56 deaths recorded through June, according to Health Ministry figures.
In Indonesia, more than 100,000 infections have been reported this year, including 1,100 deaths. That compares to 114,000 cases and the same number of fatalities for all of 2006, said Nyoman Kandun, a senior health ministry official who predicted the number will hit 200,000 by year’s end.
More than a dozen children infected with dengue filled beds in Jakarta’s Tarakan Hospital. Some had IV drips in their hands while others had tubes in their noses.
Muhammad Wildan, 5, was hospitalized last week and remained in critical condition due to internal bleeding. Doctors said he was lucky his family did not wait any longer to bring him in.
“It did not come to us that it was dengue,” said Padmi Sari, the boy’s grandmother. “We thought it was just a common fever.”
Singapore, known for its spotless streets and cutting-edge health facilities, has not escaped dengue this year. The government has reported nearly 5,000 cases and at least three deaths. Early rains also caused a surge in cases in Thailand, with more than 20,000 cases reported through June, including 17 deaths.
In Vietnam, which also typically logs a high number of annual cases, health officials have seen a 40 percent increase over last year, reporting more than 33,000 infections this year and 32 deaths.
Lethal disease
In addition to joint pain, rashes, nausea, severe headaches and high fever that typically accompany the disease, patients stricken with a more serious form, called dengue hemorrhagic fever, can experience internal bleeding, liver enlargement and circulatory shut down.
“You don’t want to have people staying at home and starting to bleed,” Ehrenberg said. “By the time they go to the hospital they’re in shock and they will die.”
The disease is not nearly as lethal as malaria, which kills more than 1 million people annually. But WHO estimates dengue infects up to 50 million people every year worldwide, mostly in Asia and Latin America. About a half million of those cases are severe, and some 19,000 deaths were recorded in 2002.
“We always think next year it will get better, but we always find next year it gets worse,” said Kroeger Axel, a dengue research coordinator at the WHO in Geneva. “There’s a very clear upward trend.”
He said outbreaks run in cycles, occurring roughly every four years. Mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water ranging from flower pots to old tires, and residents across the region are urged to avoid letting water collect near houses.
Asia hit by dengue fever outbreak
Mosquito-borne virus killed 1,500 in 1998’s major outbreak, 1,391 this year
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:23 p.m. ET July 30, 2007
HANOI, Vietnam - Dengue fever is raging across Asia, prompting the World Health Organization to warn that the region could face the worst outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus in nearly a decade.
The disease, commonly called the ’bone breaker’ illness because of the excruciating joint pain it causes, has flared everywhere from ultramodern Singapore to poor Vietnam. There are four different types of dengue, but none have a cure or vaccine.
Cambodia is now one of the most worrisome spots, where the disease has attacked about 25,000 people and killed nearly 300 children this year. That’s about three times more than the number of cases for all of 2005, according to WHO.
Sick children have overwhelmed ill-equipped hospitals there, forcing babies burning with fever to wait for beds outside with IV drips attached to their arms.
The last major outbreak to hit Southeast Asia was in 1998, when about 350,000 cases were reported in the region, including nearly 1,500 deaths. Indonesia and Thailand were not included in that tally.
John Ehrenberg, WHO’s regional adviser on vector-borne diseases, said it could potentially reach that level this year.
“It looks like it might be a bad year,” he said. “I think we’re in the building-up stage, but it could very well peak by August or September.”
A jump in cases
Malaysia has seen a 50 percent jump in cases this year over the same period in 2006, with more than 1,000 patients admitted every week for the past month and 56 deaths recorded through June, according to Health Ministry figures.
In Indonesia, more than 100,000 infections have been reported this year, including 1,100 deaths. That compares to 114,000 cases and the same number of fatalities for all of 2006, said Nyoman Kandun, a senior health ministry official who predicted the number will hit 200,000 by year’s end.
More than a dozen children infected with dengue filled beds in Jakarta’s Tarakan Hospital. Some had IV drips in their hands while others had tubes in their noses.
Muhammad Wildan, 5, was hospitalized last week and remained in critical condition due to internal bleeding. Doctors said he was lucky his family did not wait any longer to bring him in.
“It did not come to us that it was dengue,” said Padmi Sari, the boy’s grandmother. “We thought it was just a common fever.”
Singapore, known for its spotless streets and cutting-edge health facilities, has not escaped dengue this year. The government has reported nearly 5,000 cases and at least three deaths. Early rains also caused a surge in cases in Thailand, with more than 20,000 cases reported through June, including 17 deaths.
In Vietnam, which also typically logs a high number of annual cases, health officials have seen a 40 percent increase over last year, reporting more than 33,000 infections this year and 32 deaths.
Lethal disease
In addition to joint pain, rashes, nausea, severe headaches and high fever that typically accompany the disease, patients stricken with a more serious form, called dengue hemorrhagic fever, can experience internal bleeding, liver enlargement and circulatory shut down.
“You don’t want to have people staying at home and starting to bleed,” Ehrenberg said. “By the time they go to the hospital they’re in shock and they will die.”
The disease is not nearly as lethal as malaria, which kills more than 1 million people annually. But WHO estimates dengue infects up to 50 million people every year worldwide, mostly in Asia and Latin America. About a half million of those cases are severe, and some 19,000 deaths were recorded in 2002.
“We always think next year it will get better, but we always find next year it gets worse,” said Kroeger Axel, a dengue research coordinator at the WHO in Geneva. “There’s a very clear upward trend.”
He said outbreaks run in cycles, occurring roughly every four years. Mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water ranging from flower pots to old tires, and residents across the region are urged to avoid letting water collect near houses.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
hell is khaki colored
What's the toughest challenge facing us as we prepare to embark on our mad journey? Trying to pack for 4 months through 9 countries and any number of unforeseeable situations? Trying to figure out how to dodge the stingers of Japanese enchephilitis-infected mosquitoes? Trying to find a secure hiding place on our bodies (and not including the anus) to hide valuables away from the legendary Muay Thai-trained lady-boy pickpockets of Bangkok? Actually, no, none of these. The toughest challenge is that Southeast Asia (in which we'll be traveling for about 2 months) is supposedly so skin-meltingly hot and humid, you are strongly advised - on fear of sweating yourself to a painful death - not to wear dark clothes.
Anyone who knows Maya and I is very familiar with the fact that our collective wardrobe is a pitch-black pit that sucks in light, tortures and then kills it. When we do laundry we separate our "blacks" and use special dark-colors-protecting detergent. As insane as this sounds, we've actually mellowed considerably with age. When I was in high school, I would wear black T-shirts and black military cargo pants tucked into my black combat boots even in the heat of summer. Now on an average day I'll wear blue jeans not tucked into my boots, and if it's exceptionally blistering out, maybe even put on a pair of shorts (holy shit!). But the point is that I still don't have a non-black T-shirt to my name, and Maya isn't too far ahead of me in the colors department, let alone the light colors department.
Fine. So we go to this outdoors supply store in New Jersey called Campmor a few weeks ago. It's a massive place stuffed with everything you could imagine needing for your nature adventures (from industrial-strength bugspray to freeze-dried ice cream), and it's way cheaper than any store in NYC. We go to the clothing department to check out what kind of hot weather attire they have, and a sickening sea of khaki, baby blue, light orange, and pink greets us. No army green, no gray, no nothing that looks even vaguely like something we would ever been seen dead or alive in. And it all comes in crazy techno-futuristic fabrics ideally designed for the brain-frying temps and bloodsucking swarms of places like Southeast Asia: fabric that "wicks" the sweat from your skin and moves it to the outside of the clothing for quick evaporation and cooling; fabric that repel insects; cool shit like that. But does any of it come in a color that won't promote vomiting in either Maya or I? Hell no.
Is this part of the establishment's conspiracy against metalheads? Is it another strike in the war that supposedly peace-loving hippies are waging on the few headbangers who are actually willing to venture into the great outdoors? Or is it just that the mainstream's lack of taste extends all the way from pop music and hit movies to camping/travel gear? I think yes, yes, and hell yes.
Anyone who knows Maya and I is very familiar with the fact that our collective wardrobe is a pitch-black pit that sucks in light, tortures and then kills it. When we do laundry we separate our "blacks" and use special dark-colors-protecting detergent. As insane as this sounds, we've actually mellowed considerably with age. When I was in high school, I would wear black T-shirts and black military cargo pants tucked into my black combat boots even in the heat of summer. Now on an average day I'll wear blue jeans not tucked into my boots, and if it's exceptionally blistering out, maybe even put on a pair of shorts (holy shit!). But the point is that I still don't have a non-black T-shirt to my name, and Maya isn't too far ahead of me in the colors department, let alone the light colors department.
Fine. So we go to this outdoors supply store in New Jersey called Campmor a few weeks ago. It's a massive place stuffed with everything you could imagine needing for your nature adventures (from industrial-strength bugspray to freeze-dried ice cream), and it's way cheaper than any store in NYC. We go to the clothing department to check out what kind of hot weather attire they have, and a sickening sea of khaki, baby blue, light orange, and pink greets us. No army green, no gray, no nothing that looks even vaguely like something we would ever been seen dead or alive in. And it all comes in crazy techno-futuristic fabrics ideally designed for the brain-frying temps and bloodsucking swarms of places like Southeast Asia: fabric that "wicks" the sweat from your skin and moves it to the outside of the clothing for quick evaporation and cooling; fabric that repel insects; cool shit like that. But does any of it come in a color that won't promote vomiting in either Maya or I? Hell no.
Is this part of the establishment's conspiracy against metalheads? Is it another strike in the war that supposedly peace-loving hippies are waging on the few headbangers who are actually willing to venture into the great outdoors? Or is it just that the mainstream's lack of taste extends all the way from pop music and hit movies to camping/travel gear? I think yes, yes, and hell yes.
Friday, August 10, 2007
less than a month to go...
...before the ol' lady and I head off on our completely insane 4-month trip/adventure/trial-by-fire through Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. (Just typing that ridiculously long list of countries makes my skin tingle with trepidation and impatience.) The anticipation is almost unbearable. Every day, every hour is a rollercoaster of emotions - mostly extreme excitment (I'm going to see Ankor Wat, Mount Fuji, the Barrier Reef, the Great fucking Wall!) dropping suddenly into extreme fear (of exotic diseases and...even worse exotic diseases). Will this trip just fucking start already?!
It's been a long time coming, a dream to see the world that I can remember having since I was a little kid, finally set into the beginning babysteps of real motion a few years ago - I had money saved, a job I was itching to leave, a then-girlfriend (now wife) who was herself free and eager for such an adventure; it seemed like the right time to "just do it, dammit." Then I got a phone call from out of the blue - the national hard-rock/metal mag I had been freelance writing for, Revolver, was looking for a new editor and the job was basically mine for the taking. As a longtime metalhead for whom writing is one of very few actual skills, how could I turn down the gig? I couldn't. And so the dream went on hold.
But in some ways it was an easy dream to put on hold. It's the kind of dream almost everyone has, but few people actually live, even though all it really takes is some savings (a surprising small amount, too) and the courage/will to actually make the leap. Recently when I told one of my coworkers what I was about to do, he said in a resigned tone of voice, "Yeah, my wife and I have talked about doing something like that...but we never will." Like I said, it's an all too easy dream to keep as just a dream forever.
But as far as I'm concerned, that is no way to live. Maybe I've just listened to too much metal, because if metal is about anything to me, it's about living life to its fullest and not sacrificing one's own personal ideals/dreams, not conforming to the whims of the flock, and not satisfying oneself with a mundane existence. So even though I know I just wrote an article in Revolver called "Metal Made Me Do It," about all the people who have used heavy music as an excuse for the fucked-up shit they themselves are responsible for, if this trip somehow turns out to have been a bad idea (i.e., I come back with the Dengue fever or some shit), I think I'm gonna use that excuse myself. ("Doctor, metal made me do it.") But if it turns out to be my dream finally come true (which I have a feeling in my gut, it will), well, then that's just because the ol' lady and I are two metal-as-hell badasses with the balls to actually seize the motherfucking day.
It's been a long time coming, a dream to see the world that I can remember having since I was a little kid, finally set into the beginning babysteps of real motion a few years ago - I had money saved, a job I was itching to leave, a then-girlfriend (now wife) who was herself free and eager for such an adventure; it seemed like the right time to "just do it, dammit." Then I got a phone call from out of the blue - the national hard-rock/metal mag I had been freelance writing for, Revolver, was looking for a new editor and the job was basically mine for the taking. As a longtime metalhead for whom writing is one of very few actual skills, how could I turn down the gig? I couldn't. And so the dream went on hold.
But in some ways it was an easy dream to put on hold. It's the kind of dream almost everyone has, but few people actually live, even though all it really takes is some savings (a surprising small amount, too) and the courage/will to actually make the leap. Recently when I told one of my coworkers what I was about to do, he said in a resigned tone of voice, "Yeah, my wife and I have talked about doing something like that...but we never will." Like I said, it's an all too easy dream to keep as just a dream forever.
But as far as I'm concerned, that is no way to live. Maybe I've just listened to too much metal, because if metal is about anything to me, it's about living life to its fullest and not sacrificing one's own personal ideals/dreams, not conforming to the whims of the flock, and not satisfying oneself with a mundane existence. So even though I know I just wrote an article in Revolver called "Metal Made Me Do It," about all the people who have used heavy music as an excuse for the fucked-up shit they themselves are responsible for, if this trip somehow turns out to have been a bad idea (i.e., I come back with the Dengue fever or some shit), I think I'm gonna use that excuse myself. ("Doctor, metal made me do it.") But if it turns out to be my dream finally come true (which I have a feeling in my gut, it will), well, then that's just because the ol' lady and I are two metal-as-hell badasses with the balls to actually seize the motherfucking day.
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