By mfretes93
One of my biggest fears about going abroad was getting sick. I dread getting sick at home: I get chills and sweats sitting in doctor's offices and always expect the worst if I ever so much as cough a little strangely. Needless to say, getting sick abroad was never even an option for me. Yes, I have insurance, and yes, GW also provides insurance, but in a foreign country where I barely speak the language, "needing immediate medical attention" is one of the scarier things that can happen to someone. When I arrived in Brazil, I made sure to take extra precautions--applying insane amounts of insect repellent looking both ways before crossing the street, eating more Vitamin C than should be humanly possible. But of course, it's just about impossible to 100% prevent illness. And in a given semester, getting sick at least once is almost inevitable.
During a trip to Salvador, a city in the northern part of Brazil, I was essentially demolished by mosquito bites. I had brought a bottle of what is apparently the weakest repellent on the market, which did nothing to protect me from the legions of mosquitoes that make their home in the northeast of Brazil. I actually lost count of how many bites I got, but shrugged it off before my return to Rio de Janeiro.
A couple of days later, however, I started having pain in my joints, especially in my feet. I thought I was just sleeping in weird positions, and that was what was causing the pain, but about a couple of days after that, I noticed that my feet had swollen up, as had my left hand and elbow, and a few fingers on my right hand. Then some red spots showed up on my feet, and they had swollen so much that I could barely walk. Some drugstore-bought anti-histamines brought most of the swelling down, but my feet were still problematic. I essentially had elephant's feet, which were not only uncomfortable and painful, but incredibly unsightly.
Of course, I was scared out of my mind. How bad was my predicament? What if it got worse? What if it was serious? How would I communicate my symptoms to a doctor given my limited Portuguese skills? What if I told the doctors the wrong symptoms? What if I was going to need surgery or something, and have to be airlifted out of Brazil on a helicopter? For the time being, I thought, I'll see if it gets better on its own.
I panicked for a bit, and after my feet got bigger and more painful, I decided it was time to see someone.
I had heard a lot of things about the healthcare system in Brazil. Here, there are public hospitals and clinics--which are free--and private hospitals, which can be costly. Typically, public hospitals are plagued by long waits and overworked staffs, and are generally perceived to provide a lesser quality of care than their pricier, private alternatives. A friend of mine who went to a public clinic when she was feeling ill said she waited a few hours, but was prescribed good medicine and felt better in a couple days. But other friends of mine who also attended public clinics told me that they waited a long time for a doctor to barely do anything for them, and wished they had just gone to a private hospital in the first place. Another one of my friends also had good things to say about private hospitals: after he dislocated his knee in a freak samba accident (really), a public clinic told him he would need to go to a private hospital to get an MRI and an X-ray, because they lacked the resources to do that themselves. After going to said private hospital, he received his MRI, had a doctor look at it, and got a diagnosis and treatment, all within 45 minutes.
After weighing my options, and realizing I didn't have enough money to even pay for private care, which I thought would be unnecessary in the first place seeing as I wasn't dying or anything, I decided to bite the bullet and go to a public clinic.
I walked into a small building in the heart of a suburban neighborhood, the lobby filled with sad-looking sick people and even sadder-looking babies. My temperature and blood pressure were taken, I gave them my ID, and then I was told to sit and wait. This initial impression led me to believe that not only would I be waiting for three or four hours, but that I would also be tended to by an overworked, tired doctor. At this point, it's also important to note that all of my medical knowledge comes from House, M.D., so I expect every doctor to miss one of my symptoms until I'm near death and finally tended to and saved by a genius diagnostician.
But in fact, I was pleasantly surprised. I only had to wait about 30 minutes, and the doctor that saw me was a nice woman who looked at my feet, typed some things on her computer, and gave me a prescription. All in all, I was at the clinic for less than an hour total, and it cost me exactly nothing to get treated.
So, here's my advice for future study abroad-ers: getting sick is just about inevitable. And sometimes, you might get really sick, or be involved in some kind of freak accident. Either way, don't be afraid of your host country's medical services. Yes, even if there's a language barrier, and you don't know the word for "inflammation." Because when it comes down to it, you're dealing with doctors. And doctors are doctors worldwide, meaning their job is to make sure you don't die.
As for me, I'm getting better after being prescribed an anti-inflammatory. But more than getting over my fear of hospitals abroad, I now know to take extra, extra precautions regarding bugs and bug bites when I travel. It's one of the only downsides, I guess, of traveling to a tropical paradise.
