I Had a Medical Emergency Abroad. Here's What I Wish I'd Known.

26.02.2024 - 20:10 / matadornetwork.com

It was September, and at that point, I’d spent most of the year living in Siem Reap, Cambodia, after falling in love with the city as a backpacker. To make a living, I worked two jobs, teaching English to first-, second-, and third-graders in the morning, then waiting tables at a restaurant in the evening six days a week.

On this particular day, I’d exhausted my patience trying to get and hold the attention of my students in our tiny classrooms with no windows, so I asked a friend with a tuk-tuk to take me into the countryside for a dose of nature before my restaurant shift began. We traveled 20 minutes out of the city to the end of a dirt road, where wooden huts jutted out over flooded rice paddies and families swam in water the color of coffee with cream. Two double rainbows lit up the sky above us. It was gorgeous, and without a second thought, I got out of the tuk-tuk and jumped in the water.

The author went for a swim in the countryside near Siem Reap, Cambodia. Photo: Stock for you/Shutterstock

Swimming in the flooded rice paddy that day was just the break I needed, but it had unintended consequences. A few weeks later, I developed symptoms of a severe sinus infection, and lab tests showed I had a resistant strain of E. coli in my sinuses. I can’t know for sure if the rice paddy swim was to blame, but it sure seemed like it, especially as the timeline added up. (The Mayo Clinic recommends avoiding water from lakes while swimming, as it can transmit the bacteria).

Fighting off a sinus infection may not seem like a big deal, but for me, it was potentially life threatening. I was born with cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease that causes a defect in a particular cellular protein, leading to an imbalance in how my body processes salt and water in various organs. Patients with CF have much thicker mucus than other people, which causes frequent respiratory infections so severe that some need lung transplants (and many succumb to the disease at a young age). Even though my mutation of CF is mild — I experience sinus infections and stomach issues but have healthy lungs — I’m still legally disabled because of it, and prone to health emergencies.

Up until that point, I’d lived a fairly normal life in spite of my disease, so I’d assumed living in Cambodia wouldn’t pose any serious issues. I was wrong.

Far away from my CF doctors in the US, I took my well-being into my own hands. That meant asking local doctors who had never heard of my disease to culture my mucus and prescribe the appropriate antibiotics, all of which had to be administered intravenously. Eventually, I had to quit my teaching job, as it left me no time to go to the clinic twice a day for infusions. Although the nurses responsible for my care