The ‘little altitude sickness’ we mentioned in our last entry turned out to be a bit more than that for Jo. She’s fine now, but spent almost three days in bed with altitude sickness and stomach ‘issues’ before calling a doctor at 1am and being admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties. We weren’t sure whether we over-reacting by calling the doctor, but he later told us that Jo’s finger-tips were turning blue due to a lack of oxygen, and by the morning the rest of her might have been a bit funny-lookin too.
It turns out that our 30 minute flight and 3700m altitude increase up from Rurrenabaque had caused Jo’s lungs to take in some water, but we caught it early and luckily our Columbian / French-Canadian doctor was really nice and incredibly knowledgeable about the illness (I think a lot of gringo’s end up meeting Dr Oscar at some point in their travels to La Paz). The private hospital was fine, and much better than the phrase ‘admitted to a bolivian hospital’ conjures up.
Iain got a bed and meals as part of the deal. The only problem was the troupe of 25 (yes, we counted) staff taking turns at visiting, looking, checking, feeding, washing Jo and delivering bursts of rapid-fire Spanish medical terms that we didn’t understand (our doctor translated the important stuff though).
After 30 hours of oxygen, a drip and some random pills, she’s fine, and we’re looking forward to moving on to Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca (which some guidebooks say is the highest lake in the world, and others say it’s a bit of a lie) and finding ourselves some hammocks.
Backpackers here are always looking for somewhere to stay that’s outside of the ‘zona tourista’ ... I guess we found it!
