Picture this. It's 3.30am Thursday morning. You're sitting on the toilet with a bucket in your hand. It's the third time you've been in this position in 2 hours. Your body is ice cold but your head feels like a volcano. Despite the obvious noise of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea, no-one in the hostel is waking up. You desperately need some hydration but you don't have a water bottle, so you steal someone else's. You need it more than they do.
An hour later, you vomit the water up. You know you need to go to hospital, but the front door of the hostel is padlocked and you don't know where the staff sleep. You're panicking, and obviously not thinking straight enough to just turn some lights on, make some noise, wake some people up. At 6am, two American girls knock on the door of the hostel. There's still no staff awake to let them in, but the local drug dealer comes to the door and tells you that there's a basket full of keys under the reception desk. You fetch him the basket and he pulls out the right key, first try, and opens the padlock.
One of the American girls gives you her Gatorade, you grab your bag, and the drug dealer (who also happens to be a rickshaw driver) takes you to hospital. During the admission process you're so weak you can barely stand, and you vomit up the Gatorade you had half an hour ago. The toilet in the hospital's emergency room is utterly filthy. You feel like you're going to get more diseases being in the hospital than you already have. When you're finally admitted to a ward, you have to be taken in a wheelchair.
You spend 3 days lying supine in a private ward. You get jabbed with so many needles, it would make the Red Hot Chili Peppers blush.
Ultrasound scans reveal an abnormal thickening of your stomach walls. All you want to do is go to Ranthambore and try to spot a Bengal tiger in the wild, but as you lay in hospital, June ticks over into July and all of India's tiger sanctuaries slam shut for the summer monsoon. You're going mental being stuck in a lonely room, attached to machines that prevent you from even getting up to go for a piss without the assistance of a nurse. You eat nothing but plain boiled rice and bananas for three days.
Finally, the doctor comes in, at 6am on Sunday morning and tells you that you can leave at 8am after breakfast. You go down to reception to pay your bill. 36,000 Indian rupees.
I'll say that again.
Thirty six thousand Indian rupees.
That's a solid €500. Kind of puts the "cheap" 20 rupee meal you ate on the train from Mumbai to Udaipur into perspective.
This is India.
It's ironic, isn't it? We go into hospital feeling like shit, and we leave feeling pretty good, yet we hate being there.
