AsiaLIFE

Who do you call when the tummy bugs bite? Words by Zoe Daniel.

It’s 2am and Phnom Penh has wound down for the evening. The streets are dark and quiet, apart from the odd tuk-tuk transporting straggling tourists back to their hotels. One by one the last of the lights have winked out. But in the clinic where I sit with my son, the lights will burn all night. He’s finally asleep against me, his hair flopping over his pale face as he breathes softly. Exhausted but sleepless, I wonder worriedly if the ordeal is over.

Months before, back in Australia, we had carefully considered the down sides of moving to Cambodia and exposing our children to all sorts of germs and diseases that we don’t have to worry about at home. Being pre-kids veterans of Africa, we decided that we could manage the risks of moving to a developing country with a two-year-old and a five-month-old baby. We’d escaped malaria and dengue in far worse environments, we’d been jabbed with every possible inoculant, and we’d be cautious. For nine months we survived with nothing but a few bouts of funny tummy.

But then, one Saturday afternoon, in the middle of lunch, the vomiting began. In Cambodia, food borne illness is a part of life. Even the locals get sick. Poor growing conditions, bad handling, lack of refrigeration and the tropical climate all combine to increase the risk. So for months I’d cleaned our vegetables in purple wash, instituted a strict regime of hand washing and food handling, and peeled everything in sight. Perhaps we’d dropped our guard?

I still can’t pinpoint the cause but our little boy began vomiting that Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t stop. Drugs and a visit to the clinic didn’t help. By Monday he was limp, dehydrated and attached to a drip at SOS. This brings me to my vigil of self-recrimination in the small hours, as the lights winked out all over the Penh. All parents ache when their children are sick. In this case, to see his little body struggling to purge the bug was just plain awful. Then to see this normally wildly active two-year-old, limp and staring, and then passed out was downright terrifying. I had to ask myself the question – is it right to have the children here? Is it plain old selfish to drag them along on our adventures, and to put them at risk in the process? What are they actually getting out of it? As he tossed and turned that night, he’d occasionally half wake as the drip tube tugged on his arm. “I want to go home now please Mummy,” he’d repeat. But where is that? At less than three he’s had four houses in three cities and countless hotel rooms and serviced apartments. We have wonderful new friends here. But our families are in Southern Australia, a day’s flying away. Our old friends are there too, and scattered around the world. Who do you call when all hell breaks loose?

On Day Four, our baby daughter started vomiting as well. That was a low point and if I could have called my Mum to come, I would have. I have never cleaned up so much mess, and I’ve rarely been so tired in my life. I think it was only the calls and texts from friends here and the Facebook messages from back home that got me through – particularly when my husband got sick as well. It was ten full days after the episode began when things began to calm down. We’d all been bombed with antibiotics and various other remedies and by then, a few tummies were still grumbling, but the worst had passed.

I can’t fault the extraordinary care that we all received from the doctors at the clinic. Visits to check my son at 11pm, 1am, 3am were well beyond the call of duty. I doubt that we would have had better medical attention at home. A few weeks later, we’re all back to full health and the whole, awful episode feels like a far distant memory. But we have to face the fact that it could easily happen again. The cause? Vegetables probably. The bug? Salmonella, maybe even typhoid. The lesson? We forget that it’s a tough environment and we’re exposed, but we like it here. We’re here for ourselves but we hope our kids will learn to be tough, feisty, tolerant and adaptable because of it – and hopefully so will their stomachs.