How A Cheese Sandwich Landed Me In Hospital

Filed under Food, Nha Trang, Vietnam

I was fucking sick of noodles, and all I wanted was a cheese sandwich.

Preferably brie, maybe with some grapes or apple slices.

Despite the fact that the French were in charge here for hundreds of years, it’s been virtually impossible to buy decent cheese in the south-east Asian cities I’ve visited.

Processed slices, yes. The kind of stuff they have to legally call “cheese food” in the UK.

Brie? Forget it.

Bread’s pretty hard to come by too.

It’s not like you can just walk into a corner shop, buy some bread, butter and cheese. That would be “convenience”.

But today I went on a mission. I was going to hunt down the components of, and then construct and eat, a motherfucking cheese sandwich, if it killed me.

And it damn near did.

I managed to find some Cambembert – close enough – and some single-serving butter packs. Bread proved trickier. I ended up buying a couple of mini baguettes of dubious quality from a street vendor.

Miraculously, I also managed to find a knife.

South-east Asians don’t use knives when they eat. They use chopsticks for noodles, and a fork and spoon for everything else.

I got back to my hotel room, and started hacking at a baguette with my new knife.

For dirty backpacking scum, this is called “cooking”.

Some context first.

Last night, I had had another “fuck noodles” moment, and wound up ordering fish, breaking 16 years of vegetarianism.

I had barfed it up onto the pavement before I was a block away from the restaurant.

Then I got bollocksed drunk, and spent most of the night blowing the porcelain god.

It’s now 3pm or thereabouts, and I haven’t eaten all day. Feeling fragile.

Anyway, the knife cut through the bread like it wasn’t there, but then something warm and wet hit me in the face.

The Vietnamese are putting highly pressurised pork jam in their bread, are they?

Oh, no, wait a minute, it’s my blood.

The knife had gone right through the baguette and about a third of the way through my left pinky finger, just below the uppermost knuckle.

I wouldn’t say my finger was hanging off, but “gaping” would be an understatement.

This was no paper cut.

I have a first aid kit in my backpack, but every time I let go of my pinky to try to unzip the pouch, blood sprays everywhere.

I wrap toilet paper around the wound, and it is a uniform scarlet in seconds.

Ten minutes later, my finger is still pissing blood, and I’m beginning to feel queasy.

The nice hotel receptionist offered me some cotton wool.

“Thanks, but I think I’m gonna need a doctor,” I said, dripping blood all over her nice clean lobby.

I showed her that my hands were both completely covered in blood.

She gave a little yelp and went to hail a motorbike.

I tried to ask the moto guy to take it easy – I had no helmet, no free hand to hold on, and I was beginning to feel lightheaded – but he thought I was asking him to hurry up.

It was a nerve-wracking five minutes to the hospital.

The moto guy accompanied me inside, jibberjabbered to a nurse on reception, who took me into a little room.

There was something that felt very retro about the hospital. The uniforms, in particular, put me in mind of nurses in American WWII movies. No computers anywhere.

The nurse asked me my name, then bandaged my finger crudely in about thirty seconds, and asked me for 420,000 dong ($25), which I gave her.

She gave me a piece of paper that I took for a receipt. She’d written my name as “Ca Vin”.

So, is that it, are we done? I wondered.

I showed the receipt to the moto guy, who led me off down some corridors. The bandages were already soaked with blood, and I wasn’t feeling any less woozy.

Frankly, I was shitting myself.

I met one girl in Cambodia who’d had a bike accident. She’d woken up in hospital the next day with an empty wallet and human bite-marks on her inner thighs.

I ended up in a filthy room, being instructed to lie down on a narrow surgical table by a couple of nurses.

There was a medical poster on one of the walls. The only word I understood was AIDS.

The nurses kept gesturing to lie back completely, but I wanted to see what they were doing – with particular reference to the cleanliness or otherwise of any sharp metal objects they planned to use on me.

The moto guy was still hanging around, smoking a cigarette.

A nurse came out with a cartoon-massive syringe, out of a sealed packet thank god, and indicated that she was going to stick me with it.

I was sweating. Hangover, lack of food, nerves, blood, AIDS.

I asked, in sign language, whether it would make me sleep.

This, I acknowledge, was a ludicrous thing to ask.

I had a cut finger, for Buddha’s sake, not a ruptured appendix.

The girls just started pissing themselves laughing, and didn’t stop until the procedure was done and I felt like the world’s biggest pussy.

A doctor came in, stuck me directly and painfully in the pinky with another needle that made my entire left arm go to sleep.

Then he sew me up, bandaged me, and sent me on my merry way with another bit of paper.

I was giggling like an idiot by this point, though I still felt like shit.

The moto guy looked at my bit of paper.

“Need to eat,” he said, uncertainly, pointing at the words.

“No shit,” I said. “I could murder a cheese sandwich.”

He took me to another office, where a man gave me 190,000 dong ($12). My change, I guess.

Back on the bike, the moto guy drove me to a pharmacy. I apparently “need to eat” some antibiotics or something. The piece of paper was a prescription.

Later, the moto guy got 200,000 dong from me for his efforts. About 10 times the amount of a typical moto ride in Nha Trang. The way I see it, I’d hired a translator.

He looked really embarrassed to accept it. He’ll feel better about it when he gets home and sees all the blood on the back on his T-shirt.

So now I’m holed up in my hotel room.

What to do, stuck in a hotel room with a broadband internet connection and a completely numb left arm?

Hmm.

I knew that girl’s anklet I bought in India would come in useful.

I put it on my numbed wrist.

Ah, the Contessa has arrived…

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2008-08-01  ::  Kevin Murphy