I was picking up a fever—no doubt about it. I woke drenched in sweat, nauseous and confused. Everyone else in Saigon was celebrating Halloween as I lay marooned on my bed with a climbing temperature and an itch so bad I wanted to tear the skin from my body. I was too faint to stand. A trip to the hospital proved useless. I was injected with a yellow-y liquid to stop the itching, which made me tired and dizzy. It helped temporarily, but when I got home, the itching started up again. Scratching, showering, skin salve—everything and anything I tried just aggravated it. I returned to the hospital the next day and was injected with the same liquid. The doctor casually told me I was allergic to something, "hazelnuts or tomatoes," he suggested—hardly staples in Vietnam. I was frustrated and desperate.
I’d been living in Saigon for a few months, and had travel insurance to cover medical emergencies. But, too drained to figure out exactly what my policy covered, much less in a foreign language, I paid cash.After yet another trip to the hospital, it was clear that I wasn’t getting better, though, and I became unsure how many more hospital visits I could afford at $100 a pop. I did what any twentysomething would do: I called my dad. Previously unaware of my severe condition, he immediately got on the phone with the travel insurance company. A few hours later, I got a call from a nice woman at Marsh, based in South Africa (where I am originally from). The good news after loads of bad news: I was fully covered by my plan. She was genuinely concerned and got straight into the specifics: What were my symptoms? How long had I been experiencing them? What were they testing me for? Many of her questions, the hospital staff hadn't thought to ask. Finally, in a time and a place where I couldn’t help myself, someone could help me.
When I returned to the hospital the next day, I was given a new doctor. Clearly, the travel insurance woman had made a call. The new doctor immediately tested me for dengue fever, a mosquito-transmitted disease that, left untreated, has a mortality rate of up to 50 percent. The results came back positive. There I was, showing all the symptoms for one of the most prevalent and deadly mosquito-borne viruses in the country—for almost a week, no less—and no one had even thought to test me for it.
She informed me that the dengue fever was on the on the verge of hemorrhagic dengue—the most severe form. I knew it could be fatal.
The dengue fever, which has no cure, continued to worsen. The medication I was finally given helped some of the side effects, but I was so fatigued that even climbing a few stairs was challenging and the itching would come in gigantic waves. In an effort to stop myself from scratching, I’d jolt and jig my body in weird lurches, a movement my housemates coined the ‘dengue dance.’ Then, more bad news: The insurance representative, who had been following my case, called to say that my platelet count had dropped dangerously low. In all honesty, I didn’t know what a platelet count was. But when she informed me that the dengue fever was on the verge of hemorrhagic dengue—the most severe form of the virus—I knew it could be fatal.
The next step was to fly me out of the country for a blood transfusion, but there are serious risks involved when flying with dengue fever, so she decided to wait a few days and see if my condition worsened. It was a tense period of waiting and testing. But eventually, my platelet count plateaued, and then began to to climb. It was only the beginning of a very long road to recovery, but I was finally out of the stagnant water. Marsh reimbursed me for the hospital visits I had initially paid for in cash and I never saw the final hospital bill. Irrelevant of how much my treatment cost, monitoring dengue fever in the beginning is absolutely critical and, had the insurance rep not taken control of the situation, I don’t know which way this story would have gone.
