Hospitalised in Yogyakarta

By Rosa de Vos, s24
Leiden University

Since every year there seem to be 'anak ACICIS' who end up in the hospital, I'll tell you about my expierence in Rumah Sakit Panti Rapih in Yogyakarta.

During the orientation sessions the Resident Director told us that occasionally students need to be hospitalized because diseases such as typhoid or dengue fever. Of course, my first reaction to that was: oh well, it won't be me.

It seemed like I was right, as during the first five months of my study in Yogya I was never ill, had a cold or felt miserable. I didn't really pay attention to all the warnings coming from travel books and my mother. Never have ice-cubes in your drink, never eat at a kaki lima, be carefull with 'pinggir jalan food', and last but not least, drink bottled water only. Still I was quite healthy.

The last week before I planned to go to Malaysia and travel around for a week, my friend who came to visit me from the Netherlands got a bad fever and I was planning to bring her to the docter the next day. For some mysterious reason we were both hospitalised that night. She had dengue fever and I had appendicitis. So there we were, both on a drip, taking an awful lot of medicine, in the same room in the Panti Rapih Catholic Hospital.

I'm writing this story just to tell all the future ACICIS students, don't worry if you need to be hospitalised. The nurses were very friendly and according to my friend, who is a nurse herself, very professional. Our doctor spoke English fluently and took the time to answer all our questions. The Indonesian opinion about medicine though is somewhat different from the Dutch one. My doctors in the Netherlands almost fainted when they saw the very heavy doses of medicine I got. I think I was high from them a few days.

The hospital experience was actually funny from time to time. Every evening a Catholic nun would come with a little cross and a candle. Church music was put on and a nun and two nurses were running around with Holy Communion and a bell to let the sick know salvation was coming.

After one week we were allowed to go home and we flew directly back to the Netherlands, where we had to be put in quarantine for two hours. One last tip: make sure you have a really good travel insurance policy, because ours was not really prepared to pay anything, to arrange our flight home, or even to make sure there were wheelchairs at the airport. But finally we got home safely, we never made it to Malaysia though.

Have a great time in Yogyakarta and santai aja...jangan khawatir!