What it’s like to be Hospitalized in Mexico

Preparing for my several-month long trip, I knew that I would likely hurt myself. I’m so physically uncoordinated and have a tendency to choose dangerous activities as my entertainment of choice, so a bone break, ligament tear or sprained muscle is the least I can expect each year.

So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me that only five months into my trip, I found myself lying on the streets of Playa del Carmen with my elbow hanging out of my arm.

Let me start from the beginning.

The Accident

I had just finished a day of work at my dive shop. This was no ordinary day, this was the day I signed my paperwork to be sent off the next day to receive my Divemaster license. This was my opportunity to stay in Mexico and work doing what I loved – diving. I hopped on my bike and started down my usual route home, knowing that a few icy celebratory beverages were waiting for me in the fridge. Having been robbed once whilst riding my bike, (that’s a whole other story) and being as accident-prone as I am, I am, at best, a nervous cyclist, so I tend to look around me in all directions as I ride. So when I turned my head to glance around for approaching scooters with intentions to rob me again, I didn’t notice that I was rushing towards a steel pole based in a block of cement. It had been placed in the middle of the two lanes to block off the far right lane due to construction of a building and falling materials. By the time I turned my head to the front, it was too late, I collided head on with the pole and fell, very hard, onto my left side into the right lane. I knew even in the split second before impact that I was about to break something. I lay on the ground, to winded to breathe, clutching my left arm, and called weakly for “ayuda” (help).

Very soon, a small crowd began to gather as someone called an ambulance and others helped me to find my phone and contact a friend. I noticed the grim looks on bystanders’ faces as they glanced at my arm. After 20 minutes of agonising waiting, the crowd began to complain about the tardiness of the ambulance. I had begun to lose the energy required to hold my injured left arm with my right, and a woman took over. As a police took photos of the scene, I craned my head to notice the street was covered in glass and blood. My blood. After 25 agonising minutes, the ambulance arrived. The paramedic showed no mercy as he yelled at me to left my arm go and tried to force it down to my side, to which I shouted back at him in Spanish “I will, let me do it in my on time! Puh-lease!”

 

Hospital #1

Once inside the ambulance, the paramedics waited until I could produce evidence of insurance before taking me to CostaMed, a private hospital. Little did I know that I was taken there because the paramedics receive a commission for bringing patients there. I had noticed the state of Mexico’s roads before, but you never really notice it fully until you’re inside an ambulance with multiple broken bones. I had the most painful x-rays and MRIs of my life as I was moved from stretcher to bed to radiography table back to bed and assessed for broken bones in my arm, ribs and internal bleeding.

Diagnosis: No internal bleeding, no broken ribs, but a broken elbow, the bone had been exposed that risked infection and needed immediate cleaning and surgery.

The hospital staff then proceed to tell me that I would be charged a fee of $10,000USD for the cleaning procedure of my elbow followed by up to $40,000 for the surgery, not including the cost of the hospital stay. I spent the next hours painfully calling my insurance company, providing all medical reports, sending off for translations to English to arrange direct payment. After being reassured by my insurance that everything was in order for approval for payment, I was then told that the hospital insurance administration department wa located in the US and as it was now late evening, we would not know if they “accepted” working directly my insurance until the morning. Then they informed me that the majority of travel insurance policies were rejected for direct coverage, and that the patient would have to pay from their own pocket and be reimbursed later by their insurance company.

Sure, I’ll just pull this $50,000 I had in my pocket waiting for an occasion such as this…I was stuck. I didn’t have the money to pay for my treatment, not even a night’s stay. Basically I was being kicked out without being treated.

So, with the help of a Mexican friend who came to my aid, we arranged an ambulance transfer to the nearby public hospital at midnight, but not before I had to pay $1500 for the treatment I had already received in the emergency room. And it would be been thousands more had my fried not arrived and changed the bill to his name to be charged as a local.

 

Hospital #2

After an hour wait in the hallway on a stretcher, I was placed on a bed in Hospital General’s emergency room, barely able to breath due to the pain in my chest and side. Thanks to the first hospital’s failure to provide my radiography, the following morning I had to endure the same painful x-ray process, to be told yet again by the traumatologist that I had no broken ribs, just “pure bruises”, spoken with cocky arrogance as he lightly patted my breasts. I was then told that I would be taken to the ward that evening and scheduled for surgery. In the meantime, I needed to update my insurance agency where I was, what treatments I would receive and how much, so they could approve payment.

One small problem – phones were not allowed under any circumstances in emergency. Only one visitor was allowed to visit for 10 minutes between at 11am, 6pm and 11.30pm. These rules would change once I was taken to the ward, so I waited until that evening. No one came. The next day, no one came. Nurses and doctors walked past us without making eye contact, completely disinterested in providing care and service for patients. I lay in bed in excruciating pain for 3 days, only to be told every day that the wards were full and there were no spaces for me. The traumatologist never returned to schedule my surgery. I didn’t eat because I was so afraid of the painful ordeal to go to the toilet, having been left waiting for half an hour with a bedpan placed under my back. It was too painful to cry, and by day 3 I was fed up with waiting. My friend raced in out of visiting hours and made me contact my insurance, who had heard of my ordeal and had arranged a transfer to another private hospital. All I needed to do was sign a patient release and let them know when it was done. However, once it was done an hour later (after the hospital demanded cash only for my treatment), there was no way to contact my insurance company due to the strict “no phones, no visitors” rule. Both my friend in the waiting room and I lying in bed were abused by the doctor on duty for not obeying the ER visitor rules. Nice staff, abusing patients for wanting to contact their medical insurance company.

Finally, they gave in and let me place a call. I was told that all was approved for my transfer and to wait patiently whilst they arranged the ambulance. I settled down to rest for only another couple of hours as my friend went to wait outside for the ambulance. I waited, and waited, and waited, and no-one came. Finally at 11pm my friend entered the room, alone, with a dark look on his face. “They are not coming until tomorrow,” he said. We both sat in stunned, hopeless silence. I could not imagine the horror of staying another night in this place, on my back without even a pillow, not knowing the time of day as the minutes ticked away like hours, listening to patients painful screams all evening until morning. I sunk into a depression so deep that I eventually fell asleep.

Hours later, I was awoken by someone’s hand on my arm. I opened my eyes to see the kind faces of two paramedics, with my friend proudly standing behind them with an “everythig will be ok” look on his face.

The staff at Hospital General didn’t even bother to look up as the paramedics asked for help to move me to the stretcher.

This is the vast difference between private and public hospitals here in Mexico, which is far more polarised than the difference in Australia. A wait of 13 hours in emergency in Australia is something that I once would have complained about. Sadly, the majority of Mexican locals will never know anything else but the public system. I have learnt the real difference between being a tourist in Mexico, and how the people really live.

Please, people, if you travel abroad, whatever you do, do not go without travel insurance. If you think that you can afford it, you’re wrong, very very wrong.

 

Hospital #3

At 3am I arrived at Hospiten Riviera Maya with the help of kind, gentle but strong paramedics. Within half an hour I was attended to by a doctor to re-bandage my elbow, a radiographer for more x-rays and a traumatologist to schedule my surgery.

Diagnosis: broken elbow, fluid in my lungs and 5 fractured ribs. Not pure bruises. It took three hospitals to diagnose me correctly.

I was then taken immediately to a private room that reminded me more of a hotel than a hospital.  An hour and a half long surgical procedure and some lung exercises and I was out within 3 days. The bed was so comfortable, the doctors so amiable and the nurses so kind and gentle that I almost didn’t want to leave.

What do they say? Three times a charm.

 

What now?

It’s been two weeks since I left hospital and am on the long road to recovery as I begin physiotherapy on my arm and begin to redevelop the disintegrated muscles. I cannot dive for at least three months and if I cannot recuperate fine movement in my little finger, I may never again play violin at the level I used to. This didn’t stop me from getting up within a week of hospitalisation and begin slow walks around the neighbourhood and using my bed as a home office to continue my office work for the dive shop. If there’s one thing I remember from all my previous injuries, one thing that I repeated to myself every day throughout this horrific month and continue to do so today, is a lesson that I learnt in life: “pain is temporary” (click to read about another similar experience on my personal blog). Very soon I’ll look back on this as just a couple of months and what I’ll remember more is not the pain, but how I dealt with it. I refuse to allow this injury to keep me in bed, lamenting my existence. You must get up and move on, because you never know what path it may send you down in your future.

Besides, now I have a cool scar that I can say was a shark attack bite.

Whilst lying in bed in hospital, I told a friend about my experience thus far, in Mexico, to which she replied:

Alicia, you are by far the unluckiest person I’ve ever met.

This is my response.

I have a choice, I can live an ordinary, safe life where I’m not afraid every day, I know my routine and where my next paycheck comes from. I can buy a house, decorate it, live for my weekends spent strolling casually through parks and take pleasure in the creature comforts of a middle-class first-world lifestyle. I can accept the limitations given to me by my body and curl up and snuggle comfortably inside my bubble until my body decides it’s had enough.

Or, I can live an extraordinary life. I can wake up each month in a different house, not knowing where I’ll be the next. I can dive with bull sharks, hit the town to salsa dance with new friends made that same day, or explore local towns by bicycle (without a helmet, who wears helmets around here?). I can replace the comforts of friends and family that I know with the thrill of meeting new people from all over the world every day, each with their own story and unique way of looking at life. I might hurt myself, but it will always be a adventure. You can’t keep me down for long, I will be up soon dancing with broken ribs. I will write with one arm in plaster if I have to.

I choose adventure, I choose life.