Delirious

Stay includes:

• 4-day stay in a private room

• Unlimited food brought to you in bed

• Top rate attention - 24 hours a day

• Flat screen TV with unlimited movies

• Air-conditioning

Focus on the positive rather than the negatives of a situation. For example, I'm not actually in a hotel but rather a hospital in a foreign country with an unknown sickness. By food brought to me in bed, I mean injected into me 24-hours a day because I'm not able to eat and my body is melting away faster than an ice cube in the desert.

I'm not really sure how I got here. I remember someone waking me up in my apartment. I was supposed to be up and getting ready for a long day of work climbing through the Cretan landscape. But apparently, I didn't get up. Someone roused me from my sleep but I was barely cognizant. I went to bed, fine. I woke up, on fire and barely able to understand what was happening. It would have been scary... but again, I had no idea what was really happening. I was in pain but I was also barely conscious...so I was good. Someone ripped off my sheets and the bed was soaking with my sweat.

Someone took my temperature, I heard vaguely "105." Then, I must have been magically transported to a hospital because now I'm here, in the waiting room.

It's rough. Someone has the furnace set at max. My friend is there. I beg her to get someone to turn down the furnace. I'm crying because I can't get away from this heat.

Meg looks terrified. That's weird. She runs to get help. She brings a nurse back and she does the same ripping off my sheet trick to reveal a sweat drenched bed. I'm not sure what she expected, the heat is overwhelming in this room. Meg and the nurse look legitimately worried. Are they actually wondering whether I'm going to make it? Turns out the hospital is air conditioned and the waiting room is quite cold. Oh man, I think I'm just going to go back to sleep and pretend this isn't happening. Maybe it's not. It does have a nightmarish quality.

I wake up again a few hours later - okay, maybe 12 hours later. Now I am hooked up with saline and antibiotics and feel..."better." I'm in a private room with two beds and Meg is sleeping on the other bed. At first, I'm worried she is sick but then I see that she's not hooked up to anything and is wearing regular clothes so she must be fine. You always see these movies where the person caring for the sick person is sleeping in a chair by their bed. This hospital in Crete gave me a double room for me and my guest! How nice was that!

This ordeal lasted four days and the hospital let Meg stay with me for the whole time. A couple of weeks before, Meg and I went to a book store in Heraklion and pre-ordered "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Meg read the entire book to me while I was hospitalized. I mean, I was really sick but I think listening to the parts with Dolores Umbridge was definitely worse.

Many times, doctors came in with their young Greek medical students to examine me. Like 5-7 people at a time. I got the feeling that I was a freak case study. I never learned what really happened but they suspected that I picked something up in the Middle-East. That was fair, I spent a lot of time in Egyptian markets wearing just a pair of flip flops. Given the amount of live and dead animals in those markets all over the ground, I wouldn't be surprised if I picked up some type of parasite or bacteria.

While I will never know what really happened to me, I will never forget the feeling of getting my bill. 79 Euros. Seriously!?! Four days, three nights, double room, non-stop IVs. Man, national healthcare systems. I wish this could be the experience for everyone. Imagine a world where people were treated in hospitals, healed, and didn't have to worry about whether or not they could pay for their healthcare. They could come out of an awful experience feeling grateful, not hopeless because they've just incurred a life-long debt in order to just stay alive.

Wouldn't that be nice.

Just take a minute to realize how life altering this experience could have been if I had been in the United States and I had been hospitalized without health insurance.