Back about 9 years ago my wife and I went for a 10 day honeymoon to the then 5 star IberoStar. If you don't like a good story stop here...I won't bore you with intimate details but the gist of the story was one for an Oprah episode.
So we leave for Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) and arrive on Tuesday afternoon....upon our arrival we found you had to book 24 hours in advance for restaurants...otherwise it was hitting the main food hall. Luckily for us we had a cancellation at the Mexican place, we took it...we had an ok dinner.
Wednesday was blast, drank, did events, hung out, relaxed...that night, they had a honeymooners dinner...went to that and it was awesome...drank and had a great time at shows that night.
Then on Thursday it was mostly the same thing, we went on a kayak for most of the afternoon and had a ball in the ocean...and then we went to a honeymooner's dinner, which was a seven course meal and was fabulous !!!....later that night we went and caught a show and drank some more and met some cool people....THIS IS WHERE THE FUN STOPPED.
After going out, we went to bed and I was awoken out of a dead sleep around 4 a.m. with the "I am going to go into the bathroom and toss my cookies routine", My Wife kindly followed behind and decided to was a perfect opportunity to take some candid pictures, praying to the toilet god's for forgiveness for the bad things he has done...to lee's joy, Laurie decided to pray with him approximately 30 minutes later...
for the next 6 to 7 hours myself and my wife laid in our room wasting away and fighting for the toilet, to vomit and have explosive diarrhea, we both felt as if we had contracted a case of the EBOLI virus and out insides were turning to a liquid state....We truly believe now that the body is made up of approximately 80% water, because we were so dehydrated by the time we decided to finally go to the clinic we couldn't even walk and our mouths were as dry as a popcorn fart, we had to get the hotel to drive us to the clinic.
Now when I say clinic, the first thing you probably think of is a place that could provide medical attention, well what we experienced was a joke, all the lady did was push on my wifes stomach and take a blood pressure and told us we had to go to the hospital, because she feared we had a bacterial infection. So now the game gets really fun, we stumble our selves to the hotel and get a taxi ride from Guido, the crazy taxi guy to the hospital like an hour away. The ride was like something out of an Bruce Willis movie, a lot of swerving and close calls, and we even hit a dude on his bike, I thought it was cool since we were going to the hospital anyways lol...he was ok though and just took off.
So we get to the hospital, which was a nightmare, we get in there and had to wait for 1 ½ hours, we finally got into a room and had to wait more. So we waited in the room and finally a nurse or someone came in and assessed my wife...meon the other hand didn't get anything done to me lol. We finally got an IV, and some fluids, but the funny thing was that no one spoke English (AT ALL). They didn't run the IV's right my wife said (she is a nurse), since it was super slow. The doctor finally came in and basically told us we had to be admitted to the hospital, since we couldn't keep anything down we had to get IV antibiotics.
We got to stay in the same room but with only one IV pole which had a broken wheel, so we were getting each other out of bed every 30 minutes to go to the bathroom. They didn't provide a gown so we had to rot in our own stinky clothes that we walked in with...It was miserable. Thats right, we were in a Spanish speaking hospital for three days, with no one who spoke English, it was the single most worst experience for either of us. They constantly left us for hours at a time, our IVs ran empty countless times, every time we called for something all they would say was "No habla Englas", "?Uno Momento" and never come back.
After the second day I finally got to take a shower, so I could put back on my old stinky clothes lol, they wouldn't give us pain medication since we felt like we had a rabid badger in our stomachs...all they would do is come in, turn off the call light and say "Uno Momento", smile and leave, only to come back 2 hours later with zantac. Which didn't help obviously.
So on the second day, like 30 hours after we had been there, we finally see the Doctor...and he said we had an amoeba parasite, and that was what was causing our distress. He discharged me but my wife had to stay for another day, so I had to wait with her. We finally got released and had to pay our medical bill before we left. $4,000 dollars for care I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Since we had no other way to pay for it...I had to dump it on my C.C.
We went back to our hotel but it was a wasted trip, we couldn't drink or eat anything, basically we ate fruit and water. We finally came home two days earlier and went to the hospital to get more tests done and my wife had to get a CT of her liver because some of her tests came back elevated. So we got but back on some wicked anti-biotics that tasted terrible for 10 days. In the end the hotel did admit the cause, and it was because we went to that Mexican resturaunt...everyone who ate there that night got sick and were in the hospital with us. They offered a voucher for the trip to come back for free...we never got the chance to go back.
We were later told that a lot of people get sick there (locals) with that kind of parasite...but 95% of the time it is just like the stomach flu and shows up like a month after you contract it...the other 5% it can do serious harm...and shows up in 24-48 hours...
Guess which one we got
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