I know it's time to come home. Believe me, I am well aware of the superiority of a very great many things, of the warmth and comfort, of the desirability and predictability and ease of home. I would hazard to say that I might be somewhat more aware of these benefits than a great many stateside folks. And while I cannot pretend to understand a parent's worry and fretting, I would put for examination my carefully cultivated guilty conscience coupled with the more-tangible physical distress. I know it's hard to see someone sick and far from home. It's also hard, frequently frustrating, and generally terrifying to BE alone and sick and miserable on the far side of the world.
Here's the thing: here, I have a job I know how to do and am still capable of doing, a job that covers the basics, my debts are relatively static, and, with family help, the extravagancies of farang medicine. Maybe there's something different from the home turf, but from all I've seen and heard, and all the inquiries and applications I've sent, it's not necessarily an easy time to get a job, let alone one that pays for insurance.
But that's what family's all about: live with and on them until one of the applications bears fruit or at least until I look hale enough to hold regular employment.
Fantastic!
Here's the thing: when I came to Thailand, though I was careful to avoid raw food and drank only a little boiled water in addition to soda and seltzer, the alien lifeforms derailed my systems and knocked my relatively-stout self flat, literally. Coupled with the bike wrecks, it set me back in a big, bad way.
Now, even though not a week goes by that I don't dream of a steak and fried potatoes, drinking water straight from the tap, hot chocolate and real coffee, eating a real salad and--oh how glorious it would be!--Hispanic food, it now constitutes alien life.
Granted, I LOVE the idea that coming home is a relief and would ease all systems. TRUST ME, the idea of home presenting succor and tonic does not decrease from the far side of the world.
But if, on multiple daily handfuls of exorbitantly expensive medications, here where I have a predictable diet I've been on for the past year-n-change, I'm still on the squatter pot enough to prevent me rom getting anything from the squats, what happens when I throw my systems into the existential stress of greatly reduced oxygen and the metabolic challenges of producing heat, coupled with a gut load of alien life?
Here's honesty: a bad illness would hospitalize me, and American treatment would bankrupt me and anyone else. Without a robust HMO/insurance plan in place, I have to accept that running home would flatten my electronic/financial/credit/intangible self as thoroughly as my body's been reduced, without any guarantee of a direct line, passing go and collecting $200, to physical wellbeng.
Consider the obverse: say I was significantly unwell and had spent five months working with a doctor at a reputable university med center and was considering moving around the globe to an alien food culture and a medical establishment I could in no way afford--is this a good idea?
Trust me. It's not that I don't want to come home. It's not that I'm unaware of what I'm missing. It's not that I'm a callus cad reveling in the propagation of ulcers and sleepless nights. It's not that I'm still enchanted by the people and landscape and job and religion and culture here--I'm very, very, very, extremely done and over with all of it. It's that after running away into maybe not the smartest decision I've ever made, maybe running into an equally uncertain decision from a significantly worse place is not something I should be doing.
And as much as I appreciate the thoughts behind the pleas and orders to come home, they don't make it easier to pass the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment