Meg Goes Global

my nightmare in nha trang

I’m sure you’ve heard it thousands of times online, from friends, from worried family but this is your sign to listen and make sure you get that travel insurance. We all hope that we never would really need to use it but better be safe than sorry, and never have I been more grateful that I listened than this time.

When I was solo travelling in Vietnam, I started to feel unwell: pretty common when travelling new countries right? Could be something I ate or any number of things so I carried on for a few days with pretty intense abdominal pain. You may be thinking ‘Megan why would you not go to the doctors straight away’; well being a hypochondriac and always thinking that I am dying for no good reason, I have learnt to mostly push to the side these anxieties and get on with it because usually it actually is nothing. So it took me a few days and a sleeper bus later to realise it was not in my head and I actually needed to do something about it. By this time, the people I had been travelling with for the past few weeks had all gone their separate ways.

Travelling on that sleeper bus was one of the worst experiences I’ve had, with only paracetamol for the pain that was doing nothing, and travelling alone not knowing what was wrong with me. If you’ve travelled in Vietnam you already know these buses are not the most comfortable experience, but add in this pain and it was a whole different story. I took a rogue sleeping pill I found hanging round the bottom of my bag (desperate times call for desperate measures) to try and sleep through as much as I could of the 13 hour journey ahead of me. Arriving in Nha Trang in the early hours of the morning I went straight to bed and stayed there for the next 36 hours. With the pain not subsiding I spoke to one of the hostel reps, who took me on his bike to the hospital. Lots of scans, tears and google translate later I ended up being taken into surgery that day for ovarian torsion and the start of an infection. Things could have been a lot worse if I didn’t go when I did and I am forever grateful for the hostel reps that helped me.

I recovered in hospital for the next three days, deciding it was best to cut my trip months early and fly home to get checked up properly. The hospital and care service in Vietnam was faultless but this obviously racks up a bill. I remember being wheeled up to the front desk to pay for my surgery before it could be performed and I am so lucky I had parents to help me out with the costs. After coming home I was able to claim all this money back. It was not an easy process but even so was much better than if I had not had insurance at all.

This is by no means to scare anyone out of travelling, especially solo. It hasn’t put me off and it shouldn’t you, but lets not ignore the fact that bad things can happen when you are travelling. I am no stranger to some interesting experiences along the way and I don’t think there are many people that can surely say that nothing has gone wrong on their trips but it’s how we learn. The most valuable thing I learnt from this is to GET THAT TRAVEL INSURANCE. I am so lucky in so many ways in this situation, even if I had to cut my trip short because of it.