Quito starts with Quit

I’d read that Quito is a city where backpackers often hang out for longer than they'd planned. One reason is that it’s supposed to be a great place to learn Spanish. Both these things turned out to be true for me, but for an unwanted reason: T’s trip to the emergency room and subsequent 2-week stay in Ecuadorian hospitals. I’ve had almost constant opportunities to practice Spanish, and have learned vocabulary I never thought I’d need. And I can hardly wait to learn the past tense, so I can place all these experiences behind us, where they belong!

On our aborted trip to the equator, I remember passing the Cruz Rojo—Red Cross of Ecuador. Who knew that hours later, T. would be requiring its services? I will forever be grateful to those Ecuadorians who donated blood to someone they would never meet. That’s my abiding memory of Quito: how many people helped us, even when all we wanted to do was get out of there.

For the next 8 days, T’s home became Hospital Eugenio Espejo.

Eugenio Espejo was a satirist, public health scientist, and mestizo politician in the 18th century. There’s a statue of him in Quito, and a painting in the Museo Nacional. Even after T. was transferred to Hospital Metropolitano, the police station opposite is named after Eugenio Espejo. We could not get away from this guy.

Our home had been the Hostel Revolution, but when the private room became unavailable (I couldn’t face any more dorm beds) I moved to another hostel in Old Town. I want to plug the Hostel Revolution, because it was a nice place to stay—I even won a beer in the pub quiz, before all the sh*t started. Afterwards, while T. was in the hospital, I continued to visit the hostel, because Sandra, the Canadian who runs it, let me use her phone and WiFi, and catch up on how T. was doing. 

We were at Eugenio Espejo, three blocks from our hostel, because that’s where the taxi driver took us when T. really started to feel shocked. We found out later that it’s one of the best public hospitals. And, because it was public, there were no forms to fill out or bills to pay. Ecuador’s constitution guarantees that health care is free at the point of service for everyone—even foreign visitors. What an exceptional country.

Bed #3

So I got to concentrate on Spanish and making our story understood in that language. It started in a chaotic lobby where a security guard, realizing that I needed help in English, found Irvin, who spoke a few words. I will always remember Irvin, who was taller than everyone else in the hospital, and possibly in Ecuador. Irvin ran to get a wheelchair, then raced T. to emergency. They started working on her right in the waiting room. Although Eugenio Espejo wasn’t the hospital where she ended up being operated on, they saved her life there.

It isn’t an experience either of us would have chosen, but one certainly learns things about a country from the inside of its health care system(s) that most travelers will never discover. I remember not feeling the stress of the situation until later, because I was concentrating on communication and making sure the necessary things got done. What I mostly remember is the friendliness. In Quito, people always seem to greet each other, even if we’re just strangers getting on or off an elevator. Of course it was in Spanish, but I found it extraordinary for a big city. My friend from Guayaquil reminded me that we come from a European culture, “but you’re in Latin America now.”

I don’t know Inés from Guayaquil. I met her in my Chicago days, that is more than 20 years ago, through our mutual good friend. Now that she lives in Quito, I’d let her know we were coming to Ecuador, because anyone I’m even slightly in touch with knows if we’re coming to their country! But when Inés heard that T. had had an emergency, she phoned me immediately. She showed up at my hostel, she came to the hospital with me and translated. She visited T. on Ash Wednesday when I was feeling too ill to stay at the hospital. In an effort to keep me going, she also showed me the revitalized Old Town street, La Ronda, and canelazo, a hot spiced sugar cane drink that was good for my throat. And later, when our insurance had finally kicked in and we were settled in a nice hotel, she took me to the nearby (free!) Museo Nacional.

Inca quipu, used for communication and last seen on Salkantay Trail in Peru

It was an incredibly difficult time, but it would have been impossible without so many other people. The first medic to whom I could explain things in English was a doctor named Alejandra. She was on duty the morning T. arrived, assured me that night that she would take care of T. while I went to get some sleep, and was in the emergency room when I returned the next morning. When do these young doctors sleep? In a neat twist, when T. was eventually admitted to the other hospital and needed emergency surgery there, the ER doctor asked us if we remembered the “pretty doctor” in emergency at Eugenio Espejo. Of course we remembered Alejandra, who turned out to be his girlfriend, and said to tell us hi!

The nurses rarely spoke any English, but they wore old-fashioned little hats, and one even came around to clip finger- and toenails. (T., whose own stress reactions were somewhat delayed, joked that she was getting a mani-pedi.) “Good night!” one tried greeting us; another asked if we were “brothers.” I knew what she meant; the funny thing is how everyone assumed we must be blood relatives although we look nothing alike. With the doctors, I was explicit about our relationship (or as close as I could get it in Spanish), because I didn’t want any next-of-kin issues. Ecuador is still pretty conservative, but at least homosexuality isn’t illegal anymore.

What really blew people’s minds, though, was T. not having kids. And me not having kids either. In Latin America, having children is the greatest thing in life. Even taxi drivers kept chatting to me long past the limits of my Spanish, expressing their concern about this amiga of mine and how neither of us had kids. Sometimes I invented a husband in London, just to settle them down. (There are female taxi drivers in Quito, but I never had one.)

I remember the security guards who started saying “Hello. Fourth floor” to me in English, or just waving me through. One day the guard at the gate stuck out his hand; I thought he wanted my pass, but he just wanted to shake hands with me. Another guard asked if I had any explosives in my bag, and laughed! It wouldn’t work for the T.S.A., I suppose, but it was his way of being welcoming. 

I remember the nurse on the eve of T’s surgery who spoke only Spanish, but somehow conveyed to T. that she should have “peace in your heart.” I remember the nurses at the other hospital who remarked on her tan lines. Not too long ago, we’d clearly been at la playa, the beach. It was a reminder of better days.

Better times in Cuba!

I remember the woman waiting with her son in emergency, in the cubicle next to T. He looked to be in worse shape than my patient, but his mother kept checking on me, making sure I had a chair to sit in, talking long past my capacity to understand Spanish. I remember the little boys in the supermarket line who spotted a gringa (me) and shyly attempted “Hello,” to see if it would work. “¿Cómo estás?” I asked them, and they said “Bien”! Amazing: it does work, when you’re willing (or desperate enough) to give it a try.

Of course there were challenges. In Spanish, people typically have two last names, an apellido paterno and an apellido materno. I kept telling the staff, but they really struggled with T. having one last name. Sometimes, her middle name came out as her paternal last name.

I benefited from knowing some medical vocabulary in English. I have no idea how the drug ceftriaxone, for example, is pronounced, but I can spell it; and because Spanish is phonetic I knew which drugs medics meant when they said them out loud. I also know what CT stands for and that helped when they wanted to send T. for tomografía. 

They did this at a private clinic whose CT scanner was available, which means we got to ride in an ambulance (not for the last time). 

Edwin from Madrid rode with us, because he knew a few words of English. Mostly “I’m sorry.” The private clinic differed from the hospital in having TV (a Dwayne Johnson movie was playing in the waiting room) and a Coke machine that charged 50 cents! They also had a delay, so T. had to lie in the ambulance, parked at an angle on the sidewalk, for well over half an hour after we got there.

By contrast, the public hospital seemed incredibly well staffed. For one thing, there always seemed to be someone mopping. Some people would probably describe it as socialism, to which I say Bring it on!

They brought whatever gown was clean, not necessarily the correct department.

As I mentioned, I didn’t have to worry about insurance at first, because public health care is free. I understood from someone at the hospital that our insurance had been called and, basically, weren’t paying for anything, happy for T’s care to continue being paid for by Ecuadorian taxes. Since neither of our phones had been working in Ecuador either (first of 29 countries!), I had to chase the insurance by e-mail, and it took several tries to convince them I was T’s next of kin, then to speak to her sister, who was able to reach them by phone in the UK. Eventually, the insurance got T. into a hospital more accustomed to foreigners, where they ended up doing surgery and clearing her to travel on a long-haul flight; but my sister-in-law or I had to check on them constantly, or they would muck up every single step.

I suppose, when so many complicated things are happening, the most important thing is that the surgeon and other medics get it right. And at Hospital Metropolitano, where T. had her operation, they were great. I can’t think of a time when we lacked confidence in the care at either hospital.

Have a Good Day from today's nurses!

The insurance, on the other hand, consisted of a large number of different people, ranging from the completely incompetent (our first liaison in South America couldn’t even reach an Ecuadorian phone number, and complained to us about it) to the usually helpful. Unhappily, we never knew which one might answer when we typed or dialed.

During the two weeks that T. spent in hospitals, I made myself a kind of work schedule, needing the routine to stay healthy and more or less sane. Every morning I walked through the Old Town, with its plethora of churches, to get to Hospital Eugenio Espejo. It’s a beautiful walk (provided it’s daylight and the streets aren’t deserted. Inés said the neighbourhood near El Panecillo used to be off limits, even to quiteños, but the combination of a new mayor and fed-up residents had cleaned it up.)

Winged Virgin, El Panecillo

From Eugenio Espejo I could also look out and see the figure of winged Mary on the hilltop. Lent was coming, but the weekend after T’s admission was a long holiday weekend, as Tuesday was Carnival. It was interesting to see people squirting each other with silly string in the streets, but to me, Carnival represented chiefly a delay.

I’d repeatedly phoned the British Embassy, at the suggestion of Jorge at the hospital (one of the English-speaking doctors). But it was closed, and the London officer to whom I was patched through didn’t seem to know anything. Not when the embassy would reopen, nor what the embassy could do for us (she actually asked me). On Ash Wednesday, when everything finally was open, a pro-consul from the embassy showed up at T’s bedside and was really irritated that her colleagues in London hadn’t called her earlier. She explained that, with a British citizen having been critically ill in Ecuador, the situation should have been escalated, even out of hours. 

It was good to know how helpful the embassy could be once Cat finally was informed. She was in constant contact, came to Eugenio Espejo in person and put doctors from both hospitals in touch, to make sure the transfer happened. This is more than the embassy should typically have to do, but with all the delays and dumbness on the part of the insurance, we were glad to have a professional in Quito on our side.

After all of this, after T. was at the other hospital and had been operated on, the insurance finally started putting me up in hotels. I stayed across the street from the hospital, where there was a terrace with a nice view.

Cat urged me to walk in the park and not just stay in the hospital all through lunchtime. There turned out to be a lovely little park just down the street, which was great when I managed to avoid Quito’s (daily, afternoon) rains.

One day in “Women’s Park” I discovered this monument, which memorializes the Nazi massacre in Lidice, Czechoslovakia.

It’s an interesting story, how this came to be there. In 1943, the year after the destruction of the Czech village, a square in the Mariscal district of Quito was named Plaza Lidice. Over time, though, La Mariscal was developed into what is now the edgy, trendy area of the city (our last hotel was there) and the hub is now called Plaza Foch. Lest Lidice be forgotten, this sculpture was unveiled in north Quito in 2016.

We may not have been nightclubbing with oblivious partiers around Plaza Foch, but at least we were finally comfortable. Having been in room 13 before her surgery (not to mention walking under a ladder, the black cat and a broken mirror—I’m not kidding), T. finished in room 11, which is my favourite number. An English-speaking guy, seeing the famous daypack, asked if the flags represented all the countries we’d been to. I had to say that Ecuador looked like it would be the last. On the other hand, I finally found a decent empanada.

At the end of our stay, when they’d finally booked both me and T. into a hotel with, among other things, an elevator, they got us flights back to England (the long way) on Avianca. I checked the booking online and sure enough, someone (travel agent?) had misspelled T’s first name. Everyone in Ecuador could spell it, but not here, and the airline did what airlines always say they will do and refused to honour a mismatch with the name on the I.D. (passport). Luckily, I am a proofreader, and looked at this the day before, not at the airport on the day! 

After much more back and forth, including someone else at the insurance telling me we needed a form that had been submitted to them, T. was so stressed she was once again convinced she would never get out of Quito. None of this was necessary. The “Fit to Fly” form, signed at the hospital purely for insurance purposes, was never asked for by the airline, just as I suspected it wouldn’t be. The flights we were rebooked on were actually better: KLM straight to Amsterdam, with a stop off in, of all places, Guayaquil! We got back to T’s sister’s place a few hours earlier than we would have, and in business class, which meant we could stretch out flat and T. slept the whole way.

I’d never flown business class before and probably never will again. Apparently, it costs a kidney. T. said it was two for the price of one.

It was interesting to experience a completely different style of travel from backpacking, at the end of our 22 months. Not just the Hotel Reina Isabel (recommended if you can't get into the Hostel Revolution for some reason :-) and business class lounges, but wheelchair assistance for T. She wasn’t up yet for the long walks required through airports, so we had a lot of waiting for various wheelchair assistants to come and help us. For my part, I was glad yet again that we’d packed so light on our travels, because in a pinch, I was just able to heft all the bags!

With Ecuadorian flag added

Even on board the plane, we discovered that our seats were not together. Because insurance had rebooked us only the day before, business class was full, and two window seats were the only ones available. Enter a flying Dutchman who readily agreed with the flight attendant that I should sit next to T., and switched seats for us. And the doctor in front of me who asked about what had happened and if there was anything he could do. And the flight crew, who were so solicitous and brought T. this present before we reached Amsterdam.

I think the larger elephant represents T's African safari, while the smaller Asian elephant is like those we spent time with in rural Thailand.

Our house near London is still rented out until the end of May. It took a lot to make us finish our travels before two years was up, but a life-threatening emergency, followed by surgery in a foreign country, finally convinced us it was time to quit. The middle of the world, Mitad del Mundo, seemed like a good turning point, and by the time we left Ecuador it was also the equinox. Couldn’t have timed our departure better, in the end.

"Speedy recovery"

T. and I said we wanted to go backpacking while we were both healthy and active enough to do it, and we did. We wanted to go to six continents, and we made it. We still love traveling and I know we’ll go on other trips in the future. Just not for 22 months at a time.

As Inés said, "life is not just about fun moments but all moments in which we can care for each other!"

It wasn't all bad!