Kuala Lumpur, 13-25 Aug
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
My love in front of the Petronus Towers
Kuala Lumpur (Inside the Hospital)
Kuala Lumpur (Outside of the Hospital)
Kuala Lumpur (KL)
So, we think Malaysia is great…’think’ being the operative word. What started off as a Tourist/Medical Tourist trip turned into a hospital stay for wife…ooops!
Not how you want to write a postcard to someone - “Let me tell you about the three days I spent in a hospital in Malaysia”!!!
I'll back up a bit. We haven’t been to see a doctor for regular check-ups since we left the states, like 2 years ago. Well, we saw dentists in Bangkok and then wife developed a Frozen Shoulder earlier this year (our Slug Bug game might have become TOO competitive) and went to see a specialist in Seoul, where she got a bit of relief after some shots and PT. Both places offered excellent healthcare options, btw. The dentist cost about $50 each for check-up, x-rays and cleaning. And the ortho was around $500 for a whole list of stuff including the pain shots - this might have been thousands of bucks back in the states. And we got in to see both docs on the same day we called them - no wait!!!
Well, fast forward to KL, where we’d planned to get routine tests done for quite a while. The medical reputation of some places, like Spain, Thailand and KL, for travelers and expats, are all excellent. The care is on par with anything we’ve seen back home, aside from our Dr. Devy - no docs better than her. We don’t even have a co-pay with her AND we get to freeload at her house AND drink her wine. If she only specialized in OPS (Old-People-Shit) she would be the best of all time. As usual, I digress. BUT, in KL, we planned to get a whole list of stuff done (list below), with some tests that I’ve never even heard of, and all for roughly $500 each. The testing took about an entire day and went great, with us each getting lots of face time with specialists and needle time with their teams. Toward the end of the day, we were ready to leave but opted for two final shots, since we needed updated flu vaccines. This went without a hitch, especially since we’d each been poked and drawn from the whole day, so one more shot was nothing.
Unfortunately, after a few hours, wife’s shoulder started blowing up in pain. We thought it would ease up but it finally got so bad we had to go to the ER around midnight. A night in the ER, some heavy duty pain meds and me turning into a drug mule and we finally made it back to the hotel around 4:00 and a still painfully sleepless night for wife. We didn’t get a real good explanation for what the pain was coming from but they set us up for a specialist appt the next morning (UGH!!!).
We saw the Orthopedic specialist, a nice doc with great credentials but he was wearing bangly Bad Religion jeans so I immediately doubted his judgement on anything. I’m a judgmental asshole, btw. What we thought was going to be a “Take 20 of these and call me on Monday” turned into a “You need to stay with us because we have lots of needles and a cool IV machine and this machine that ices your shoulder at $200 per day” So, she did…for the next three days. And all the things they had helped but it will be some time before she’s carrying her own luggage again (I knew this was a plot against me from the beginning!). It turns out that what happened was that final shot was right on top of her already damaged and inflamed shoulder, so it inflamed and then exploded in pain and needed a lot of that expensive ice machine and the IV magic liquid to make her comfortable again. The 2nd worst part about the whole thing was that our hotel had the LARGEST bed in the entire world and she was stuck in this hospital with a squeaky cot and all of the beeping machines. And I was off by myself in the world’s largest bed having to suffer through room service to get past the loneliness.
Speaking of the large bed, the hotel staff was amazing, but thought I was lying that she was in the hospital and making up some story to get extra free croissants each morning, but when she finally returned and they saw she was in pain still, they treated her like a queen and gave me extra wine for having to deal with her all this time. Love is blind but it’s also thirsty. So then the room service guy, Soman, started leaving her a progressively more complicated and elaborate list of towel animals on that monster bed each day (check out the pics - this guy was a true towel artist, the Donatowello of absorbent art, if you will). At the end of the week, we had every spare towel on the hotel floor, sitting under our TV, like a little towel hoarding hotel petting zoo/drying rack. If there ever was an award to the best room attendant, this guy deserves it. But I really felt bad one day - I was moving the puppy and knocked his little head off and couldn’t reattach it correctly, so he looked a bit detached (haha!) from the rest of his zoo-mates.
What does a one night stay in the KL ER cost, you ask? $125. Seriously. Not a typo. And that's a PRIVATE hospital. Three days in the hospital…about $600 per day. Was there any difference in care than what we have received in the US. Not a bit. The doctors and nurses were all excellent, even with Bad Religion jeans and even if we sometimes had a tough time making out their accent - which was our problem, not theirs. And how was hospital food in KL, you ask? Apparently, hospital food follows the same scale everywhere, so it was hideous but there were a lot of nearby restaurants so I was able to get decent meals, at least (yes, I brought her some, also). So, would we recommend the medical system in KL - absolutely and wholeheartedly YES. Would we recommend getting a shot in the same arm that you recently had issues in - absolutely and wholeheartedly HELL NO!!!
Now, the KL that we finally got to see was really cool. It’s a well run city with beautifully kept streets and buildings, a vibrant expat community, wonderful nightlife (we heard, at least) and fantastic restaurants. SE Asia is lush and green and really beautiful. I walked past these stunning and majestic Rain and Angsana trees every day that just made me happy. A lot of the buildings are architecturally stunning, including the famous Petronas Towers. We were lucky to stay about a five minute walk from the towers and seeing them lit up every night was a treat. I love skyscrapers at night.
Just in case you are curious what we got for our tests, here it is:
(Malaysian Ringgits are roughly 100 to $24.75 USD)
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