bryan, one of my best friends from college and a groomsman in our wedding last august, left N. America for the first time to come visit chris and i in thailand. he arrived last friday and we did some standard chiang mai tourist stuff (seeing lots of wats, walking around the old city, shopping at Warorot Market, and hanging out by the Ping River) for a few days. Mostly it was just me and bryan hanging out because chris was recovering from Giardia (more on this below).
one of my fave parts of the wat circuit again was being able to have a short chat with a monk at Wat Prathat Doi Suthep. bryan had read some of this book i picked up there last time (karma for today's traveler) and we'd had some discussions about buddhism before we went to the temple. one question bryan had was why (according to buddhism) you would have to suffer the consequences of some bad thing you did in a past life when it wasn't really you that had done it, and i think the monk did a good job of answering the question by talking about his concept of 'self' and the buddhist concept of rebirth. he also gave a great analogy for karma, comparing it to salt water. in this analogy, salt represents bad karma and water represents good karma. some people have really salty water to begin with but can add water (by doing good deeds) to make it less salty. alternatively, you can also make pretty clean water more salty by adding salt (bad deeds). because your sins can't really be forgiven in buddhism (or 'cleaned' away), all you can do is "shift the balance of the compartments" by adding either salt or water (and it's your choice). it may take a long time to see a difference though - like the monk said, you can't expect to shift your balance overnight if you've been doing bad things (or have really salty water) with just a few drops of good.
Giardia story:
I always make fun of Chris for his stomach being "weaksauce" in Asia. Thus it came as no surprise that Chris got his first parasite in Thailand (he figured it was from some of the stream water at Jae Sorn Park where we went camping a few weeks ago). i took him to the hospital sunday to get some blood drawn because he had been having diarrhea all night and had just finished a 5-day course of Cipro that i had bought him with not much improvement. we didn't have to wait very long and first met with a cardiologist (staffing the internal med outpatient clinic in the AM) who took his history, did an abdominal exam, and ordered labs. she was later called to the cath lab so we went over the lab results with a GI doc who was called in to take over clinic. i was able to look at chris's labs before we saw the doc again and it was much as i expected - he was dehydrated (Hb 17) and his white count wasn't elevated, but there was a left shift. His stool sample was also positive for occult blood. the GI doc was pumped that i was a medical student and could speak thai, and said that he was going to prescribe an antibiotic for chris. i was like, hello, he already took cipro for 5 days and it hasn't gotten better. he suggested taking a 7-day course of cipro (for traveler's diarrhea) and then i was like, well, i was just going to start giving him flagyl. he agreed with my plan and said that if chris didn't get better in a few weeks he should come back so they could send his stool for O&P. i was like, who wants to have (bad) diarrhea for weeks? we ended up just buying flagyl and now chris is better. i thought to myself, hey, i might not be such a bad doc after all. :)
although chris is better now, he originally flipped out on me after he read this forum about all the nasty side effects people had after taking flagyl. he woke me up after taking one dose to discuss his concerns. i was like, 1) is it good to trust everything on the internet? and 2) is my husband one of those problem patients? after talking to him about it (and a few days of him realizing he didn't have any side effects), he decided that he would rather take flagyl than having diarrhea for another month.
Mae Hong Son:
With Chris mostly recovered from his bout of Giardia, we decided to fly out to Mae Hong Son for a few days since we'd never been there before and Bryan wanted to see the mountains. After checking out one nasty guesthouse, we gave in to our snobbiness and got two rooms at a hotel in town (clean sheets, air conditioning, private bath with hot water, breakfast = 800 baht a night, or around $20). I also booked a private car with a driver from a local cafe to take us around for the next day. The car ended up being a comfortable Ford truck and the driver/guide took us around to a lot of the local sites, which included temples, a fish cave, hilltribe and minority villages, and more. I'll post pics and info tomorrow!
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