My battle with air born allergies continues. A week ago Tuesday, I went to the Ayuervedic day clinic in Kundasalle. There is a big institute there as well as a hospital. I had heard about the place but have never had cause to go. After struggling far too long with severe "colds", I finally decided that I had to see a doctor. Needless to say, I was not interested in seeing an allopathic doctor as all they do, especially here, is write prescriptions for antibiotics. So I put the word out to my book club for a good Ayuerved. What came back was the institute in Kundasalle.
My next problem was how to get there. Of course, I could take a tuktuk, but it is quite a distance from my place and I was already feeling like crap. 45 minutes in a tuktuk was not going to help. As I lay in bed thinking about it, I got a call from my friend Tamami saying she wanted to go out there and she would pick me up with her car. Then a call from Clare saying that she had been there and we really needed an interpreter but that Yoshitha had volunteered to do that. So arrangements were made and Tamami, Yoshitha and I headed out there.
After getting a little bit lost even after asking a gaggle of policemen on their way to work at the prison, we found the place. It was crowded, but not chaotic like all the "channelling" centres where you have to go here to see a regular doctor. Thank god for Yoshitha. She befriended a security lady who got us in the right line to get a number. That did not take long. The reception referred us to room 4 but the security lady said that there was not real need to go to the room they assigned and just to look for the fastest moving line. We did just that and after just 1 hour, we were in with the doctor. God only knows that you can wait longer than that in a doctor's office in Canada even with an appointment.
Both Yoshitha and I had issues. The doctor spent an hour with the two of us. As Yoshitha was consulting her, I was watching the other two doctors in the consulting room. They too were paying close attention to their patients and not rushing to get them out the door after writing them a prescription. After intense questioning, taking my blood pressure (they seem to believe that everything here is due to high blood pressure) and listening to my heart and lungs, the doctor wrote out a course of action. She prescribed two things that would get to the cause of the problem and two things that would relieve symptoms. She also advised me what to eat and not, when and how to take a shower, when and how to protect my head and ears.
Then it was off to the dispensary to get our stuff. The queue for the dispensary was truly crazy plus, the doctor had written just enough to last us one day as all the services, including the medications are free. Yoshitha and I decided to go to Bowata, the big ayurvedic pharmacy in town. And so we did. There is an ayuerved on duty there as well who was very helpful to me to sort everything as it was all written in Sinhala. Of course, I had written down what the doctor at the clinic had said, but I had to match it to the liquid, oil, powder, paste and tablets that I was getting. Everything in the end cost me LKR.430, about C$4.
I finished the acute cure stuff on Tuesday, 7 days after I saw the doctor, and lo and behold, I am feeling almost back to 100%. I stopped using the symptom relievers as the symptoms subsided. I am continuing with a longer term preventative until my immune system can cope with all the air pollution.
I can't say enough good things about the clinic. Needless to say, Tamami and I were the only foreigners in sight. Yoshitha told me afterwards that the doctor was thrilled to have seen me as I was the first foreigner she had ever treated.
The precinct of the institute, hospital, day clinic and administrative offices is beautiful. They have extensive gardens where they grow their own ayuervdic herbs. Later my friend Billy told me that here mother in law was treated in the hospital with very good results. Should I ever need hospitalization for anything other than a broken limb or surgery, I am going to that place. They even have ambulance service. Thank you government of Sri Lanka.
The other big news is that my visa is settled. After submitting the second application, the department admitted that they had been in the wrong and issued the visa on the spot. I didn't even have to go to Colombo. So I am good for another 2 years until November 2017. Hooray!
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