The Insulin Express Read online

  With the exception of the two people we met in the night market two nights ago, we know absolutely no one here, and yet we have committed to spending the entire evening with them, given the importance of the occasion.

  We go around the table, introducing ourselves in English so that everyone can understand, before we immediately abandon niceties and conduct the rest of the night entirely in Hebrew.

  One of the most important items in the course of a Passover seder is the Haggadah, which is the book that contains the order of the meal and the story of the Exodus. Naturally, no one brought one. Everyone has been backpacking as long as us, and a weighty book that only serves a purpose on one night of the year did not make anyone’s packing list.

  Someone manages to load the Haggadah on an iPhone—a not insignificant feat given the lack of reliable Wi-Fi—and we pass the phone among the Hebrew speakers who each read parts of the story.

  Halfway through the meal, a German backpacker sits in the corner next to us, watching our meal while liberally taking hits from his bong.

  “Now it’s like home,” shouts the guy we met in the market. “Except it’s this guy smoking instead of Grandpa!”

  Since nobody at the hostel is about to whip up a meal for fifteen people, we figure it would be easier to grab street food. After we make it through the story of Passover, we all go out to eat together. I know I will probably never see these people again, but for one night we are our own bizarre little family.

  The Passover seder is a perfect way to end our time in Laos, especially since the beginning of our time here almost made me call off the rest of the trip.

  When we first arrived in Laos, our hostel owner gave us a city map and showed us where to find food in a small alley right off the night market that he cleverly labeled “Food” on the map.

  We found the food alley and ducked inside. Overflowing bowls of seasoned vegetables and rice, flavored with different spices, filled long picnic tables on one side of the tent-covered street. Chairs crammed together around small tables filled the other side, allowing us about eighteen inches of space to make our way down the alley. Most vendors served only vegetarian meals. The ordering process was simple. You paid for a plate, then filled that plate with as much food as you could for a flat fee. The plate cost ten thousand Lao kip, which worked out to $1.25. A few stands had skewered fish or chicken for a few extra dollars. Nothing there appeared to have been prepared within the last twenty-four hours, but we didn’t complain, since we were eating only vegetarian, and it was quite delicious. I had broccoli with red seasoning and some broccoli with green seasoning, along with a side of broccoli with yellow seasoning.

  My stomach held together for all of about twelve hours.

  At breakfast the next morning, I picked at the oranges and eggs.

  “Are you okay? You don’t look great,” Cassie said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, before bolting upstairs and throwing up in the bathroom. I didn’t know if it was the food or the malaria medication that we had just started taking, but I was out. Down for the count. I tried to eat a banana and drink some water. That came up too.

  Normally, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal that I wasn’t able to hold down food for a day or two. But it’s a big problem for people with diabetes. A very big problem. If I can’t eat, I can’t keep my blood sugar up, which puts me in danger of passing out in a country whose medical facilities are probably far closer to Nepal’s than I’d like to imagine.

  I spent two days in bed while Cassie looked up medical advice and emailed doctors back home.

  For the first time since we started traveling again a few weeks ago, I seriously questioned my decision to get back on the road. I didn’t have a particularly good handle on my disease yet, and reliable medical help was very, very far away. Once again, I felt stranded. I couldn’t hold back the tears of self-doubt. I cried for a few minutes, collected myself, then cried again. As I lay in bed, trying to feel better—or at the very least, less worse—I kept hearing my dad’s words.

  “At your age, everything should be working. If something isn’t working or you don’t feel good, come home.”

  He was right before, and he was probably right again. Everything should be working. Except something wasn’t working, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

  For two months, I had refused to acknowledge the obvious signs that something was wrong with my system. Now I knew exactly what was wrong, and yet I found myself again trying to convince myself that I was okay. It was déjà vu at its absolute worst.

  I tested my blood sugar over and over again, worried that it would drop into the 50s and below. It came back in the 70s. It was a far cry from keeping my blood sugars in the 120 to 150 range. We had the Glucagon shot if my blood sugar dropped dangerously low, but to use it that early in the trip would have been to admit defeat. It would have meant packing our bags and going home. I could already hear my mom and dad lecturing me. This time, there would be no arguing, because they would have been 100 percent right. Maybe I should’ve stayed home. Maybe I should’ve called off the rest of the trip. Maybe I should’ve found a job and returned to a normal routine. Maybe I was wrong … again.

  I nibbled on granola bars, afraid of taking more than only the smallest bits to avoid upsetting my stomach. Cassie gave me probiotics to see if they would help.

  Gradually, I stopped feeling like shit. I could hold down a bit of food, then a few bites, then a full meal. It took nearly three days to recover, and I still felt a bit weak from not eating, but at least I was back where I needed to be. I promised myself this would be the last time I ever shed a tear over diabetes.

  My blood sugars were where they needed to be, my stomach wasn’t stamping every bit of food with the words “RETURN TO SENDER,” and we were on the move once again.

  And it felt awesome.

  Chapter 16

  April 22, 2014

  11°34’14.4”N 104°55’47.5”E

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  I never see the bastards coming. There are two—one driving the motorbike and the other sitting behind him. The second guy is the thief. The first is the getaway driver. Their target is a small pouch sticking about two inches out of my left cargo pocket. I’m sure they think it has money since, somehow, I doubt they realize that no tourist would have his billfold hanging out of his pocket. Inside the pouch that I got from Etihad Airways on my way home after my diagnosis are my diabetic supplies: my blood sugar monitor, test strips, and about a third of an insulin pen. The red plaid pouch scores far more points for functionality than style.

  They yank the pouch from my pocket as Cassie and I are walking to dinner along the river in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. They make a left and speed off. I immediately start sprinting after them, running full speed for about fifty meters, adrenaline pumping through my veins. Without my diabetes supplies, I am left guessing at my blood sugar. My glucose monitor is the single most important piece of equipment for me to control my diabetes. I cannot imagine a life without it because there is no life without it.

  I keep them in sight, but I’m not exactly closing the gap. It’s not that I’m slow. Quite the contrary. I was the fastest Jew in my high school, which almost means something since my high school was 40 percent Jewish. I even earned the nickname Jewish Lightning back then. But Usain Boltstein I am not.

  I flag down a car and yell at the driver, “Follow that bike!” When the driver speeds off without me, the fruitlessness of the situation dawns on me pretty quickly. Cassie has the presence of mind to flag down a passing motorbike right after I get pickpocketed, and she hops on and puts up chase. As she passes me, she gleans as much information as she can from me.

  “What was their license plate number?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “What were they wearing?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I don’t know!”

  I always thought I would be so astute if someone s
ucceeded in pickpocketing me. I would know within seconds that something was missing, and I would immediately create a list of suspects from all of the people I had seen within the last few minutes. I would recognize their faces, their clothes, and any distinguishing features. I would pick up on the curly dark hair, the small tattoo of a coiled snake on the back of the neck, the white unlaced shoes, the stained jeans. The suspect would be caught within hours, facing justice and the prosecution I would press to the fullest extent.

  None of that happened. I couldn’t remember even a single detail. There were two young men on a bike. They looked Asian. And I can’t even be sure about that. That’s all I’ve got, and that’s probably not enough to launch a police investigation. I had made it through all of Europe’s pickpocket danger zones: Paris, Rome, etc. And I get tagged in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

  Phnom freakin’ Penh.

  I look up and down the street, struggling to catch my breath after my impromptu sprint. To go up the street is to pursue the captors of my supplies, and even I realize how pointless that is; to go down the street is to admit defeat. I was enjoying the relatively cool night air, but now I am sweating again, and not just from exertion. I had never planned for this contingency, never thought there was any way I would let anyone or anything separate me from my monitor. Without my supplies, my heart beats a little faster and my breaths become a little shorter. I was hoping the punks would open the pouch, realize there was no money inside, and throw it to the street, but they aren’t kind enough to do that. Instead, Cassie and I shift quickly from the burning desire for vengeance to the pressing need to find a way to keep track of my blood sugar.

  We grab a tuk-tuk and go to a couple of pharmacies before we find one that has a blood sugar monitor and test strips. Not the OneTouch device that I had, but a cheap generic brand that seems to work well enough. It costs us forty-two dollars. We spend another twelve dollars on fifty test strips.

  Cassie and I come up with a simple plan. Get enough test strips for my replacement device to get me to Hong Kong (about two weeks away), and there I can buy a new OneTouch blood sugar monitor since I’m carrying hundreds of OneTouch test strips. Watson’s Pharmacy, one of the biggest chains in Hong Kong, responds very quickly to my customer service email and includes a list of all the OneTouch supplies they carry, which is fantastic. That will be our first stop when we get to Hong Kong.

  When we arrive back to our guest house, Cassie explains to the receptionist what happened, while I figure out how to use my new blood sugar monitor, which happens to be quite a bit bigger and bulkier than my old one. The receptionist is so upset she almost starts crying. I find that odd, since I’m the one with the chronic disease, but I will not be the one to ruin this emotional moment.

  We try to comfort her, reassuring her that we don’t hold it against her or Cambodia. Quite the contrary. We’ve had an incredible time in her country, and this little incident won’t change our opinion.

  We spend a day exploring the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the center of the city. In a very real and heartbreaking way, the Killing Fields represent the Cambodian Holocaust, except the mass slaughter didn’t target outsiders, though anyone with a connection to a foreign government or ethnicity was also killed. The slaughter targeted Cambodians. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot massacred somewhere between one and four million of his own people in the Cold War era. Walking around the Killing Fields is hauntingly similar to walking around Auschwitz. The voices of the dead cry out to you. Here, there are fewer pictures than at Auschwitz, and all of the torture buildings and prisons that once stood here have been demolished. Instead, fragments of bone jut out of the ground, reminding you of the crimes that took place in these fields. We were warned to look out for bones, especially after a storm, since rain can wash away the top layer of soil and reveal another layer of human remains.

  Very often, when Jews speak of the Holocaust, they say “Never Again.” Yet it did happen again—maybe not to the Jews, but the systematic slaughter of an entire population took place less than forty years later. The world had not learned its lesson. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge government held on to the Cambodian seat at the United Nations until 1993, long after the world knew what happened at the Killing Fields.

  To summarize my feelings while learning about this part of history, allow me to quote my favorite author, Douglas Adams, from Last Chance to See: “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

  Before coming to the Cambodian capital, Cassie and I spent most of a week in Angkor, visiting the country’s most popular tourist sites and marveling at massive stone temples that date back some 1,200 years. The centerpiece of Angkor is Angkor Wat, meaning “Temple City” in Khmer, the native Cambodian language. Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world, covering 1.6 million square meters. Originally built as a Hindu temple in the early twelfth century, it eventually became a Buddhist temple. Today, Angkor Wat draws in more than two million visitors a year, and I think most of them were there on the day we went.

  We wake up early to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat, meeting our tuk-tuk driver at 4:15 in the morning outside our hostel. Tuk-tuks are motorbikes connected to a few seats on wheels, and they serve as cabs in most of Southeast Asia. We are among the first at the temple, and we plant ourselves right next to a small, mosquito-infested pond so that only someone willing to risk malaria will stand in front of us. Then we wait.

  Within thirty minutes of our arrival, thousands of tourists are standing around us, filling in every available space with tripods and cameras. Moving is not an option. To give up a spot here is to never return.

  The first hints of sunrise come as the sky lightens from black to dark gray to deep blue. Faint oranges seep in at the edges, gradually painting the sky in bright pastels. When the sun creeps above the temple, rays of light burst forward, and the entire sky ignites into a fiery, bright orange. It is absolutely spectacular, and worth every moment of waiting.

  From there, we spend the day exploring Angkor’s other temples. What’s amazing about many of the temples is that you can climb all over them. Very few have any restrictions, and there are no guards or warning signs telling you what to do or where to go. (Angkor Wat has quite a few restrictions, but it’s also the most visited, largest, and most famous temple.) The jungle has consumed many of the temples, adding a dark, haunting beauty to the atmosphere. Massive trees grow out of stone towers, the roots snaking their way through cracks and crevasses in stones. One tree has even grown around a stone doorway, giving the distinct impression that centuries passed here without any form of human intervention. If New York City were left alone for enough generations, it would look like a modern version of Angkor, consumed by the wilderness into which it was carved.

  One of the most famous temples we visit is called Ta Prohm, better known as the scene of one of the Tomb Raider movies, and it is here that we interrupt our story for a moment. Aside from being an incredible temple set deep inside the jungle, Ta Prohm has what creationists claim is undeniable and incontrovertible evidence that evolution is an outright lie and the earth is only a few thousand years old, not the silly 4.5 billion years that every respectable scientist on earth believes. This proof comes in the form of a three-inch carving that looks quite a bit like a stegosaurus.

  I have to admit, I didn’t see the stegosaurus when we visited the temple because I didn’t know it existed until later. But this seems like the kind of off-kilter story that fits right into this book. Had I known about it, I probably would’ve swapped out the entire diabetes section of this book with a few chapters on this mythical, history-changing, science-crushing, fact-obliterating dinosaur engraving. Why anyone would offer such proof at a Cambodian temple deep within the woods, as opposed to, say, a populated area that can be easily spotted from any direction, has never been made clear.

  For those who do
n’t know or have briefly forgotten, stegosaurus was the dinosaur that no one really liked. It was an herbivorous dinosaur that walked on all fours, had protective plates sticking straight up out of its back and running along its spine, and had sharp spikes protruding from its tail. This last bit is about the only cool thing about it. It wasn’t as ferocious as a tyrannosaurus rex or as big as a brachiosaurus. Stegosaurus ate low-lying shrubs and bushes, had a very small brain, and lived in what is now the United States and Portugal, when the two were smashed together on earth’s one mega-continent a few million years ago.

  The stegosaurus carving is near one of the many doorways at Ta Prohm, about five feet off the ground, surrounded by intricate portrayals of other animals, decorations, and vegetation. By general consensus, it is not a fake. Back when Ta Prohm was being built sometime in the late twelfth century, its builders carved a stegosaurus into its facade.

  “Aha!” says the skeptical sleuth. He mulls his evidence over once again before proclaiming it to the world, making sure it all checks out.

  “Aha!” he repeats. “If people who built this a few hundred years ago knew what a stegosaurus looked like and how to carve one, then dinosaurs must have been around a few hundred years ago. The artist must have seen a stegosaurus in person!”

  He pauses a moment, collecting his thoughts and making sure they are in all order before proceeding to the grand crescendo.

  “And if dinosaurs were around a few hundred years ago, then clearly evolution is a lie, fossils are fake, and creationism is the only plausible explanation.” He concludes his argument, cooing loudly to show his self-satisfaction to the world, clearly unable to detect his own putrid nonsense. There are a number of websites that support this exact argument, though I will not, for your sake, point you to any of them. Suffice it to say that the Internet isn’t always right.