As Stephen said when I returned to the hotel, “Now you’ve had the complete Bhutan experience”.

The “experience” started at 8 AM as I headed down the stairs and out to the street alone. Timphu seems to wake up late, so the shops were still locked up tight.

Folks were drying their wash and meat from their balconies. The streets were filled with schoolchildren apparently cramming for a test.

Circling the block was my plan, but there was no short way to do it. I walk back slightly and then turned down a side street and snapped a quick picture of a group of dogs. They apparently took exception to this and charged en mass. One looped around behind me and bit me on the left leg. It was 8:14 in the morning.

I returned to my room and washed the bites. The two small wounds barely broke the skin. Dr. Stephen called Dr. Dhamey. This was our last morning in Timphu so we packed our bags and headed down to the lobby. Lakey, our guide, was waiting and looking very sick. He looked far worse than I felt. He had obviously gotten the message from Dhamey.

Kencho paid the meter maid (shown at the right) for parking, and we are off to the best hospital in Bhutan, the Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital. Lakey checked me in at 9:17, barely an hour after the bite.

Brief forms were filled out, we walked down the hall to a large room with a number of patients, and several staff scrambling around. A physician looked at my leg and took out a sheet of paper and a “dog bite” stamp. He wrote down the schedule for the four remaining rabies shots that I would get back in United States.

We walked to another room where a nurse took much time and care cleaning my two small bites.

 

 

The photos above in the hospital were taken by me with my iPhone. Four of the photos below (without the © Jim Block) were taken by Stephen with his iPhone.

After the swabbing of the wounds, it was off to another room where two nurses administered tetanus and rabies shots. I’m hamming it up for the camera in the left photo below. In the right one I’m trying to be brave.

We departed the hospital at 9:43, 26 minutes after we arrived. I challenge any hospital in the US to do as well. Total cost for the treatment – zero. Medical care in Bhutan is free for everyone, even chilips (foreigners). In fact chilips get special treatment, I am told.

Dhamey wouldn’t let us leave Thimphu without being certain I was okay. So we made the short drive to his house and assured him I would survive. We thanked him for the continued super treatment he gave us during our time in Bhutan, and we headed off to Paro, Tiger’s Nest the following day, and then our flight home.

The timing of the bite was fortuitous. I was near an excellent hospital, and we would arrive home only a dozen hours after my second shot was due. Once home, I picked up four syringes at a local drugstore — Jann had already made arrangements — and took them to my doctor’s office in Norwich.

The four rabies shots would have cost $300 each just for the vaccine-filled syringes if not for prescription coverage which brought the cost down to $41 total for the four shots.

None of this was particularly painful or unpleasant. It was mainly a few hours I won’t forget –- it completed my Bhutan experience.