Acute Mountain Sickness

We piled out of the hotel on our tour bus headed for dinner when Roger asked where Bob was. No one had seen him and Bob hadn’t left any message about not joining us for dinner. With that, Roger went back into the hotel to ring his room. To make a three-day story short, they had to break down Bob’s hotel room door, and found him unconscious.

Bob spent a week in the Lhasa hospital with both Cerebral and Pulmonary Edema caused by Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), and then had to be medivac’d by special jet to Singapore once he was stabilized. TRAVEL INSURANCE!

Keep in mind that Bob was in excellent condition. He was a biker, in good health but AMS can strike anyone. There are several important precautions everyone should take to avoid Acute Mountain Sickness:

- Drink lots of water. The thin, dry air wicks away moisture as you breathe.

- Don’t use sleeping pills or other sedatives. They tend to decrease breathing and may lead to AMS.

- Don’t drink alcohol or smoke at high altitudes.

Bob’s incident certainly scared the daylights out of us! Before heading out of Lhasa, Roger stopped by the hospital to check on him each morning. The medical personnel took excellent care of Bob but, trust me, you would not want to be in a hospital in Lhasa. It was a typical third-world hospital, overcrowded, people sleeping in corridors, and long lines of patients waiting outside to be seen by a doctor. And the procedure to even get someone medivac’d out of a country is very labor intensive. It requires 24-48 hours of telephone calls between doctors, insurance companies, Washington, DC, family back home – to move forward. It was too risky to try getting Bob out of the country until his condition stabilized.