🎼This Is the Worst Trip I’ve Ever Been On 🎶

(A Lengthy Vacation Post-Mortem)

In early April my wife and I took Viking River Cruises’ “Rhine Getaway” from Amsterdam to Basel. It was our first cruise, but I was sick in bed. I re-listened to The Beach Boys “The Sloop John B.” — “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on” — and re-read David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”; both highlighting the horrors of cruises. “So true,” I murmured to myself. “So true.”

My right hand had become badly infected during the long flight from the US. A doctor in Amsterdam examined my hand and gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and we boarded the Viking Ullur for our river cruise.

My hand was quite painful and I had no strength. There was no ship’s doctor and few medical supplies: no oral meds, no arm slings. Even so, I’d just seen the doctor in Amsterdam and I was still taking the antibiotics. I stayed in bed for days, waiting for the antibiotics to work.

Fast-forward a few days more. I was still in bed, feeling worse and worse. I needed to find a doctor again. I told the Front Desk, who said they could certainly call me a taxi. Great, but where to? The boat was in different places every day, docking for varying intervals. Planning for the future seemed impossible.

I’d found my doctor in Amsterdam online, but the boat’s Internet connectivity was too poor to learn much here. One day, well before dawn, I finally dialed the emergency number 112 and learned that the nearest Emergency Department would be just a twelve-minute walk from that day’s berth in Kehl, Germany! At last!

But would the boat would still be in Kehl when I returned? Maybe not. I could take trains to catch up, staying in hotels overnight, but maybe not. For safety, I took an overnight bag with me, with two days’ clothes.

But thankfully, after I underwent a little hand surgery in Kehl and received some antibiotic refills, I found the boat was still there! The hospital in Kehl had wanted me to return the next day for more work, but of course I’d be somewhere else.

I felt better after Kehl, then worse again at home. My bones were infected and I’d developed sepsis. I’m still on much stronger IV antibiotics until June.

“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” — The Beach Boys, “The Sloop John B.” (1966)

Here are some things I did wrong:

• I didn’t plan ahead for my hand infection. (I couldn’t have.)

• We underestimated the severity of my infection. The antibiotics from Amsterdam were inadequate and I kept getting worse.

• I had trouble finding medical care and supplies along the way. If I’d bought an all-inclusive medical plan, maybe they could direct my search, other than just offer a taxi.

Here are some things that Viking did wrong.

• Cruises isolate you. You can’t just walk around town looking for a doctor or an apothecary; you can’t always search for care online. I later read Viking’s Health & Safety Program — “guests can seek medical guidance via a 24/7 hotline staffed by doctors ashore” — but I saw nothing like this.

• Bad network connectivity isolates you too, more than you might imagine.

• The boat was ill-equipped for any illness. There were no slings on the boat; there had been, I was told, but not any more. I never found slings in local apothecaries either; maybe Viking could offer shopping advice.

• I learned at the end that the crew could have delivered room service while I was bedridden. I had no idea this was possible.

• The crew each had very specific jobs to do, with little freedom to improvise. Offering to call a taxi was really not enough, no matter how often it’s repeated.

• As I left, I offered one of the boat’s Directors an oral summary of my problems, hoping to help Viking in the future — but he wanted only to know whether they hadn’t done their very specific jobs, which I really couldn’t judge. I do know this was a very bad outcome, and I’d like to think it was preventable.