If Seabourn is the top cruise line in the world, and the Pride her finest yacht, there is one dark spot (I know) in the entire business of luxury cruising: gastrointestinal illness. At our first dinner in the main dining room, the woman beside me mentioned that she and her husband had been terribly ill. They looked it. I wondered why the doctor had not suggested they dine in their cabin until recovered, but assumed they had been seen by him or her. I never actually met the doctor in a professional capacity.
Both Linda and I felt pretty good until the last two days of the cruise, when I became wretchedly ill during the night. I attributed it to an extremely spicy Thai soup I’d eaten, as Linda did not have the soup and did not fall ill.
On the other hand, there were some small fruits in the cabin, with which I was not familiar, but they might have been dragon eye. I ate them and Linda did not. Whatever the source, I was not willing (even if possibly able) to go up to the doctor’s office which was open for an hour or two in the mornings. One of the requirements on a cruise is that if you get gastrointestinal illness you inform the medical office, so Linda called. The woman who answered told her I could come to the medical office. When told I could not get out of bed she said someone would call back. But nobody did. A possible reason for that is that it avoided the reporting requirements.
It wasn’t until we were gathered to disembark that I realized several of my fellow passengers had also been very ill at the same time I was, and that none of us realized the extent of the problem. The reason we didn’t was that there was no apparent effort to inform us, or to isolate the cause of the illness. Nobody asked what I had eaten that Linda did not, for example. It is also possible that it was a virus already identified, so that there was no point in investigating for a source. There was no information disseminated, though there were expressions of concern from the staff who knew I was ill.
This seemed like a strange turn of events for a cruise where you sometimes cannot go to the main dining room without black tie and tails, and where someone takes your plate for you from the buffet to the table in the casual dining room. All of that decorum, and polish, and emphasis on the same level of service as the finest hotels, and yet when there was a problem it seemed to be pretty much ignored by the medical staff.
The intensity of the illness didn’t last all that long, but there was an aftermath of no appetite and weakness. I recall the Captain coming on the intercom while I was in the throes of it, to give us an update on location and so on. When he did this he always gave us some nautical term and where it originated, I suppose to be affable. His word of the day was groggy, and he related how grog was watered down rum, and if you drank too much you got sick, or groggy. Hmmm. Was that a suggestion?
My ordeal did point out the problem with cruises: even though the incidence of gastrointestinal virus on board has declined, it isn’t uncommon, still, to have illness spread through the ship. A good reason for covering it up is that a ship can be refused permission to dock if it has a large portion of the passengers down with illness. That is news, and a public relations problem for the corporation.
We were thankful that it hit only one of us, and at the end of the trip. Linda tends to have an immune system that is hard to crack, but she ended up with a lighter version of it when we got back home. What we noticed, and wondered about in retrospect, was that the chef went to the local market in Saigon to lay in supplies, including, I assume, fresh produce. We had been advised to not drink anything that didn’t come in a can or bottle, so there was some concern about bacteria in the water. I’m not sure buying locally was a good idea. But then again, if the ship’s doctor didn’t care enough to find out what was making people sick, or send somebody down with some medicine, I was left with speculation.
My guess is that Seabourn provided a free cruise to a doctor in return for services, and got exactly what they paid for. On the other hand, he might have been in his cabin where a demon god was taking a blowtorch to his ass.