DAVE’S NIGHT OUT
This is a story about a near-fatal case of food poisoning. But before telling you about that, you should know why Dave, or any of us, would ever have chosen to eat out in our town. My family lived in Al Khobar Saudi Arabia for six years through the mid-1980s. We lived in an apartment building along with other King Faisal University faculty.
Al Khobar is small town on the Arabian/Persian Gulf that was established by the Saudi Government to isolate foreign influence from the Saudi Society. The population of Al Khobar had three components. The first were the male laborers from Arabic and Southeastern Asian countries. The second component of the population was families of professionals who were there as administrators, technicians, and teachers. The third component was Saudi families who provided the services to make it a functional town.
The members of the labor force were not allowed to bring their families with them to Saudi Arabia. Most of them lived in company housing. Their meals were provided at a company commissary. Consequently these men didn’t have access to meals from their culture. To satisfy this need, small ethnic restaurants were established each serving delicious authentic food of India, Thailand, Korea, India or Turkey. The only place to go for an American meal was the Al-Ghozibi Hotel. Meals there cost twice as much as at one of the ethnic restaurants. The ethnic restaurants were popular with the adventurous members of the expat community. The only limitation was that women were not allowed unless the place had a “family room” where women could be separated from male diners. This story is about the consequence of Dave’s meal at one such ethnic restaurant.
There were no emergency services, like 911, in Al Khobar. Consequently, if a person needed emergency transportation to the local hospital, they had to rely on friends.
One evening Dave called Mark, his closest friend, to say that he needed help. When Mark saw how sick Dave was he phoned me. I ran downstairs to Dave’s apartment. When I entered, Dave was sitting on the floor slumped against the wall. He was barely conscious and too weak to get up. He mumbled that he had eaten out at a local ethnic restaurant. He had become sick with vomiting and diarrhea, soon after. Mark had tried to give him water. But Dave could not hold it down. We had to get him to the hospital. Mark and I lifted Dave to his feet. Then with Mark on one side and me on the other, we walked Dave to the elevator and down to Mark’s car. Mark took Dave to the emergency room. Knowing how long one may have to wait in the Khobar ER, I drove directly to the apartment of our friends, Doctors Timur and Nilufur Sumer. They were also on the faculty at KFU. The Sumer family had joined us on several of Dave’s trips into the desert. They lived in the gated KFU medical compound. My hope was that Dr. Summer would go to the hospital with me and make sure that Dave would get immediate and appropriate treatment. I explained to the guard, at the compound gate, that there was a medical emergency at the hospital and an urgent need for Dr. Sumer to be there. The guard naturally assumed that I was referring to the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Timur Sumer. However, Timur was out of The Kingdom. It was his wife, Dr. Nilufur, Sumer, for whom I had come. I told Nilufur of Dave’s condition. And that Mark was taking him to the ER. Nilufur quickly put on her white jacket. We ran to my car and drove to the compound exit. I had not given a thought to the fact that In Saudi Arabia, a woman could not ride in a car with anyone but her immediate family.
The guard had obligingly opened the rolling steel gate so that we could drive through without stopping. As I drew near to the gate he saw that it was Nilufur in the car with me. He shouted for me to stop. I knew that if I stopped we would never leave the compound. He activated the switch to close the slow-moving gate. I slammed the accelerator to the floor and made it through the gate before it blocked our path.
At the hospital, we found that the ER staff had recognized the seriousness of Dave’s condition. He had been taken to a treatment room and was already on a saline IV drip. The staff conferred with Nilufur in Arabic. She then explained to Mark and me, that Dave was seriously dehydrated. His blood had been so thick that they could not draw it through their largest gauge syringe needle. He was near death of coronary system collapse when he arrived.
It was soon after this that there was a clambering in the corridor. It was the police. They had come to arrest driver of the Toyota Land Cruiser, for transporting a female who was not a member of his family and for ignoring the compound guard’s orders to stop. These are serious offenses in Saudi Arabia. I was on my way to the notorious Al Khobar jail. There are no lawyers in the Kingdom for such matters. Once in jail, it would take days or even weeks before an act of the US consular general or the chancellor of the university could get me out. Nilufer and a nurse blocked the doorway so the police could not enter. They engaged the police in a long and intense conversation in Arabic. They argued that since Nilufur is a Doctor and it had been a medical emergency, and since I had delivered her directly to the hospital, they should not press charges. Another factor they must have considered is that one of the fundamental mores of the Saudi culture is that one is expected to do everything possible to help a friend. The officers recognized that I had been willing to risk going to jail in order to save the life of my friend. They eventually acquiesced and left without me. The emergency was over. Dave was still groggy but coming around. Assured that he would be okay, we left him to spend the night in the hospital. The hospital provided appropriate transportation for Nilufur to return to her apartment. By the morning Dave had recovered sufficiently for Mark to bring him home.
Copyright October 2022 by Theodore “Tod” Lundy, Architect