When Your Cabin Mate Gets Sick

One sick person on a liveaboard can turn a trip into a disaster. You see, liveaboards are tight environments where divers and crew can easily and inadvertently share pathogens. Some readers have told us of their problems, so we asked all our readers if they have had to share a cabin or a boat with an unwell person, possibly with a communicable disease? And we heard stories.

If you're traveling solo and assigned to a cabin with someone who is obviously sick, one would think the captain or cruise director would find a solution. But, no such luck for subscriber Maureen Howard (a pseudonym; the subscriber prefers to stay anonymous), who, after taking about 40 liveaboard trips, signed up for a pricey nine-day trip aboard MY. Arenui in Indonesia. Traveling alone, she was assigned a cabin with a woman diver who was a long-time repeat customer of the boat. The first night, Maureen found her projectile vomiting.

"When I took the cruise director aside and asked that the common areas of our room be wiped down because of this, he said, "he'd seen this before and it was jetlag. The next day my cabinmate seemed to have a fever, and I asked her to let me know if she felt she was getting to be contagious. She said it was too late for that. I walked out of our cabin empty handed and didn't go back in for three days. When I finally went in, I held my breath while I retrieved my things."

Maureen wanted to find change cabins and get another bed (the brochure promised a maximum of 16 passengers), the boat carried 19 -- an extra passenger and an additional couple training to be cruise directors.

"I spent the next seven nights sleeping a few hours each night on the deck in a chair until I got chilly and moved down to the restaurant to sleep on a bench for the next few hours. I used the community bathroom, which didn't have a sink or mirror. I brushed my teeth in a glass of water on the back deck each day. When I ran out of clean clothes, I washed them in the shower. My roommate wound up with a single cabin. I wound up camping.

"It was not my cabinmate's fault that she had a contagious virus and didn't leave our cabin for a few days. However, the cruise directors were very attentive to her but did not help me or acknowledge my predicament. All they had to say was 'we understand this is a difficult situation for you but the boat is full and we have nowhere to move you. What can we do to make it better?' But nothing. Surely, it's understandable that I didn't want to get sick too? The other passengers referred to her as Typhoid Mary when she came out into the restaurant area and everyone vanished at the table.

"For 12 hours a day the trip was enjoyable. For the nights for a week it was miserable. If I too had been a repeat customer would I have been treated differently? Perhaps. They were very attentive to my sick cabinmate but seemed to pretend it wasn't a challenging situation for me and left me to fend for myself."

What should have the cruise director done? He should have gone all out to set up a comfortable private sleeping area at night for Maureen's com-fort At a minimum.

Trying to Duck a Norovirus

On the Palau Aggressor several years ago, Ken Hayduck (Angola, IN) was unlucky enough to share a cabin with a passenger who, it was later discovered, was suffering from a norovirus, a highly contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea. The man was feeling very ill and the crew monitored him, thinking it might be DCS; he was finally hospitalized. Hayduck, unaware of the contagion, stuck it out in the cabin, but a couple of days later he went down with similar symptoms. He was lucky to lose only a couple of days diving.

But, one doesn't have to share a cabin to be exposed to illnesses that can curtail diving. Lee Fenner (Cleveland, OH) said he was aboard the Red Sea Aggressor II in August 2018 and two passengers were clearly under the weather. He doesn't know if he caught anything from them but he ended up with explosive diarrhea which took three weeks to subside (once home, a doctor visit) found no trace of parasites or bacteria). Of course, whatever he had could have been picked up anywhere along the way, but nonetheless losing out of diving was at best disappointing.

If you are headed to the Red Sea, note that "Egyptian tummy" is common among visitors. Go into any Egyptian pharmacy and ask for the yellow pills -- they know exactly what you need. They say, "One or two Antinal tablets should set you right within a couple of hours." However, you might be better off carrying Rifaximin, as explained in another article in this issue.

Keep in mind that water abroad may carry bacteria that affects travelers and it's not worth drinking from a bottle that you haven't witnessed the cap seal cap broken. Just as important, understand the middle-eastern way of using a lavatory. The hose provided is used to flush yourself clean; the paper is to dry yourself afterwards. If you drop soiled paper into the bin, keep in mind that the crewmember who has to deal with it probably makes your lunch. Tell the other passengers if the cruise director is too coy to explain.

Facing Embarrassment

Some people have an unusually cast-iron constitution. Mike from Germany says he is still embarrassed by what happened during a trip on Kararu Voyager in Raja Ampat, a couple of years ago. During three days of the trip, a virus ran wild and almost everyone got ill. Everyone that is, apart from his cabin mate, a Dutch photojournalist, who didn't get sick and continued eating and diving. Mike confessed, "One time, he came back from a dive to find me in bed and complained about the smell in the cabin. I still blush to the roots when I remember the story," he wrote, "but what could I do under the circumstances?"

Some people seem just downright unlucky. Jeanne Downey (Baden, PA) tells how shortly after Wakatobi first opened, she and her husband were among several guests who came down with diarrhea and vomiting. They put it down to an infected water supply. A few years later, on the flight to Fiji for a trip aboard Nai'i, she felt herself going down with the flu. Later, at least a third of the passengers and crew were infected, as every day another went down with it

"We also got sick after a two-week trip on the Truk Odyssey. One of the passengers had ended up at the Chuuk Hospital, where he probably picked up a virus. My husband was the first to show symptoms, pink eye, unable to breath, aching, and sore throat. Then two more of us got the worst sore throats we ever experienced. One person [in our group] got sick after getting home and missed two days of work. It was some form of adenovirus."

Traveling divers know that scrupulous personal hygiene is essential on a boat. Some carry hand sanitizers and wash their hands frequently throughout the day. Others avoid anyone who shows the slightest signs of illness. But, nothing may work if a contagious person is clueless. Maureen Howard noted that Typhoid Mary would sneeze into her hand then touch the common areas: the fish id books, the refrigerator/ice machine handle, coffee machine and so forth.

On a dive trip aboard the Bilikiki in the Solomons, she says a woman had a terrible cold. "The afternoon snack was a huge bowl of popcorn. This woman would blow her nose and then reach into the bowl. Three of us watched her and our strategy was to be ahead of her in line for popcorn or for using the buffet utensils and to keep the same coffee mug throughout the trip. The three of us did not touch the stairway banister. Others got her cold. The three of us did not."

We think a well-trained crew should not only do everything possible to accommodate the cabinmate of a sick diver, but also should counsel the ill person on good manners, while doing do their best to isolate him or her, regardless of whether a repeat customer. The good health of everyone else depends upon it.

And, let me add one more piece, not about contagion, but about decision making in the time of illness, as reported by Alan Dean Foster (Arizona) when diving on the Golden Dawn out of Port Moresby, PNG years ago. A diver from Chicago became dizzy, sick to his stomach, and light-headed. A doctor aboard learned he was taking Larium, a powerful malaria prophylactic that can induce strong side effects. This diver, however, was taking a daily tab, when the proper dose is one tablet/week. He was seriously overdosing.

"It was up to the diver whether to cancel his prepaid, difficult-to-arrange trip and go home, or try to stick it out. We were allowed a vote. Even though if he had become seriously ill partway through the trip, resulting in our having to cancel it for all of us, we would have let him stay on board. In the end, he took the very wise decision to give up on the trip and return home . . . . All of us provided our contact information in case he elected to file suit against the prescribing pharmacy...the bottle of Larium clearly said 'Take one a day.'"

What's important to note is that the passengers got a say in what to do. Keep that strategy in mind, fellow divers, if you find yourself in a situation where a passenger may be contagious and the captain or cruise director does not act.

- Ben Davison