A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: Tripoli, Libya (November 2006), Part Five A

Victor Davis Hanson

By 1996, I had settled down to an academic life, if teaching four and five courses a semester seemed a normal scholarly career. I puttered rather than worked with my siblings on the farm and turned my attention to my great-great-grandmother’s house that was falling apart.

We had no money, but I had a salary and did (shoddily) most of the work of roof patching, plumbing repairs, painting, and carpentry myself. Other than the yearly kidney stone bouts and another kidney stone surgery, I was mostly happy, healthy, and writing every day, at least in between going to my kids’ sporting events.

In 2002, the Director of the Hoover Institution, John Raisian, called me out of the blue (I was a visiting professor at the USNA in Annapolis) and told me to fly out for an interview. I did and I was hired in the fall of 2003, retired in the fall of 2004 from CSU Fresno, and also began a 21-year teaching stint, at first for an annual 4–5 weeks at Hillsdale College.

Life had changed quite dramatically as I began to commute weekly to Stanford and farmed less. The main problem was I was now paying off farm debt and sending three teens to college and as a result still speaking out of state 3–4 times a month and mostly from the hard-to-connect Fresno airport. In any case, almost every year, cruises and travel companies were offering me speaking jobs for a spring or summer trip.

I was offered I think 3-5,000 dollars in 2006 to go to Libya and speak on the Roman mosaics at 4 or 5 sites that the Gaddafi government had recently opened up in its new policy of tilting toward the West. So, I booked a flight after a 10-day speaking tour in spring 2006.

What followed turned a preventable (had I listened to my body’s warning all year long) disaster into a near-death experience. I wrote it about and here I reprint my narrative of 19 years ago beginning with some strange symptoms that finally erupted when I boarded the cruise ship for a few hours the cruise ship to speak (a mix-up with visas meant I had to spend every night on land).

Driving over potholes in a small, cramped Nissan full of cigarette smoke, I thought, must explain the increasing fevers and occasional vomiting I was continuing to experience. Was it car sickness or something I ate? Even when much of the abdominal pain suddenly went away, the brief respite gave way to even more sweats and fever.

Or maybe the malaise was due to the newly allowed Al Jazeera beaming in all the cafés, blaring out the usual monotony of IED explosions from Iraq and finger-shaking lectures from Gaza and Lebanon. Finally, after another three-hour marathon session with port officials, I was allowed onto the ship and had my first dinner with the guests.

Then I finished a formal lecture on the Roman economy and culture of the early empire in the lounge—and quite literally collapsed in a fever in my temporary cabin.

A few hours after the lecture, I woke up, delirious, and called the ship’s doctor, a young Ukrainian. After a quick examination, she guessed a perforated appendix, perhaps already of some hours’ or even a day’s duration.

She then explained the bad—and worse—options: the ship was embarking the next morning on a 30-hour cruise to Tunisia. If I did have a ruptured appendix, surgery would be impossible at sea.

I could risk the voyage or, as she advised, try a Libyan hospital, although no Westerner to her knowledge—and she knew of Russians who had worked in Tripoli—had recently experienced surgery in the state-run hospitals.

Prior to departure, I had done some research on Libya and remembered coming across an old Wall Street Journal piece that referred in passing to Libya’s hospitals as “dirty death traps.” And I remembered the stories of the Bulgarian nurses and their clinic’s contaminated needles, as well as an offhand remark by one of my newfound Libyan friends that he had just returned from Tunis for “minor” surgery….