Well, first off, your T isn't completely wrong about the hospital experience thing. I had a friend in college who went to study abroad in China. She was extremely brave and ate a 10,000 year old egg from a little dive in some run down cafe somewhere. (If you haven't heard of these, they are hard boiled eggs with something done to them and kept a long time until they are actually black eggs!) Well, it is a delicacy, yes, but maybe not the best advice to eat something like that when you're a foreign student.

So, she got extremely ill from it and ended up in the hospital. Her experience was completely traumatic. First this particular hospital did not have private rooms, so she was in a big room with many other girls. Second, they don't have nurses that assist you with things like showering, getting to the bathroom, etc. They expected her to have a family member who would come and help with that. Of course she had no one and was so weak she couldn't get out of bed. Fortunately, one of her roommates had a kind mother who helped her. Third, the antibiotics were different than the ones in the US, and she got even more sick off of them. No one from the foreign exchange program even bothered to check on her while she was there. She eventually did come home early.

So yeah, it can be traumatic. I'm not saying all experiences would be like this. I think she was very unlucky (and I can say perhaps she was very unlucky because she needed to learn something from it.)

Also, she has bipolar and was diagnosed before she left. She never said anything about having to disclose to anyone about that.