the old-school guestbook archives
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it gets a name... ~ May 2, 2003 - 10:44 p.m. so my malaise finally has a name: typhus. not to be confused with typhoid fever, a kind of food poisoning. no, typhus is even more delightful-- a bacterial disease contracted by eating food that's been contaminated by rats. welcome to life in a developing country. when I called in sick yet again on tuesday, a couple of the teachers ganged up on me and insisted I see a doctor. wayne came for me on his motorbike after lunch and took me down to the hospital. which was an adventure all its own. not much english spoken there, and they kept wanting me to come back tomorrow. wayne has a little more lao than I do, so he helped out a lot. I just kept insisting that I could not come back the next day, and finally they gave in. first a blood test for malaria, which was negative. white and red blood cell counts normal. then I got to talk to the doctor, who had a little bit of english. she decided I should have another blood draw for typhoid, salmonella, and some other things she didn't know the english words for. so when the test came back positive for "ricketsiose", she couldn't tell me what that was in english, but she wrote me a prescription for doxycycline. which I took to the hospital pharmacy. it wasn't until I got home that I realized that they'd given me the wrong antibiotic, something called cephalexin. luckily, I hadn't taken any yet. so I rode my bike to pharmacy, where they gave me my doxycycline. it was a couple of days before I found out that I had typhus. ricketsiose is the name for a group of diseases caused by the rickettsia bacteria, carried by rats. and, you know, as icky as that feeling is-- it's at least good to know that there's a name for my sickness, and a medicine to cure it. I've been feeling unwell for so long now, I was starting to wonder what the hell was wrong with me. I'm looking forward to being healthy again, to getting my energy back. the doxycycline knocks me out. strong stuff. I've spent most of the week in bed, dragging myself up and out for dinner-and-a movie at saignam so that I didn't feel utterly alone in the world. nothing makes me feel lonlier than sick-in-bed with no one to take care of me. I'm halfway through mama, by terry mcmillan, though, and loving it. oh, and I've got a good guess as to where I picked up this delightful disease... I keep flashing on this conversation I had with teacher roy, when I first got here. we were having lunch at school and talking about tropical diseases, and he waved at the open-air kitchen and said "well, just look at this kitchen-- you know there's rats in there at night, running over the counters..." yeah. well, the good news is, you can't get typhus more than once. and as far as tropical diseases go, it could've been a lot, lot worse. let's just call me lucky.
(((rings))) |