It seems to me
While it's true that every dog will have his day
When all the bones are buried
There is barely time to go outside and play
This week, I was sick as a dog.
It all started last Saturday. While on my way into the County capital to do my weekly radio show, I felt strangely tired and had the sensation that something foreign was reproducing in my body, ready for a hostile takeover of my weakening organism. I almost didnīt want to do the radio show, because of the sense of foreboding, and queeziness, I felt while riding the bus.
I did the show, but when I was finished, I felt exhausted. Normally, after doing my radio show, I eat dinner at an outdoor stand where some friendly Afro-Ecuadorians serve up some of the best coastal cuisine this side of the Amazon Basin.
Yet, oddly, I did not feel hungry. In fact, I felt feverish, with a headache, and nausea. I immediately got on the bus and headed home, knowing that a biological cataclysm was about to occur.
Home: open the door, run to the bathroom, explode in a fit of diarrea. Drink water, take off clothes, go to bed at 8:30 PM without dinner.
16 hours later, full sunlight splashed out across the Amazon landscape, I crawl out of bed, creep into the bathroom, and explode once more. No appetite, just feeling like a dead dog.
For the rest of the day, I sit in a catatonic state, hermit-like, hunched over in my own private, sickly world, getting up only for the occasional glass of water. Any thought of food makes me want to vomit, although I never actually do.
On Monday, I call the Peace Corps nurses and they tell me to get a stool sample. I eat some food that day, and even manage to go into the county capital to take care of errands. But that doesnīt last long, cuz Iīve got to get home soon and release my guts into the toilet again.
Tuesday was the worst day of all. What seems like gallons of yellow bile shoot out of my sphincter early in the morning, as I gather a small sampling for lab analysis. I had to cancel an important United Nations-sponsored health workshop I was scheduled to give in a village 2 hours away. Instead, I go to a laboratory for fecal analysis.
While waiting for the results, all I could do was sit hunched over on the sidewalk, feeling like a dead zombie (yes, I know that zombies are already dead, but I felt like one that was even deader!).
Occasionally friends and acquintances would say hello to me, but I was in too foul a mood to make any conversation. And I had to poop really, really bad but dare not do it in any bathroom in that town (Ecaudorian bathrooms are often disgusting, lacking a toilet seat, trashcan overflowing with used toilet paper, stench-filled, and no running water).
The hallucinations began on the way back home from the county capital. It was about 5PM, and I was sitting in the busīs front cabin with the driver. The village doctor, a young, female rookie, straight out of med school, sat next to me. Despite my stupor, I managed to notice that she wore a low-cut shirt, revealing her ample cleavage. As we rode home, I cradled my head in my hands. The doctor told me I looked like a skeleton. Indeed I had lost weight quickly over the days.
The journey back to the village, led straight into the setting sun, and there the visions began. With symptoms of severe dehydration and possession by a foreign organism who had truly taken over my body, I began to see my own death. The sun representing my sunsetting life, and I had the odd sensation that I was leaving my own body. Part of me was scared that I might actually die, especially given the fact that my village is 5 hours away from a modern medical center. Mixed with the sensation of death, were odd, ghastly visions of sex with the female doctor sitting next to me, as if we were skeletons copulating with one another.
Arrival to the village -- I asked the doctor to accompany me to my house, because I was so sick I did not want to be alone, and frightened for my health. I ran to the house, the doctor following hesitantly behind, pushed open the door, and immediately headed to the toilet, where I released my bowels like never before in my lifetime. I felt crippled, wrenched over in my agony, like some old man, desperate because the village had been without running water for the past 48 hours and I was unable to flush the toilet, nor turn on the tap to wash myself.
I was in a truly precarious situation, full of rage at Ecuadorian infrastructure, the people who prepared the contaminated food that surely gave way to my illness, and at my own self for being in Ecuador in the first place, experiencing 3rd World Diarrea.
The doctor, who had obviously heard my earth-shattering spasms looked at me, aghast, as I came out of the bathroom, without my shirt on, looking like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. I asked her not to leave, but she told me she had to go home and change, and rushed out the house. I was mad at her for leaving like that, so unprofessional, and such a scaredee cat, especially when she knew how sick I was, but at the same time I didnīt blame her.
On Wednesday, I picked up the meds. High-dosage antibiotics. The diarrea continued into Thursday evening, but my appetite came back and I ate breakfast and dinner that day.
Thankfully, I woke up this morning feeling pretty good, had a nice solid sh-t, and ate healthy. I think the episode has come to a close, but those dog day I will remember for a long time, as part of my Peace Corps experience.
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