Sublimity…

Yep folks, I’m sorry to say that my streak ended yesterday, and though I feel extremely lucky that I’ve been able to stay healthy for so long, it was just a matter of time before I caught something. I came back from “work” at the office (where I didn’t actually do any work because there is nothing for me to do right now) yesterday evening and everything felt absolutely fine. I went up to my room and made the final touches on prepping my photos for the website, and once that was done, lay back and listened to some music while waiting for supper. I think I may have dozed off, and when I got up, I suddenly felt very cold. Though the weather here has been cool lately, my room is at the back of the building where sunlight never reaches, and the window over my bed had fallen out letting the cold breeze in, I was wearing a nice thick hoodie and every other day, felt perfectly warm with only that. I figured that I was cold because I had been lying around not moving, so I got up and went downstairs to see if supper was ready. Downstairs was warmer, but I still felt very cold, and just before supper arrived, I decided to stop being the tough guy, and went back to my room to put on a nice thick fleece.

However, during supper I didn’t warm up (even while eating hot food), and in fact kept on getting colder. Towards the end of the meal, I started to shiver a little bit, and while walking back upstairs afterwards, my teeth started chattering. I had no idea what was going on, but instinct told me that I had to find a way to warm up – and fast – so I jumped into my -15˚C sleeping bag with all my clothes on and zipped it up, something I’ve never done here in Dehradun before. By that time, I’d developed a minor headache as well, and while not feeling completely retchid, was certainly not well. The sleeping bag and sweaters helped – though slowly – and after about 20 minutes the shivers had stopped, and by 45 minutes after, only my lower legs and feet were feeling at all cold. At that point Sunil came in (he’d been working really late at the office), and as soon as he saw me and heard my story, proceeded to pile on blankets on top of me, despite my pleas that I was fine and would just over heat. He was very concerned and asked what he could do to help, but at that point I still had no idea what had happened to me, and so the only thing that seemed to make sense to me was to warm up and get some rest.

Sunil asked if I had any medicine, and when I responded I did (my parents wouldn’t have let me come without a proper first aid kit), told me I should take some. However, I’ve always been wary of magic pills, and unless there has been something specifically wrong with me and there’s some medicine that is directly meant for curing that ailment, I’ve always opted not to take it. I figure our bodies are incredible things (take a minute to think about how a huge jumble of atoms can create something as incredible as a human being) and our modern medicine has only been available for the past 50 or 100 years, but we still managed to survive before, so give the body a chance to sort itself out. And finally, I had no idea what to take, what medicine do you take if you’re just feeling really cold?

So I lay back, drank as much water as my tummy would accept (water is always good for the system, and I hadn’t had my 2 liters that day) and tried to get some sleep. Sunil’s extra blanket did make me warmer, and after awhile I felt nice and warm, but still not good. For the next few hours I just lay there trying to sleep (my iPod’s battery was dead, and given the location of the power socket, I couldn’t plug it in and listen to it at the same time), but sleep would not come. By 10:30 I was really starting to feel hot under all the blankets, but Sunil felt my forehead and pronounced I didn’t have a fever. After that he went to sleep, but I lay awake. By midnight I couldn’t deal with the heat any more, so I ditched the blanket and my hoodie which made me feel much better, but my stomach was starting to feel nauseous, so over all I felt worse. Having cooled off, I think I managed to doze off for awhile, but at 2:30 woke up again with my stomach feeling really bad. There’s nothing worse than feeling that you want to throw up, but being unable to do so. Finally after half an hour of trying, supper came up, and despite the fact that rice grains coming back up feel pretty horrible, in the end I was glad it was out as I started to feel a lot better. I was still feeling hot, so I took off the fleece and got back into the sleeping bag, and managed to fall asleep pretty quickly. Anil (the caretaker) came in with chai at 5:30 as the group of 18 trainees who had been staying with us had to leave then to catch their bus home, and after all the water, it was nice to have something with a little flavour in it. By this time I’d drank my 1L Nalgene dry, so around 6:00 I ventured downstairs to the kitchen to fill it up again (thank goodness they have a water filter here!), and though I certainly wasn’t feeling 100%, I did feel a lot better. The headache was still there (but still only minor), and my muscles were tired (from all the shivering I think), but i felt that I certainly could walk around if I wanted to, not the case the night before.

By breakfast time (9:00), my tummy was feeling good enough that I had two parathas and didn’t feel any worse after, and though I felt I could have gone if there was a pressing reason, I took a pass on going to the office and instead lay in bed all morning drinking water and snoozing under my sleeping bag. I checked all the health information I had brought and couldn’t really match my symptoms with that of any of the things listed, so I’ve decided that I likely have some form of food poisoning or minor flu, with the treatment for both being “get lots of rest, keep hydrated, eat whenever possible and basically let your body take care of itself”. My notes say that rice and beans are good for upset stomaches so I had a bit of rice and dhal for lunch, and given that I was getting bored with drinking plain water all the time, I asked Anil to go out and get me some Limca and Fanta (soft drinks) and a few bananas (both supposedly good for the system). So here I am, sitting up for a change, sipping Limca (which reminds me of all those times I was sick in India before – the weeks of lying pathetically in bed feeling absolutely horrible) and feeling not too bad (certainly the best I’ve felt lately, but I still have a bit of dull headache when I move around, my muscles are still quite weak and the tummy’s still a tad queasy). It hasn’t been fun, but as being sick in India goes, it’s been pretty good, and current signs point to a quick recovery (the general rule with getting sick is that anything that starts very suddenly like this usually don’t last that long). I’m also glad it’s happened here in Dehradun when I have nothing to do for a few days, as of Wednesday afternoon the plan was for us to travel out to the fieldsite today, and that just would not have been good…

On the good side, sitting around all day gives me a chance to write some more in this journal and hopefully catch up a bit, I’ll try my best. That’s all for now, don’t get worried, I think I’m on the mend (and I’m going to call my doctor friend here soon just to get an expert opinion). Here’s a Limca toast to getting through my first illness here without too much pain, but I’m still hoping I won’t have to go through this again, we’ll see…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.