Home/Sick

I recently returned from a trip to Maun sick as a dog. What started as a little tiredness and what I’ve come to call sexy bar voice (named as such after I first acquired the infliction, which had to do with spending time in smoky bars and screaming to be heard over loud bands in college. It usually went away on its own) has progressed quickly into a full blown “flu”. Now despite what we’ve all heard about the horrible diseases coming out of Africa, in reality there seem to be only a few. They are HIV, Malaria, TB and flu. “Flu” is the catchall for whatever else might possibly ail you that cannot be detected by one of the diagnostic tests for the other infections.

On the other side of this illness I’m left with only my own feverish recollection of my symptoms, which I’m relatively certain had something to do with sexy bar voice, which progressed into swollen closed throat to the point of waking up choking, which lead to phlegmy cough and feverish body aches. When it was just sexy bar voice I waited, as this one sometimes goes away on its own and generally has causal factors linked to my excitedly screaming too much. As I had been in Maun for my goodbye party, it seemed this one was a likely candidate. When I was still hoarse by Wednesday, I knew things were headed downhill.

When the painful throat began I started pushing fluids and ibuprofen, and I stopped by the clinic to check in on if it might be something serious. They only seemed to want to give me an injection (a move I’m certain has more to do with them getting a chance to stab me in my white ass than it does actually making me feel better because no matter what I’m sick with the clinic always wants to give me an injection.) I raided their ibuprofen stock and grabbed some throat lozenges (which are chalky and don’t work) and headed home. This would be the last time I left my hut in three days.

I laid around and rested, the kettle constantly boiling as I prepared myself some homebrew remedy that I think I inherited from some ex boyfriend’s mother as the gospel, as I can’t recall drinking hot lemon and honey water as a child. This mix was alternated with tea and regular water, with broccoli as the main food of choice, not because I wanted it, but because if I didn’t eat it soon it would go more off than it already was. Picking through that moldy mess alone took about an hour, and I prayed that stomach sick wouldn’t follow. At one point I can actually remember thinking how novel it was to feel like shit, but to have a completely different area of my body than usual be the center of my distress. I think I’ve prepaid on any future morning sickness, puking hangovers, or flu caught from a child who is in school with a bunch of other disease infested germ factories through my time of intestinal distress in Botswana. I’d like to think that my stomach has become iron clad, but I know the minute I reenter the States and all the preservatives and strange foods that I’ve been unwillingly weaned off for the past few years are going to throw me into a mess of stomach sick again.

So lying in my hut dying, I would have given huge amounts of money I don’t have for some chicken soup, but it’s certainly not a part of the typical Batswana diet, and thus not available in Seronga. The co-op (the only store in town) didn’t even have orange juice, although my host sister was kind enough to send the kids on the compound to my door with green unripe oranges plucked from the tree outside my window. I gnawed on them while watching episode after epsiode of Gossip Girl (until staring at the screen made my eyes ache).

During this time I would wake myself up in the night with a dry hacking cough that water alone could not quell several times a night. I would stumble out of my bed looking for water or SOMETHING only to get caught in my mosquito net-trip and fall, and grab around in the dark until I was drinking honey directly from the bottle. It seemed to be the only thing that would coat my throat. This happened several times a night until a stroke of genius hit and I realized that surely the Peace Corps must have given us something in our medical kit for this particular ailment before they sent us out into The Land Without Target (or pharmacies, or minute clinic, ect). So I fumbled around in the dark for that nearly empty toolbox and found that sure enough, there were 2+ year old cough drops. I popped one of those nasty soft bad boys in my mouth and drifted back into a feverish sleep, and woke up in the morning with the remainder in my cheek and pink drool on my pillow.

I spent the days restless and yet tired, and couldn’t leave my hut for fear of running into someone I didn’t have the voice to speak to. I’ve learned that when I’m really exhausted and on the verge of sick I can’t hear well, and my friend’s Afrikaans accent had been giving me some serious trouble when I left Maun. And he was speaking English. I knew I couldn’t manage to try to speak to people if I was going to have to decide which language they were trying to communicate with me in as well as responding in the Voice That Sounds Like She Smoked a Hundred Thousand Cigarettes.

I’ve found that being sick is one of the universal times that makes one miss one’s home and culture. I may be 28 years old, but you can bet your ass that I wanted nothing more than for my mother to rub my back, or for K-Train to make me chicken soup (likely from scratch, she’s domestic that way). Although I couldn’t really talk, I wanted to speak to the States so badly. It seems being ill was bringing on a terrible bout of homesickness.

I held out for most of the day, as I had to wait for it to become a decent hour to call America. I made a few calls, but it seemed that many of you were out enjoying springtime in the US (as winter descends on Botswana). Being “sick” is usually synonymous with “emotional” for me, so when I couldn’t get a hold of anyone I began pouting, which in the absence of any voice of reason to smack some sense into me quickly became a pity party of note.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the sort of mind bending and soul crushing bouts of homesickness that were a hallmark of my first few (*8? *10?) months in Botswana. That sort of loneliness has to fade away, either on its own or by force, or I wouldn’t have survived here this long. I think knowing that I was going to be away from home for this long has sort of compelled me to push thoughts of home and people there further from my day to day mind, as if I thought about it as much as I used to, the pain would get to be unbearable. So as a coping mechanism, I think I’ve put you all on another planet; you are characters of some movie I remember seeing that used to be my life, but for right now only exists in a slow motion dream world.

Now that the time to reenter that universe is coming near, I’m struggling to remember all the storylines, the new characters that have come on in the episodes I’ve missed, and the details of the one I’ll soon again be playing. And all of this struck me a lot when I was ill.

After the “flu” incident I the cavity I had diagnosed but not filled in Gabs back in March flared up and I had to continue on with antibiotics and pain reliever drugs until I could get to Maun. (See previous entries.) Never in my life have I wanted so badly to be completely drug free within my body.

I survived Africa’s most recent attempt on my life, but the ache for home still remains. As my arrival in the motherland gets closer, it joins the emotional stew swirling wildly and erratically throughout my body. I guess if this whole experience hadn’t been worth it, it wouldn’t hurt so badly to leave, and time remains the only drug that will cure this ailment. And so I take each day as a pill, both bitter and sweet, as time takes me away from this world I will miss so desperately and into the one of my dreams.