sickness

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Well for the fourtieth time since I entered this country, I am sick.

My stupid immune system + foreign country + extreme heat + thirty disease-carrying children = constant sickness.

For pretty much the past four days I have been sleeping in my room, with the fan full blast, my windows closed and the curtains pinned shut with a clothespin. I feel like I don't exist anymore. Hillary came back to Guwahati today, and this is pretty much the first human interaction I have had in four days. Fortunately, she confirmed my sanity by feeling the same way about Guwahati that I feel. She describes this city as being a "vortex of heat," and says that she can't think or move normally because of the heat. She feels nauseous and heavy just like me. Honestly, I don't know how I'm gonna handle four more months of this sticky, humid, time-warping, sweat-trickling, inescapable heat.

It's crazy, I have never felt this way before. I just don't care about anything--it's too hot to care! Being awake and sleeping, same thing. Eating or drinking or praying or checking email, it's all the same thing--it's all just HEAT. I don't know how people live here. Then again, I have not specifically evolved to live in this sort of climate. I have hair on my arms, for God's sake. These people don't even have hair on their arms. Their arms KNOW: There's just no point. Hair is only going to make life more painful and more hot. My stupid arms just don't get it, and they continue to grow hair. I wouldn't be surprised if I spent the next four months sleeping. Dehydration, dehydration, headache. I can't drink tea. The one thing that makes my life pleasant and meaningful is tea, and I can't drink it because I'll get sick. That's how hot it is. Drink one cup of tea and I'll automatically get sick.

Well, tomorrow night I am supposed to go eat dinner with some Korean missionaries who are living in Guwahati. I ate with them once before...it was a pretty interesting experience. Mostly it was interesting because they don't speak English. The husband speaks a bit of basic English, but the wife speaks almost no English. Last time they showed me a bunch of pictures on their computer. They had about 60 photos of the water-distillation apparatus that they made for themselves and use in Guwahati: something involving various bowls, buckets, and a long transparent tube. I hope they remember that they already showed me all of these pictures, and don't try to show me again. But they're really nice--at least, they seemed nice from the broken English and gestures they used--and the food they cook is good.

Me and Hillary decided we just need to put an IV drip in our veins, since we can't drink water fast enough to keep up with this heat.

Oh, I forgot to write about my trip to the doctor. Yesterday, since I felt like absolute death, I went to see the doctor. There was a small waiting room with a fan, and I felt pretty hopeless when we first walked in because there seemed to be about 12 people waiting in front of us. But we had only been there a minute when the door to the doctor room opened, and two people spillled out into the waiting room with a fresh prescription in their hands. Another person was quickly ushered into the room, and once again this patient had received a check-up, diagnosis, and prescription within about 2 minutes and came bursting out of the room and into the street. All in all, I only had to wait about 10 minutes before the doctor called me in. He asked me some questions about how I was feeling. (head cold, aching neck, etc. I mentioned that I thought I could have a sinus infection, but I wasn't at all sure.) He then told me to lay on the little doctor table and looked into my eyes, nose, and mouth with a small flashlight. Then he listened to my breathing with a stethescope, and then he and the nurse took turns pushing on my appendix and asking if it hurt. No...it didn't hurt...I had a head cold. Then they both spent some time squeezing my throat glands, and it was over. The doctor misspelled my name at the top of a piece of paper, and then prescribed three different medicines and handed it to me. He gave me an infection medicine, due to the fact that I had mentioned that I suspected that it was possible that I might maybe have a sinus infection. He gave me pain medicine, because I seemed to be in pain. And he gave me cough and cold medicine, because I was blatently coughing in front of him. Great. I can't even read the prescription. For all I know, he might have prescribed me morphine and sugar pills. But anyway, I started taking the medicines and now I'm feeling better.

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