I was a healthy person up until this point of my life...

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So I just got done washing all of my clothes by hand, something I can say I have never done in my life, at least to the extent of full loads of clothes. I know you are probably thinking, this is the first time you’ve washed your clothes since you have been there? False. Contrary to popular belief, third world countries do have washing machines, ours is just broken right now. However, I have not encountered anyone with a dryer, so we use the good old fashioned clothesline. Besides the fact that it can literally take multiple days to dry clothes when it is cold out, it is not that bad if you plan ahead of when you will actually run out of clothes. I have to admit, I have run out of socks on a few occasions while waiting for the rest of mine to dry. I would buy more, but I am kind of particular about my socks and also, they do not seem to sell socks in packs here, so I would be buying a bunch of single pairs of socks I do not even like. Therefore, I am surviving with the 10 pairs I brought. If my math is correct, 10 pairs of socks over 9 months means I will wear each pair roughly 27 times. I will not lie, my socks may look like they belong to a homeless person by the time I am done here, but hey, life goes on. With that I welcome you all to the latest edition of The Life and Times of Matthew Caldis. Since our last encounter I have turned a year older and have lost a serious amount of weight. As a prelude, I will just say that the weight loss, for once, can not be blamed completely on something lacking from my diet. All I will say is that life has gotten a bit more challenging over the past few weeks, but in a very different way than all of the language problems and uncomfortable situations I have dealt with up to this point.

This week’s post
- My 23rd birthday
- GEMA SA
- More issues with the left side of my body
- Intoxication without the alcohol
- Wrapup
- Spanish Vocabulary

As you can probably guess, after all I have said about birthdays, I kind of expected there to be a huge deal made of my birthday. I am not one to like there to be a big deal made about my birthday, but it kind of seemed inevitable. For weeks leading up to the date people were reminding me that it was coming up and telling me how much we were going to celebrate and this and that. I really did not know how we were going to celebrate, but it seemed like everyone wanted to be celebrating with me. If there is one thing I have learned about people here, it is that they often talk a big game but do not really back it up. What I mean by this is that people love to talk about plans to do things, but they often do not end up following through on the things they talk about. In almost all of my experiences here, situations are built up to be something much more important and extravagant than they really are and end up being. That being said, my birthday did not end up being as big of an occasion as I had envisioned and I was very thankful for this. In the morning of my birthday, November 5, my host mom and sister greeted me at breakfast and sang to me. There is a custom of hitting the birthday person on the back one time for each year of their life, so I took my beatings then as well. I received a short sleeved black dress shirt as a present from my family, which I felt was a very thoughtful gesture as they have already given me a home for 9 months. Throughout my day at work I received birthday greetings from my coworkers, the sisters, and other random people that somehow knew it was my birthday. At lunch the sisters gave me a picture frame that they told me was intended for a picture of someone I miss. It is now sitting on my dresser with a picture of my family. During the afternoon all of the children from the school connected to my work gathered and sang to me, which was nice but slightly embarrassing. I purchased a cake to share with my coworkers and the sisters later in the afternoon and as the work day came to an end I was preparing to cut it up. It seemed like my coworkers were trying to distract me and some of them kept entering and leaving one of the rooms where we work. It was pretty obvious they were trying to ‘surprise’ me with something, although they were not being very discrete about it. They called me into the room where they all awaited (about 5 coworkers and 3 of the sisters) and had set up a small little party of some snack foods and drinks. They sang to me and told me that I was part of their family, which made me feel extremely welcome and not out of place (something pretty rare for me, not feeling out of place that is). It was nothing big, but it did a lot to make my birthday memorable. That night, I got together with a number of my friends at my friend Arnaldo’s house for a little bit of a party. We had beer and pizza, listened to music, and played pictionary (charades style though, not with drawings). Again, it was not a huge extravagant party, but I had not wanted one, so it ended up being perfect.

I woke up early the following morning after very little sleep to head to Asunción. The purpose of my trip was a new opportunity that has arisen within the past few weeks. I may have mentioned this in my last post, but one of the doctors that I work with on Fridays at la obra also works for a private ambulance company. Recently, she asked me if I would like to come and work with her for one 24-hour shift each week. I was told I would be able to help with simple tasks such as taking blood pressure, checking temperatures, and suturing and that, with time, I would be allowed to do more. As this was an opportunity that would absolutely never exist in the U.S. (without a serious amount of training) I felt I could not pass this up. Therefore, I am now supposed to work with the doctors and paramedics at GEMA S.A. every week from 7:00 am Thursday morning until 7:00 am Friday morning. I worked with them two times before a certain something stopped me from going last week and will most likely keep me from going again this week (read on to find out what). But anyhow, in my first few weeks I basically just tried to learn the ropes and get a feel for life in an ambulance. I practiced how to transport patients, how to address certain emergency situations (like immobilizing patients), how to inventory the equipment, how to clean the vehicles, and was even allowed to drive an ambulance a for a bit (not with a patient of course, which is probably a good thing considering I lack a ton of practice driving stick, let alone a huge ambulance). I also spent a lot of time doing sudokos, studying my flashcards, drinking tereré, sleeping, and waiting. When I say a lot of time, I mean a lot a lot. In my two 24-hour shifts, there have been exactly 5 emergency calls. Contrary to popular belief, ambulance work is not all sirens and flashing lights. I have come to realize it is extremely unpredictable and can get very boring at times, but then again, almost any job can. I will admit, I have never been in an ambulance as a worker or as a patient, so the first few times of weaving in and out of traffic at high speeds with no regard for any traffic signs or lights was probably a lot more thrilling for me than it really should have been. I am excited to get back to working there as it is a nice break from my sometimes mundane and predictable life in Villeta (that, and it lets me get to a real grocery store once a week, which is pretty awesome because, believe it or not, there is only one small grocery store in my whole town).

Starting right around the day after my birthday, I had a really weird aching feeling in the upper left side of my body. I had just started lifting again that past Monday and was rehabbing my left shoulder (the one that I separated) pretty heavily, so I figured that the pain could be from this. I woke up Friday morning at GEMA and was still in pain, which seemed a little weird as the pain did not seem to go away after a few days. I soon noticed that there were a few red bumps on my back, which developed into more bumps and a rash later Friday evening. I was thinking that I had had a reaction to something in the bed that I had slept in the night before and thought they would go away over night. False, they got worse, and by Saturday there were a few more of those little buggers under my left arm. At this point I decided it was something else, so I took a walk down my academic memory lane of bacteriology, parasitology, and virology. This, I thought to myself, was why I got a college degree, to diagnose my strange medical problems while living in a far away land. Hey, at least I can say my degree was useful and is already paying dividends. After reminiscing about all the good time I had obtaining my degree (good times in class of course) I decided that what I had seemed a lot like Shingles. After this realization, I headed to WebMD and Wikipedia to confirm my self-diagnosis (let’s not kid ourselves, who does not use Wikipedia to confirm important facts). Sure enough, many of the symptoms that I had experienced/was experiencing were very similar, and the pictures made me pretty sure that this was what I had. One of the benefits of living in a small town is that you get to know useful people very easily. That evening I contacted a doctor friend of mine (who also coordinated the Expo) and went to have him check out my condition, even though he was in the middle of a family gathering (pretty sure a lot of his relatives knew that I had Shingles after that). He told me to start taking an antiviral drug called Acyclovir and to check in with him on Monday.

For those of you who do not know what Shingles are or what causes them, here is a quick lesson. When a person has the chicken pox, they eventually get over them, but the virus is not eliminated from their body and remains dormant in certain nerve cells of their body. Later in their life, for unknown reasons (maybe stress), an altered form of the virus can become reactivated and reappears in the form of Shingles. Since it is only dormant in certain nerve cells, it generally appears on only one side of the body. Lucky me, I got hit on the left side of my body (that’s 2 problems with my left side if you are counting at home). I looked up the word for Shingles in my Spanish dictionary, lucky me, the word is Herpes. Therefore, whenever anyone asked me what was wrong with me I had to tell them I had herpes. Shingles is caused by the Herpes Zoster Virus, which is in a completely different family of viruses than the ones that cause fever blisters and genital herpes. The Spanish translation does not clarify this, so I always felt very weird telling people what my problem was and just tried to avoid it all together. I took the angle of having a reactivation of Varicella (chicken pox) because it just seemed easier than explaining the type of herpes I had. Back to the story…

I started with the antiviral, along with an immunostimulant and regular doses of ibuprofen for the pain. I also regularly take a variety of other medications for malaria prevention and to supplement things lacking in my diet. With all of these pills it got to the point where I was taking a ridiculous number of them everyday and eventually my body decided it had had enough. On Friday, November 14, my stomach started hurting a little before lunch time. I had lunch with the sisters and really was not able to eat much. After lunch I kind of felt nauseous, but finished my afternoon work with the doctor. I went home around 3:30 and lay in bed with horrible stomach pain. I knew I was eventually going to vomit, I just didn’t know when. Around 4:30 I had an empty stomach (I figure I’ll spare you the details). I talked to a doctor and she said she believed I was intoxicated on pills, basically that I had taken so many that my body could not handle them all and was now not able to handle anything. Over the next 7 hours I did all I could to drink exactly one small glass of flat Sprite, and even this was difficult. My host parents came home from a party and thought I had a fever and that I needed to go to the equivalent of the emergency room. I did not think this was completely necessary, but the idea of having an I.V. appealed to me as I felt severely dehydrated. The doctor at the emergency room gave me an I.V. and added something to take care of the nausea, which eventually provided me with some welcome relief sometime during the middle of the night. She told me to try and sleep and not eat or drink anything until the next day. On Saturday my stomach still felt pretty horrible and I only managed to eat a little food. By the time Sunday rolled around my stomach was not back to normal, but I was able to eat a little more than the day before. It is now Tuesday and I am able to eat normally again, for the most part. I am still not able to eat as much as I was able to before this incident and am consciously avoiding certain foods. As you can probably guess, basically not eating much for almost 4 days has not done wonders for my already shrinking figure. I can not say exactly how much weight I lost over the past weekend, but in my three plus months in Paraguay I have now lost a total of about 12 pounds. I would like to think I will be able to gain this weight back, but I now believe that would involve me eating about 5 meals a day, which I can not even physically do now. I am no weight loss expert, but it seems to me that the “Paraguay Diet” works much better than Atkins, low carb, Hollywood, and whatever else kind of diets are out there these days. I am thinking the tagline for the “Paraguay Diet” should be, “you do not have to do anything to lose weight, it just happens…” I am hoping that the Shingles will clear up for good in the next week and I will be able to go back to living a healthy life, something I can say I have very little memory of at this point.

As my mom said after I separated my shoulder, “you are being tested.” To tell the truth, this test has gotten a whole lot harder than I expected it to be. I expected to feel uncomfortable in the culture and with the language, but it never occurred to me that I could have to deal with the range of health problems and injuries I have already encountered. I would be lying if I said I have not questioned myself and my desire to be here in the past few weeks, but I am going to keep fighting. I came here to serve a purpose, and because I feel like I have not completely fulfilled my purpose as a volunteer, it is not time to give up, no matter how hard things may seem to be. I recently told the sister who oversees my work that I feel ready to start giving educational presentations to large groups, so come the beginning of next month, I will start doing presentations on basic nutrition and safe food preparation and storage. I also hope to start my radio program in the coming weeks, so that will be another step in the right direction. I think when I actually get to present some of my work and feel like I am making more of a difference in the community I will be happier. I will wrap this up now, but as always, thank you for the continued contact and encouragement. I hope that my blog continues to provide you with some interesting/different/slightly comical insights on what it is like to live somewhere a little out of the ordinary. I hope all is well with you and that you are having a pleasant month of November. I leave you with a few photos of my birthday party as I thought taking pictures of my Shingles would be a little much for the old blog.

All the best, chau and suerte,

-MWC

More fun Spanish words to add to your vocabulary

- la ampolla - the blister
- Vomitar - to vomit
- la espuma - the foam, or head of a beer
- las bienes raíces - the real estate
- Entrenar - to train
- Adelgazar - to thin down
- el peso - the weight
- jamás - never
- Aprovecharse de - to take advantage of
- Fingir - to pretend
- el juicio - the judgement

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Comments

[Matthew K]

crazy driver... drives like an animal
I just read your novel. Four things came to mind... 1. Is driving the ambulance anything like driving a short bus (without the traffic laws)? If so, it sounds like a blast. 2. If they refer to your shingles as herpes, what do they use to refer to your real herpes? Anyways, sorry about The Shing. 3. If you're having trouble gaining weight, I would recommed trying this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EYZCZvV7WM It seems to work pretty well. 4. A serious note: impressive outlook in the last paragraph. I'm sure your helping the community in many ways.

[Tom B]

The Herpes Shuffle
Hope you feel lots better in the next week, Matt. It sounds like you've got a lot to accomplish. A little immaturity to add to Matt's comments about The Real Shing. Just so you know, this is not to be confused with the Cupied Shuffle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aPGV9CaySk