the delights of dengue fever!

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i don´t know who knows what´s been going on in my little latino life recently...but it´s been a rather, erm, colourful two weeks...everyone keeps telling me dengue is the best souvenir you can get from paraguay (its actually probably the only one), and it´s been quite a lot of fun...so here goes, i´ll launch in a describe...

well i´d been feeling really tired for a while, and im not much of a sleepy person and was sleeping 10hrs a night plus (early nights,really exciting)..at first i thought it was becuase i´d taken up running every morning and was really going for it through all the potholey streets,dodging the cows and the rabbid dogs who seem to get turned on by a sweaty gringa running around and go for my ankles which is a bit scary. anyway, i was sitting there teaching one of my students and started to feel really funky...out of nowhere my bones ached really badly, my joints and my muscles too, but all really random pains that never lasted for too long til they moved to another bit of me and i had kind of torrents of bone pain shooting round me for days. combine this with dull aching muscles,sore throat, sore eyes, sore skin,sore internal organs at one point, fever all through the night, insomnia for 10days or so...what else, well imagine everything that hurts possible,and thats what i got...

but it gets better, the paraguayan rural hospital experience probably just topped the whole thing off (bearing in mind i have those tendencies to have weird epileptic fit type things when someone with a white coat gets close to me, even when i got my verruca hacked off in the nice little place in canterbury i had a bit of a freaky 5 minutes). so yep, in i went with a fever etc and all my aches and pains and they took my temperature and told me to go home and have a cold shower then come back, so i did, but when i came back there was a looooong queue and it all started to look a bit grim.imagine people lying around kids men and women etc with flies all over them, i seemed like the healthy one, got stared at by everyone and generally felt really uncomfortable(ohh and really ill) and then...this was the bad bit, an old indigenous looking woman got wheeled in the door on a metal tray type thing with wheels clanking around and everyone was looking(as you do) and then it hit me that she was actually v.close to dead or dead...allher skin was grey and you could jsut tell from the mood that she wasnt v.alive...which really scared the living poo out of me and got v.queasy and ran outside to have a little fainting/epileptic session...which thankfully i narrowly avoided because i was on my own at this point!
anyway so then my supposed paraguayan mother(the bitchy one) figured it was time to take me somewhere else and took me to the private doctor hospital thing(i cant bring myslef to actually call thses places hospitals becuase they´re people´s houses and jsut generally a bit dodgy) ($2 per consultation so not exactly expensive) and they plonked me in the kids room on the little bed thing for about 2hrs while they all prodded round and obviously as people do here, all come and take a look at the dengue ridden foreigner and take out her blood (not very succesfully i had needles hanging out of my arms forever!) and they put me on a couple of drips which seemed to calm me down a bit.theeen i had to wait hours for the results...AND, i couldnt beleive this, my paraguayan mother who was making it quite clear what a sacrifice she thoguht she was making by being there with me (moaning about how late it was getting,how i was going to give dengue to her screaming brat and that i had to be isolated-dengue isnt contagious,never has been, never will be- and she had the cheek to start telling me about her HUNGER PAIN!!). I jsut read my last blog of about a month ago and i said that i suspected that she had issues but that was jsut the tip of the iceberg...she ignores me when she/i come into a room and wont say hello til i do, she treats me like a child in front of people at the centre i work in - oooh my little english daughter-and then doesnt speak to me in the house.she also watches me eat and stuff and jsut generally looks me up and down.so YES, she DOES have issues!. right so there i was on the hospital bed, my ears and eyes werent even really working properly and there she was, wait for this bit, TAKING PHOTOS OF ME ON HER CAMERA PHONE!!there was a reason behind this however, becuase the little mural on the wall behind me was of fish and a little underwater scene that she really liked and wanted to paint herself one day(yes,complete nutter) and she thought i looked rather like a goldfish in the foreground and asked me repeatedly if i felt like one too. amazingly i kept my cool and didnt tell her where to go and i didnt start being really rude or anything,it took a lot believe me. paraguayans are like that, jsut really odd sometimes, dont know where the line is if you know what i mean.
ok, the centre is closing so i think i´ll have to stop there for the time being...i´ll be back within the next few days for "dengue part two", hope its making for entertaining reading, you should see the video diary...anyway i think im back to normal now, bit sleepy but no more pains etc, just a dodgy tummy but thats another story(the THINGS they eat here are jsut WRONG!).hope all´s well back at home, again make sure you all eat something tasty for me and appreciate mattresses with springs!lots of love XXX

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