Killing your friends with chemicals

These days when inspiration tugs at my proverbial shorts leg and says "write about this", it happens during a situation. It's never about the whole story, it's about the tableau of the moment, the comical caricature that is the present, which contains all moments before it. So yesterday as I was tearing through the dusty, broken brick and gravel strewn pavement of hanoi on the back of a motorbike, clutching an envelope of CAT scans to my chest, wondering if I'd killed all my friends yet, I felt that little tug on my shorts, and that old familiar voice. "Write about this". I would say this all started on the second of June, when I started to notice I didn't feel so hot, but a little research indicates that really this started 7-14 days before that, which places me somewhere in the Mekong Delta, drinking some sketchy water or eating some sketchy food that someone pooed in. For my conscious awareness this started on June 2nd. I felt a little fever coming on, I know the feeling well, I think I'm really sensetive to it since I'm pretty familiar with so many flavours of fever at this point in my life, and the last one I had was the worst, lasted 5 days and Kate had to take care of me and feed me Tylenol. I thought that was bad. ahahahahahhahahah

nope.

The next day I felt slightly shittier than the last, and I did my usual routing of forcing myself to eat and drink and lay down (that's the easy part). By day 3 things are getting a litte serious, but I don't know it cause I'm completely in the zone. Staggering through the heat of

Vietnam I get myself to a noodle soup joint and order myself a noodle soup and a sprite. I slammed that sprite (still comes in glass bottles here) and when the first noodles touched my lips they went back down into the bowl, nope, can't do it. I take a breath, and then another one, and the world starts to turn light blue. This is bad.

Suddenly the world switches off like a TV, but I am weightless and there is glass and porcelain smashing around me and when the TV turns on again it's a ceiling and it smells like beef noodle soup everywhere and the nice kid that runs the place is looking down at me and my head is in his lap. What the FUCK do I have, this is not nothing. FIrst thing I asked for was my steel nalgene, which I ended up forgetting there anyway, but I had bigger things to worry about. I asked them to call me a cab, which they kindly did, and the noodle soup kid rode back to my place with me, which was nice of him. My solution to this was to start taking painkillers to crack the fever, and this worked for three more days, at which point the fever was worse, and since six days was a new record for me, it was hospital time. Also ordering food to my room was getting old since room service is not part of the deal here, but in true vietnamese spirit the family that runs the place would literally cook the orders up themselves in their kitchen sometimes. Some snippets from the hospital:

They let my fever run to see how high it goes, and I feel like killing them. I feel how hot my skin is but I can't sweat and my feet and hands are cold so I pull as many blankets as possible, to reach my body's target temperature of 39 C, way to go brain, that's real safe for weeks on end.

They take blood, they're trying to figure out what it is. They give me some effervescent tylenol and some doxicycline, "here, it's not malaria or dengue, it's ROcky Mountain Spotted fever, even

though you have no spots, take these, you'll feel better by tomorrow."

Two days later I'm back, and this time they say I can stay.

More fever, more needles, more blood taken, more IV's with different antibiotics that might (but aren't) working. Blood report is terrifying, low white blood cells, and liver slowly falling apart. The upside is that the menu here looks like a five star restauraunt's. The downside is that the food doesn't, and I have no appetite anyway.

The dude in the bed next to mine sounds like he has a bad cold, does he really need to be here? (this is the fever talking). He won't stop snoring, what if I catch what he has too? Why is his whole family here all day? Why does he have two different cell phones? Why does his four year old brother keep sneaking to my side of the dividing curtain to watch me be sick? In the delirium of the fever while I wait for the next paracetamol to kick in I have several distinct thoughts. "What do I have, will I ever see the outside of this hospital again, surely 10 days of fever is not a good thing, especially when it's getting worse in the face of drugs and doctors."

"One well aimed kick to that child's chin would take his disproportionate head clean off. It would be a welcome distraction, and in the hospital I'm sure they could get to it quick enough. . .But the yelling and chatter that would cause from mom and grandma would make this headache a lot worse than it is."

"I wonder if grandma would let me borrow that huge dirty knife she's got."

They're letting the fever run again, they're looking for something in my blood again. Now they're taking me downstairs and injecting me with a huge ball of radioactive iodine so they can but me through a giant spinning ring of x-ray cameras. I've never had a CAT scan before. The novelty of this makes the fever go away while it's happening, but it comes right back. I have no tumours. Kinda nice to rule that out.

They find Salmonella Typhii. Typhoid fever? But I'm immunized. . . And the antibiotics I'm already on are supposed to work against that shit. So they double the dose, and two days later the fever subsides. Just like that, gone. So there I am in the hospital bed, I've seen every minute of programming NatGeo offers, and most of Discovery Asia as well. My appetite is back, no headache, just a little annoyance at the fact that every time there is a roadblock (which is every day) my insurance company calls me. I my room. Never before 10 pm unless it's before 9 AM. Do they know I'm sick? No one seems to, the hospital desk does the same thing when they have issues with the insurance company, it seems they think I have a fax machine and a computer in my room.

14 days of fever, 8 days in the hospital later and countless IVs of salene, antibiotics of every kind and a shitload of paracetamol latger I am granted a release and a clean bill of health, holy shit what the hell was that? Can that please never happen again. I got the typhoid vaccine before I left but be warned that it really doesn't mean you're immune. My case was wierd because I presented with no other effects other than the fever, so they couldn't even trace where it got into my system.

I keep looking over my CT scan pictures, it's wierd to see your own kidneys and pelvic bones and arteries and heart and realise that all that shit really is inside you, and this is what it's shaped like, inside you. Everyone knows how their exterior differs from others' but when you see your insides that's a wierd moment. I posted the reference pic, they make you put your hands above your head and take one from the top before they take the slice pictures, and I thought it looked like my hands were raised in victory, even though at that moment I was deathly scared they might find the cancer they were looking for. It looks like I already knew I was going to be okay, so I thought it was appropriate. I have one section of pelvic sections up on my wall as decoration. Strange to think I have millions of little new bacterial friends hiding inside the cells of myh immune system and pancreas, and I'm chemically trying to kill every last one of them. I'm pretty sure they're almost all dead. So sitting in the hospital waiting to decide whether the non-english speaking nurses understood that I was checking out that morning and was waiting for medication, or if they just did the "nod vaguely, walk away and let someone else deal with it when he gets tired of waiting" trick, I thought, these pictures would make a great souvenir. Also I think I'm fit to take a motor bike home, fuck paying for a cab, I'm through cabbing it to this stupid hospital. So I walked outside, Kanye West's Touch The Sky came on random, great victory song, and I hopped on the back of a motorbike and I was off. Winding through the dusty metropolis I thought. "I wonder if I've killed all my little friends yet" and then I thought "I need to write about this." That's where I've been for 16 days.

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Footnote

First order of business after dropping my bag in my room was of course to soldier march right back to that noodle soup stand, and with a big grin the guy that helped me yelled back from his rice-frying post to the lady in the back, who literally within 10 seconds of my arrival sauntered out of the back with my nalgene. I could hardly believe it, but that's vietnam. Needless to say I had some noodle soup, a revenge Coke (it was supposed to be revenge sprite but they were all out) and needless to say my friend got a tip that day.

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