Weeks 23 and 24, Thailand
WELL, WELL: this was uncalled for. I am currently coming to the end of a week-and-a-half-long battle with Dengue fever, which has left me battered, bruised and sorta sleepy. My fingers are still swollen (it feels like I'm mashing at the keyboard with a set of cold football hotdogs), my muscles still ache, I'm as weak as a day-old kitten, and my head is still very fuzzy, so this may not be the most coherent letter that I've ever moose apple bulldozer. But I'm improving, at least.
Dengue fever is not nearly as much fun as I had thought it would be. I'd thought: instant cred for the price of a week lying in bed flipping through magazines in my pyjamas. Sweet deal, I thought. Not so. Instead I spent a week staring at a small patch on the ceiling and trying very, very hard not to move. Any movement - any at all - and I was off into dizzyness and nausea for the rest of the day. I couldn't eat, I couldn't drink; I couldn't sleep; I almost went through liver failure. I glowed red day and night and my hands and feet swelled up like balloons. My motivation to do anything was shot: all I wanted to do was lie and stare at the ceiling - and that's all I did, all throughout the day and night in my apartment; then, when the doctors told me I was no longer healthy enough to stay at home, I stared at the hospital ceiling.
It was a truly boring disease. I didn't even get hypercoloured fever dreams about decapitated cattle. The closest I came was when I convinced myself at 4am one morning that I was a businessman from eastern China and that it was absolutely imperative that I work out what number one gets when you multiply all the numbers on a Sudoku board together (it's 3, 265, 720, incidentally). Even my fantasies were boring.
Hospital was fine, and I even kinda got used to pissing into a jug. Started to enjoy it, really. I'm considering getting one for the apartment. A large sign above my bed announced to the world that I was a "Bleeding Precaution", which made me look pretty hardcore to the other patients, I think. Well, those that could read English, anyway. The man next to me had a young son who came to visit him regularly, lugging along a videogame thing-y that made loud, ridiculous noises every few seconds. That boy died a million gratuitously-violent deaths in my head over the time I was in hospital, deaths which usually involved him being forced to eat that stupid videogame thing, or having it otherwise inserted into his body painfully.
The fever baked away any last remnants of Thai language that I still carried around with me and so I was left to communicate with the nurses in garbled sign language and monosyllabic directions. The doctor just said "Cannot go home yet" while she watched my bank account disappear; when there was nothing left to take I finally got "Okay, you go home now".
And I finally emerged into the light and quickly retreated back into the dark of my apartment. Now I've got to make a desperate scramble to remake some of the money I lost so that this time here hasn't been wasted because of a mosquito. (Back at work today, this is what passed for co-worker sympathy from Jack the Canadian: "Dengue fever? Where the fuck do you live, man? In a hammock over a swamp?")
In other developments, the Thai PM has finally been sacked - for illegally making money from his cooking shows while acting as PM - so the protests should dry up fairly soon out here, although the people they've put up as his replacements look like an even bigger bunch of clowns.
Anyway, I apologize for the short update this week but as I said, I'm still fairly weak and it hurts a little to look at the computer screen. I hope you're all doing better than I'm doing, and I'll catch up again next week with what will hopefully be better news.
Lachie
The fever baked away any last remnants of Thai language that I still carried around with me and so I was left to communicate with the nurses in garbled sign language and monosyllabic directions. The doctor just said "Cannot go home yet" while she watched my bank account disappear; when there was nothing left to take I finally got "Okay, you go home now".
And I finally emerged into the light and quickly retreated back into the dark of my apartment. Now I've got to make a desperate scramble to remake some of the money I lost so that this time here hasn't been wasted because of a mosquito. (Back at work today, this is what passed for co-worker sympathy from Jack the Canadian: "Dengue fever? Where the fuck do you live, man? In a hammock over a swamp?")
In other developments, the Thai PM has finally been sacked - for illegally making money from his cooking shows while acting as PM - so the protests should dry up fairly soon out here, although the people they've put up as his replacements look like an even bigger bunch of clowns.
Anyway, I apologize for the short update this week but as I said, I'm still fairly weak and it hurts a little to look at the computer screen. I hope you're all doing better than I'm doing, and I'll catch up again next week with what will hopefully be better news.
Lachie
