The Humilities and Advantages of Falling Ill

It all started quite innocuously...

Several abbreviated bouts of dizziness, nausea and general feelings of weakness prompted little concern on my part in the days leading up to Wednesday, August 27. After all, coming from upstate New York, to Siem Reap, Cambodia, during its wet season, is a leap of quantum proportions regarding environmental conditions. When a particularly strong wave of weakness hit me, I attributed it to mild heat exhaustion, dehydration or lack of sleep; the last I expected was a potent amoebic adversary getting comfortable in my lower digestive tract, preparing for the microbiological equivalent of a house party.

Caffeine doesn’t help much against what I was battling, however. After a quick jaunt to the coffee shop, I was able to fool myself into feeling healthy enough for class, but I certainly didn’t have my students tricked. Their eyes, usually bright, laughing and playful, darken with concern, watching my every move as I laboriously pace the classroom explaining the present simple tense. They sense something is up, and as my condition worsens become increasingly distracted. By my afternoon classes, I had to sit down to get through my lessons, and writing on the board became an effort in itself. Their fear grew exponentially; Sophal stopped copying down his lesson at several different points to study my face carefully, now involuntarily bent into a perpetual grimace of discomfort.

By now, my head has begun to ache, my body is on fire and my brain has begun playing devious tricks on me. Turning my chair to the board to write out an example problem, my hand defies my brain’s orders in a peculiar rebellion I’ve never before witnessed. After several failed attempts, I manage to write the letter “4” on the board in front of me. But wait...did that really just happen? My head aches and my short term memory begins faltering like a misfiring engine; numbers, words, whole paragraphs of the book I read just an hour earlier fall out of my consciousness in a downpour that drives me out of the classroom covered in sweat. Sopheap has been begging me all day to go home and rest, leaving him with my classes. Now that this ailment has snuck into my head, I finally relent, turning over my final class to Sopheap and retreating to my apartment, assuming that a several hour rest with a powerful fan would cure what ails me....

Like my few remaining thought processes, this proved to be a delusion. My condition had slowly deteriorated over the course of the day, and I remained just barely capable of taking care of myself; as I step through the door of my apartment, my entire being takes a sharp nosedive. I close the metal grated door of my bedroom and my sense of balance no longer guides me. My next memory is inexplicably lying in bed, covers thrown haphazardly about, fighting a battle of thermal stress. My head was absolutely burning, and felt like some insidious foe was attempting to drive an iron stake through my forehead. That, or like the growing pains of some majestic artiodactyl as it pushes a rod of calcified bone up through the skin of its forehead; the intensity of the pain coupled with my mental state led me to believe that any second the ordeal would resolve itself in a horn sprouting out between my eyes. My extremities were cold, and in sharp contrast to the burning heat of my torso. Despite this heat, my body felt freezing, and as I tried in vain to cool my head off, my body erupted in a flurry of shivers that made breathing all but impossible.

My memory is sparse. I didn’t sleep, yet I dreamed in a strange, unprecedented way; I would call them mild hallucinations. It was as if my brain had been seized by some violent, malevolent, creative force that projected brutal images on the inside of my eyelids whenever they closed over my irises. My time consciousness waned, and hours passed before I realized how bad this was getting. I collapsed at 4:00; by 7:00, I was frail, constrained to my bed and thoroughly frightened. Despite the daunting array of physical symptoms, it was the mental ones that scared me the most, convincing me that some viral infection had bored itself deep into the folds of my brain. I have never been literally thrown onto my back like this before by illness, and I was, in all honesty, completely terrified and alone, without the slightest idea of how I would get out of this.

A flicker of intellect shown through my diseased form, and I reached for the cell phone on the wooden cabinet above my bed.

“Smey-getting worse. Not sure what to do. Any ideas?”

Soon after the SMS was sent, Raeksmey arrived with the TGC medical division. They marched into my room, armed with wet towels, anecdotal medications, words of comfort and enormous hearts, sitting on my bed, keeping me cool, rubbing my fingers and toes to generate warmth, and, most important of all, reassuring me. I suddenly found myself surrounded by Smey, Sopheap, Ratha, Sophal, and others who were constantly, insistently reminding me that they cared for me and everything would be just fine. Covered in moist clothing and towels, with their words of comfort resonating through my troubled mind, I felt my physical condition inevitably worsen, yet my fear dissipated. I was in good hands.

Sometime later, relatively comfortable beneath my blanket of moisture, Jumana, a fellow volunteer and doctor from Israel, came to inspect my condition. My temperature was at a steady 40 degrees, yet my fingers and toes were freezing. After describing my symptoms, she looked at me with great sympathy, and gave her prognosis. Malaria, or possibly Dengue, requiring hospitalization the next morning, unless things got worse during the night. The words of Allan and countless others come to mind.

“If you get sick enough that you need a hospital, forget Cambodia; get on a plane to Bangkok”

It grows late and my medical entourage begins dissipating. Jon arrives; as he had been working in town, he had no clue about my condition. We exchange a few words as my caretakers begin filing out. Sophal and Ratha resolve to stay with me. It is a Khmer custom, fueled by a vivid system of beliefs in the physical manifestations of countless spirits, to stay with the sick overnight and bring gifts to ward off the spirits that brought the illness. Ratha and Sophal settle on my floor, and I settle in for a long night. As Ratha covers my face in a wonderfully dampened towel, I dread the coming night, the thought of entering a Cambodian hospital at midnight, the lack of sleep and inevitable extension of my hallucinations and visions, and even the prospect of boarding a plane the next morning. Yet for now, with Ratha and Sophal watching over me, I am calm, at peace, under the watchful eyes of those who care deeply, resting in the eye of the storm. Tomorrow will come the trials, tribulations, dehydration, fatigue, exhaustion, and ultimate realizations of personal and essential human weakness, vulnerability and mortality. Tonight, I rest, surrounded by those I love.