No pictures of me for this update - Minoli my roommie and one of my besties here took a few photos at different points in my hospital journey but she's off bonding with the earth or something in Nepal until Sunday. I'll go back and add photos later. Honestly I haven't seen any of them since they've been taken and I imagine they're very, very flattering - definitely the kind of thing I want my name associated with forever on the internet. There's a few pictures, but none of them are mine. All are stolen from the internet.
Hey, check out that orange country to the right of India. Guess which country that is? Hint: I'm there.
Anyways, story time! I'm guessing most people reading this are not familiar with dengue because they've been smart enough to stay in places where it doesn't exist. Like malaria (which I've also had), dengue is transmitted through mosquito bite. It's also known as breakbone fever so that should give an idea of exactly how much fun it is to catch. The really awful thing about it is that it comes on really suddenly. Monday night I was perfectly fine, in great spirits actually trying to decide what to pack for my trip to India. I tried and failed at making a spanish tortilla for Minoli and I for dinner, and went to bed after staying up late reading on my newly arrived kindle. I was feeling really itchy from mosquito bites so I also took a half a benadryl before bed to help calm that nonsense down. This is important to the story because I can be affected by the weirder side-effects of benadryl, and so when I started waking up with a splitting headache and leg cramps (think charlie horses) in the middle of the night, I assumed I was reacting badly to the benadryl.
The next morning my head felt steamrolled. I wondered whether I had a migraine for the first time in my life, but popped two excedrin and hopped in the shower. After hopping out I noticed how shaky I felt, and no matter how many times I tried to dry myself with a towel I was still dripping. Eventually (I'm always this dumb in the morning) I realized I was dripping sweat, which was odd considering I had the AC going and was quite comfortable.
Anyways, I finished grabbing my things including a chickpea salad for lunch that still resides in the office fridge to this day. That's going to be terrifying to clean out later. Loaded onto the van and headed to school, where I confided in my friend Asfara that I was feeling off. After unloading in my office I decided to run over to the health clinic before my 12:30 afternoon meeting.
At the health clinic I described my symptoms and got my vitals taken. The nurse recommended I go to my meeting and then come back to the clinic to rest until the doctor came in later that afternoon. I didn't have a temperature and my heart rate and all was normal, so she told me to drink fluids and sent me on my way. I headed back to the fellows office where there's a couch and decided to lay low and rest until my meeting to see if I could kick whatever it was. Eventually I felt worse and worse, and texted Minoli that I was dying because I'm nothing if not hyperbolic. She fetched me and hauled my butt back over to the clinic where my vitals were taken again and my temperature was already 101.4 after less than an hour away!
Here's one entrance of the hospital I stayed at.
I was immediately laid out into the bed area to rest while the nurse checked the rest of me and decided what to do. She noticed pretty quickly that my finger and toenails were all a dark purple and after checking that I wasn't wearing nail polish, they pulled the oxygen tank over and strapped me into the good, clean sweet stuff. Oxygen. Amazing how nice it is to breathe that in after dealing with pollution here in Chittagong normally! I was shivering violently so they loaded some blankets onto me while trying to force me to eat some cookies so I could take Tylenol to lower my fever.
Honestly, this is about where I started to check out. Everything below is what I remember coming through a pretty high fever and so my concept of time and space is mostly nonexistent. I remember being told I had to go to the hospital and protesting because I had to go to India in two days - like if I could just stay out of the hospital I'd be well enough to stick on a plane.
Once at the hospital the nurses crowded around and the AUW nurses who accompanied (one American nurse and one Bangladeshi nurse) tried taking care of me, fending off the local nurses, and filling out paperwork. It was a hectic process that I mostly remember for the moment a squat older Bangladeshi nurse came in armed with gloves and a suppository. Caught between hysterical laughter and crying, I got permission to, uh, take care of that myself. Meanwhile my basic contact information, including my father/husband's name was written down on a chart affixed to me. After what could have been ten minutes or ten hours, I was moved from the ICU to a private room, the VIP suite (don't get excited for me).
Other entrance of hospital I was at.
My fever was taken again in the VIP suite and it rose somewhere over 103.5 at that point. I was being given lots of tylonel and an IV bag was set to give me fluids, but the staff refused to give me anything stronger despite the bone-breaking pain in all of my limbs. Hence the name breakbone fever. Turns out dengue has a nasty habit of turning hemorrhagic, especially with any kind of pain killer administered to deal with the joint pain. So there's literally nothing you can do for the pain and fever other than tylonel.
Of course at this point they weren't sure it was dengue, I had to get all the proper tests done. Accompanied now by just Asfara, a Bangladeshi fellow who I consider one of my closest friends here, I was taken out of bed and wheeled down to what I was told was the lab area for an x-ray and blood tests. Turns out the lab area was literally just the front hall of the hospital entrance. Anyone who knows me well knows I'm not a fan of needles, so here I am sobbing in pain, hallucinating from fever, dragged sweating and dripping past the crowded waiting areas of the hospital so someone could take my blood. It gets better. Immediately after that's over with, the take me to go get x-rays by CARRYING ME DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS.
That's right, this "modern" hospital in the heart of Bangladesh has decided that downstairs in a non-elevator accessible room is the best place to put an x-ray machine. I was carried down by two male nurses and a door guard who looked about my grandfather's age. Absolutely nothing was stopping them from dropping me. And of course I was too tired to stand for the x-ray so they had to let me sit in the wheelchair and then propped me up for 30 seconds it took the machine to take a photo. When I was done I was carried back up the stairs and then took the elevator back to my private room.
From here the story gets much less interesting. I was watched round-the-clock by a mixture of friends here and AUW staff, some of whom were nice enough and some of whom I dislike enough to wish dengue on. We had to keep the door to the room locked to keep out errant nurses or workers who popped in to stare at the sick white girl, which got pretty old. My fever dreams got pretty vivid and if I didn't know who was with me at the time I would start calling people until someone I knew and liked answered the phone and listened to me hysterically respond to whatever hallucination I was having. My favorites include imagining someone brought in one of the feral dogs I like to pet outside the other AUW housing building and let it crawl onto my back where it trapped me in heat. Another included the mosquito net around my bed falling on me, making me think a giant spider had tried grabbing me into its web.
I was brought food three times a day that I refused to eat. The one time a friend insisted I ate, I took one mouthful of omelette before throwing just everything up. I didn't go a single day without throwing up while in the hospital, and have lost a pretty crazy amount of weight because of it. It almost makes me wish I had taken before- and after- photos. It's significant enough that several other fellows have commented after seeing me out of the hospital for the first time.
Well, that's about it! I was locked away in the hospital until my fever dropped for more than 24-hours, which means I didn't get released until Sunday night after being there since Tuesday afternoon. Everyone was gone on holiday off amazing places like India (without me), Malaysia, Nepal, and other parts of Bangladesh, so I've mostly been lying about at home resting and recovering and going a little crazy with boredom. Boy I was looking forward to getting out of this country for a few days! Hopefully I can find the time next weekend to head down to the beach area and stay in the nicer resort where western women can wear bikinis to relax some.
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