Africa Journal #11: "__________!"

Africa Journal #11: “__________!”

Most of my tropical-fever nights I’ve been musing, perhaps obsessing, over what would be a catching, quippy intro to my latest and greatest journal update. As you can see, not much is the result. But of course I had better things to feverishly dream about, such as last night’s classic “I dreamed I joined the Coast Guard” dream. You know you’re delusional if you even dream of joining the Coast Guard, right Ryan? I mean real men join the Navy or a department therein, right?

Either way, it’s Sunday morning, I feel 60% and I’m drinking coffee because I love it and because I’m hoping the caffeine will help rid me of the constant headache I’ve had since Tuesday. With stimulants currently combating the malaria or whatever is in my bloodstream I am going to update you on my life. I fear this will be long, but not really. As most of my friends have said over the years, I’m waging a war on brevity and definitely emerging victorious….

I could either start with the computer debacle or the disease, but I believe it would be prudent to go with the latter before the former. So! I’ve been having an oscillating-intensity fever, constant headache, come-and-go appetite, and general achiness since Tuesday. That was about the last time I have been able to think clearly or be productive. I’ve had swings of jovial moods amidst the sickness to dour, cynical generalized bitterness. The first few days I just sucked it up thinking, “I’ll get better; I always do!” But that didn’t happen. The last time I was deathly ill I didn’t go to the hospital of course because of, well, if I’m honest, American political neo-liberal macroeconomic failures of the past 30 years masqueraded as, “you don’t have health insurance, Dan.” So I just sucked it up and hoped I didn’t die. It’s the legitistan way. This time, far removed from the medicinal properties of my beloved Arizona home, Africa got to me and tried to kill me. So this past Friday I went to a local clinic for Mzungus like myself. In truth, Gina, a hardcore Arizonan woman here who is taking care of me, made me go to the hospital.

“The Surgery”, as it is awesomely called, is located in the beautiful and relatively affluent part of North-Central Kampala known as Garden City. Granted, I’ve been jumped here, so it isn’t necessarily a cut out of Scottsdale, but it is really nice and far more beautiful than Scottsdale. I had to wait just over an hour to see a doctor, and he was a very kind, intelligent Ugandan man and took good care of me. Initially he, a specialist in tropical medicine, thought that my symptomology (is that a word?) leaned more towards bilharzias than malaria, which is what I thought I had. I would have gotten bilharzias, a small worm that tries to kill you, when I went swimming in Lake Victoria my 2nd week here. The gestation period was right on and the initial effects of being “infected”, if you will, were the symptoms I was currently experiencing. So Dr. Conrad, which was his name, had me do it DUI style: Blood, Breath, and Urine. Ok, so breath was irrelevant and possibly contagious but I had to give blood and urine. Urine, of course, is par for the course. Blood…. Well, I’d rather get a back piece tattoo for 13 hours than have someone stick a needle into an arm vein for 2 minutes. Ugh. Hell is hospital in my feverish dreams…

Anyways, they took blood—I didn’t watch—and then I had to wait. In the next partition over there was an Indian man who had obviously been in a really bad accident at some point in time having some regular maintenance done—I guess. His intermittent screams of pain and genuine laughter with the Ugandan doctor were singularly disconcerting. I think I was at 100+ degrees at that point in time, so not too bad, but feeling hyper-sensitive to sound, smell, and needles. About 30 minutes later Gina snuck in to my room to check on me. She’s a grandmother after all and won’t take “no” for an answer. I’m sure my mother would understand. Soon after Dr. Conrad came in and let us know that the results came back negative for bilharzias and malaria and that I likely had some sort of virus. I asked, “like what….” Thinking, “well, I know it’s not HIV, so that’s good….” Anything else was possible. Africa has some pretty cool diseases that I will never have a chance to fight in the U.S. In fact, I heard that the village I currently live in a couple years ago had one recorded case of Ebola. It was the only village in Uganda to have an Ebola case that year, again, allegedly. So maybe…. but no, there is no chance of me having Ebola because Ebola comes from certain monkeys that live in mountainous areas (like the primate SIV strain which is where HIV and HIV2 both come from); fun facts, terrible ways to die. So, that didn’t really narrow it down. Heck there are probably like 14,000,000 other viruses. That being said, Dr. Conrad said, “I don’t know what virus it may be. Likely you’d fight it for a while and then you’re immune system would overcome. [I’m thinking, ‘Sweet! New antibodies!’] We’re going to watch that. What is also possible, Dan, is that you have malaria it’s just of a strain that is harder to detect or it has not left your liver yet because that is where malaria hides out. So what I want you to do is not take your anti-malarial medicine so that if you have malaria it can show up and we can treat it.” I’m thinking, “or I will get malaria in that period of time on top of my other disease.” But I’m a cynic. So with that he let me hobble down to pay the $39 that my medical care cost. Seriously, what a deal! Yet another thing the U.S. has to learn from Africa.

That was a couple days ago, so tomorrow I’m to return to do the tests again to see if anything has shown up. The doctor has also ordered that I stay in Kampala until I get better… which is advice I’ll likely take. The hospitals are close here; they are pretty far in my village of Kikubampagi. I figure that 28 is a tad early to die, but if you’re going to die, Africa is the place to do it. I mean honestly, the worst way to die is of “complications” at a phenomenally expensive hospital in the United States that has miraculously kept you alive for $36,000 a day to age 84 despite the myriad of otherwise-life-ending conditions your corporeal state must endure. I will not pretend that my illness has this 20-something contemplating death, for that is not true in the way it seems to be true for people I know who edge into the later years of their life. But, I also don’t live my life to survive, but to thrive. I know that sounds overly poetic, but it is true. I know that thriving will in turn lower my life expectancy, and from an evolutionary biology perspective, lower the chances that my genes will go on in the species. Perhaps I’m not “fit” or perhaps I’m not the least of which concerned about fitness and believe wholeheartedly that such things belong to God and I need not worry about them. In truth I am scared to die. Very scared (in general). There are so many things I will have wished I had said, so many things I would have wished I had done. But a more alarming and pressing fear is that I will have squandered life in the hapless pursuit of living longer. That’s a personal conviction and I will preach it to few. Being decently sick of a tropical disease in a modern state in Africa is hardly the harrowing story of survival that it may sound to some. I’m in literally almost no danger of dying from anything disease-related, but I do, in a sense, have more opportunity to make decisions here that could willingly place me further from the safety net that my Western life has always afforded me, health care or not. It is, and always will be, a question of values. What do I value most? The “correct” answer is saying that I want to die for the Gospel and yada yada. A part of me does and a part of me doesn’t. A part of me wants to die for my lover or for faux-selfless reasons. None of me wants to die for my country—sorry. But I am bifurcated, as always. I do hope, however, that the net effect of my life, whether I die young or old, is that I somehow communicate to a profoundly broken world that the faith I attempt to believe has something to say for the chronic illness we all carry. I want people to somehow receive that if they look in the mirror they are looking upon something incredibly valuable and beautiful, even if they’re “the worst of sinners” and have taken life or innocence. Then they can address the rot that plagues their heart. This world is an ugly place and none of us escape alive. Just some thoughts.

God has been good to me in this time. I’ve not been able to get on the internet much because it require movement and presence of mind, but the few times I have and read even a fraction of what people have said I’ve been overwhelmed with the support. Whether fundamentalist Baptist or dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, many of you have emailed, messaged, texted, prayed, offered positive thoughts, and even sent “good vibes” my way. My personal conviction is in the efficacy of prayer, but I do believe God sees the hearts of all men (and women) and listens to the beseeching of his children for healing and restoration. I live in expectation of healing. Part of that is faith, part of that is statistical reasoning. Yet I know that God is working in all the crazy events of the past two weeks, and a lot I haven’t mentioned has gone on. Africa is always a little wild, but this is starting to push it a bit. I’ll write more about that (and about the crazy story concerning my computer) in a bit, but this will have to suffice for now. It’s Sunday morning and I’m skipping church here in Africa to listen to my mentor, Pastor Bob, give a sermon on beauty from Romans. Oh, and it can be found here: http://www.moonvalleybible.org/sermons.php

Can’t wait.

I love you all.

Dan