Thursday, February 19, 2009

Unidentifiable fevers--my favorite

It seems that travelling makes me sick. Or at least I get sick when I travel (though I’ll claim no causal connection). In any case, I’ve had a low fever (99-102 degrees) ever since I’ve gotten here. It hasn’t stopped me from getting things done, though.

But let me take it back to the beginning. After a wonderful night’s sleep on Monday night, I got up on Tuesday morning to go get my research authorization. Rosemary came with, since apparently M. Guindo, the director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique et Technique is her colleague. He was a charming man and got my research authorization (and by that I mean Jeff’s ) executed without any problems.

Afterwards, Rosemary and I went up to Amandine to wait for a friend of mine, a Dutch linguist named Victoria who works on Malian sign language. She’s a very bubbly and passionate person, and it’s hard to be in a bad mood around her. She came with the president of Mali’s deaf society, and she carried on almost all of the lunch conversations in both sign and English. Very impressive. She wants to mount a project to study sign languages in Dogon country, so we discussed those prospects.

After lunch, we went home and I powered through a lot of work on the dictionary. Hamed really wanted to watch a movie that evening, so we put on Willow with Rosemary’s LCD projector and watched it “big screen”. I was beginning to feel more feverish at this point, and finally took my temperature, which was over 100. I Skyped a little bit and then went to bed.

Yesterday morning, there were more errands to run. First, Rosemary and I went to the Embassy, where we both had mail waiting for us. I got three big boxes full of clothes for my villagers that took extra help to get outside and into a taxi. We went home to drop off our mail, but Mohammed wasn’t there, so we left the boxes with the neighbors and set out on foot for Amandine.

There we had another lunch date, this time with Spencer (the Fulbrighter I had yet to meet) and two Peace Corps volunteers, Tiffany and Alec. They were all extremely friendly and pleasant individuals, which made for a wonderful lunch. To top it all off, I had a banana split smothered in whipped cream. I certainly can’t find that in Douentza.

I was feeling a little feverish on the walk back and immediately hit my bed for a nap. Unfortunately, I felt no better when I got up and had a temperature of 102. That evening, I decided it was time to go to the doctor. My neck has been stiff, so I was paranoid about meningitis (though in all likelihood, the stiff neck is just due to the 12 hour bus ride).

Rosemary was kind enough to accompany me to the doctor. Neither of us had particularly high hopes for Malian clinics, but we went to the one the embassy recommended, a place called Clinique Pasteur. We were both very pleasantly surprised. The clinic was clean and nicely decorated, and the doctor, a young guy by the name of Dr. Toure, I believe, seemed very thorough and knowledgeable (and not to mention friendly—an important character trait in a doctor). I explained my symptoms (fever, fatigue, stiff neck, no problems with appetite or anything else stomach related). It turns out when he took my temperature, I no longer had a fever, but he said he’d do a blood test for malaria just to be safe. He sent me down the hall to the lab, where the technician used a nice new needle to give me a finger prick. Twenty minutes later, the technician hands me my results in a very official envelope with my name printed (as in computer printed) and everything. We took it back to the doctor, and he told me they were negative. He said the most likely cause of my fever is the heat and fatigue of working too much (which I have been doing), and prescribed me paracetamol and an anti-fatigue medicine.

He took us over to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist was sitting playing a computer game on a computer with Obama on the desktop. We got to talking about Obama, and he said something I hadn’t heard before. He said he likes and respect McCain too because he was a very gracious loser. I thought that was interesting. He spoke highly of Americans, as most people do here, which always makes you feel good. I got my medicines, and we took off. The whole visit cost me only 50 bucks (which I should get reimbursed for).

As Rosemary and I were getting into the taxi to go home, the pharmacist runs out and invites me to a party on Saturday night, “where there will be French people and we can converse”. I’m not going to go, but it was a nice invitation anyway.

I don’t know what’s up with the French and liking to drink their medicines, but my paracetamols are dissolving tablets like Alka-Seltzer, and the anti-fatigue medicine are a liquid individually packaged in little glass vials.

I colored in the picture of Moses in my Great Lawyers Coloring Book and went to bed.

This morning, I found that I still had a slight fever, though only 99.8. I took a paracetamol and set to work, finishing up the lexical spreadsheet edits. Now I just have to analyze the few problem words I recorded and I can send that off to Jeff. My dictionary is not quite at that stage, though I have less than 1000 words left. Just a day’s work.

As I was working, I decided I should check on my burn, which is taking an awfully long time to heal. Sure enough, it didn’t look real great. When Rosemary and Mohammed got back from the Embassy, she gave me some hydrogen peroxide, which sapped some of the infection out of it. I will reapply later. I was stupid to not show the wound to the doctor yesterday, but if I’m still feeling bad this evening, I’m going to go back, because the fever could be connected with the infected burn, in which case I should get some antibiotics ASAP.

In any case, I’m at Le Campagnard right now, eating a delicious pizza (after already eating a warm goat cheese toast salad) and using their wireless. It’s an expensive meal, but well worth it. Pictures will be up shortly.

1 comment:

Kate P said...

Dude I'm gonna say the same thing to you that I've been saying to my friends from treatment: Take care of yourself! I know you will but still, don't try to power through shit while your sick, just focus on getting better. I need you healthy when you come back so I can gush all my secret's to you and get fully animated responses. :) It sounds like other than being sick things are going well though. Keep up the good work!