Dama feebar

I’m sick. I’ve got pretty much every symptom I can think of: fever and chills, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, lightheadedness. I’m actually feeling a lot better now. Yesterday my fever was so high that I hallucinated a bit. Well, I’m not fully sure it counts as a legitimate hallucination, so maybe I’ll tell you about it and then take a poll. I was lying in bed awake but super feverish when this mute video-clip of Alice singing at a concert popped into my head. But it was a lucid hallucination so I decided that I wanted to star in it too, so suddenly I was up on stage as well, playing drums. And then I remembered that when people talk about what they’d want to do if they had lucid dreams, many say they’d want to fly. So then I flew for a bit, but then I got bored so I went skiing. And then the visual hallucination stopped. But later on I had auditory hallucinations. I could vaguely hear the goat baaing on the roof next door and suddenly it sounded like there was a goat baaing in my room, too, only it was baaing in my Senegalese grandfather’s voice. This happened several more times. I also heard traffic driving on and off through my room.

Anyway, when I first came home from school yesterday around 1:00, the maid didn’t really understand I wasn’t feeling well (between my Wolof and her French, communication can be difficult) and so when she told me to come eat lunch and I asked for just plain while rice and she said sure, I ended up with rice with sauce and fish. Which I promptly threw up. (Fun fact: Asking for plain white rice actually worked Wednesday, although both the maid and my host father laughed at me for wanting to eat food that boring, but even though there was no sauce, the rice tasted remarkably fishy. My family must cook rice in the equivalent of fish bouillon cubes.) Upon hearing that I had a fever and had vomited, my host family promptly determined I had malaria and went and bought me anti-malaria medication (not the preventative type I already have, the type you take when you come down with malaria). The pills were made by Novartis, which is where my mom works, so that made me feel a bit closer to home, but I tried to explain to my host family that a few weeks before a guy in my group had similar symptoms and everyone assumed he had malaria because but he didn’t. My family just thought I was in denial, but I got out of taking the pills.

This morning I went to the doctor and he confirmed that I did not have malaria and gave me more medicine, so that I had one pill to take twice a day so that I wouldn’t have diarrhea and one to take half an hour before every meal so that I wouldn’t vomit and dissolving pellet to take every four hours to reduce my fever. Too many pills. Plus rather than tasting like nauseatingly fake lemon or orange as it would in the US, the dissolving pellet tastes incredibly strongly of salt. As in saltier than ocean water. So drinking that ever four hours is just delightful.

I am feeling considerably better today. But at about 2:30 this afternoon, I went to lie down for a bit, figuring I’d be feeling up for doing something after I rested. The next thing I knew, it was 9:30 and I had spent the entirety of the afternoon and evening just lying in my bed, not reading, not listening to music, not even sleeping, really, just lying there feeling exhausted. And whenever I got up I’d feel lightheaded and I actually fainted in front of Marie Sophie and Ibrahima when they knocked on my door to ask if I was feeling better, which I think terrified them. It’s funny, yesterday I was telling Alice how I faint every two years or so and started thinking about how the last time I fainted was January of 2009 and how I was due to faint sometime soon. And then I fainted the next day.