Take Plenty Fluids

I am going to ignore the old adage that if you don’t have anything good to say that you should keep your blog to yourself.

I have spent much of the past 36 hours in bed and nearly-comatose – feeling like a fish in the market, with my mouth agape and my eyes glazed over and staring in the direction of my closet door.

I went to the hospital last night to see what was wrong. “Pole kwa umeme,” the doctor said, apologizing for the lack of electricity in his office.

“Hamna shaka.” I explained my symptoms: dizziness to the point of nearly fainting, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pain, and a sharp but brief headache. He sent me off for a malaria test – and fair enough, the symptoms and geography fit – but I was a little surprised by his diagnosis when I returned to his office with the negative test results.

“You have an upper respiratory infection,” he said to me, writing out a prescription accordingly.

“Hunh?” I thought he must have me confused with another patient, the light being so poor and all.

“An upper respiratory infection.”

“Based on what, the fact that I don’t have malaria?”

“It’s the signs in the air,” he said.

“But my primary symptoms are dizziness and lethargy. Don’t you think you should check my blood pressure or something?” He was resistant to the idea, but eventually stepped out of his office, searched for a key and for someone to retrieve the pressure cuff from wherever it was stashed.

You see, this hospital looks quite nice from the outside. But I was beginning to realize that was the best vantage point from which to view it. Inside, bloody gauze was stuck to the floor, and the “hazardous waste container” was a bed pan sitting on a counter, where I saw a used needle get tossed in and promptly bounce to the floor. A roach near my foot appeared to be having a seizure, lying on his back and looking in worse shape than I had been in earlier that day. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he, too, had an upper respiratory infection.

A nurse returned with a pressure cuff and sat down to administer the test. “100 over 60,” she said.

“That's below my personal average," I told the Doctor, "So what would cause such a sudden drop in blood pressure like this, besides an upper respiratory infection?”

“Anxiety,” he said.

“But the most anxious I have felt all day has been in your office. Is there anything else it could be?”

“Maybe somebody is punishing you.”

“Punishing me?”

“Punishing you,” he repeated ominously, looking at me with great meaning, almost accusatory and threatening. Does my Doctor really believe in witchcraft, I wondered. “Daktari nyngeni ipo?” Is there another doctor here? He smiled back. I tried a different tact: “can sodium – ‘chumvi’ – affect blood pressure?” After all, before the attack all I had eaten was a chapati laced with salt.

“Umm," he said looking around the room, "I don’t know.” Then he had a flash of genius: “you should drink water,” he said, crossing-off the respiratory-related prescription and writing instead “Take Plenty Fluids.” So while we still weren’t sure what the root of my problem was, we seemed to have the answer: water.

Later that night, I had fevers which ping-ponged between 97.7 and 101 degrees, shivering at one moment and baking the next. And while drinking water probably helped, it didn't seem able to adequately counteract whatever ailed me.

I laid in bed, wishing the cell network would work so I could call Dr. Mom to get her advice on how to lower the fever and increase the blood pressure. But the network was down, as was our power. I laid in bed sweating in the dark, feeling powerless myself.