Monday, July 14, 2014

Dengue Fever and the dangers of traveling alone

In my last post I felt my eyes wandering tiredly as I stared at a tiny village internet cafe computer screen.  I have had some photo problems with my camera and I was not feeling the patience to sort through technical things at the moment and since then I fear that I may have lost a lot of them.  It doesn't really matter though, at the time I was recently diagnosed with dengue fever and I had thought I was already in the recovery stage.  Today looking back just a short 8 days ago I cant help but laugh at how stupid that thought was.

Dengue makes you feel like every bone in your body has been replaced with shards of broken glass and your head becomes a throbbing ball of confusion, nausea and fever.  Simple tasks become great ones as nearly one hundred percent of your body's energy is being given towards fighting the virus and you end up spending most of your time in bed just laying and thinking and hoping you are doing everything appropriately to take care of yourself. 

I contracted the virus at the worst time as it was really only a matter of hours after I last parted ways with a friend I had been traveling with and it came to be that I would have to deal with this completely alone mostly in the surrounding of a small bamboo hut in a tiny village with no hospital.

Now it is passing and as it passes I choose to let it go.  I don't want to talk about it when I come home as it casts a nasty dark cloud over my experience in Madagascar and I don't want to assosciate such pain with such a beautiful place; the dichotomy is ironic and indescribable. 

So what do we do now?  I'm really not sure.  All this time sitting and thinking has boiled my brains.  I've hallucinated myself to sleep for a week now and rolled out a tapestry of dreams for myself.  I really don't know what I'm doing anymore and that is to say that I have never known what I'm doing.  I've been all over this world to countless places and I have developed an addiction for travel that can never be satisfied. 

I absolutely adore this country and I had never intended my blog to carry such negativity (i.e.  a few posts ago about racism or this post about dengue and internal bleeding).  I'm lost.. I'm lost and I'm in that writer's conundrum of choosing between posting this article or erasing the whole thing and leaving my ideas to rot in my head. 

My mom said something to me on the telephone the other day that was simple yet amazingly empowering to me.  She said, 'stay strong' and as simple as that sounds I thought about it for a while and I don't think in my entire life anyone has ever told me to stay strong.  Strength is an incredible gift and something I've never asked myself if I have been blessed with.  I have a stubborn mind and a brave soul but am I stong?  I guess I will never know.

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