I’m always amazed at how pale I look when I’m sick…
Bubble girl is a nick name I’ve had for years, it’s a reference to my weak stomach. Yesterday, once again I was stuck down with the tummy blues. Totally my fault. The pervious day for lunch I had taken Kath to Tib-market, a tiny restaurant run out of a house in the slums. I was taken there last week with some friends from NID and was mightily impressed, the food was awesome. You walk down a tight dusty alleyway with a convoy of children running after you yelling “Auntie, Auntie, Sooooo beautiful, Auntie!”, you duck through a door designed for a midget, the smell that greets you- delicious, two men are cooking up a storm and a sweat catering for the packed inner room (packed full of NID students, escaping from the mess food), you leave your chappals by the door and squish inside. The two Tibetan chefs come down to Ahmedabad for half the year, operating the restaurant and saving, the other half of the year is spent in Tibet with their families. They are famous for their Mo-mo’s (dumplings), in particular their beef Mo-mo’s, scrumptious (beef, a rarity in the land where the cow is considered sacred)! In retrospect it was kind of stupid eating at the slums with my reputation for a weak stomach, last week I must have been dinning out under my lucky star- no problems (instilling in me a false sense of confidence), this week another story. I may be a bubble girl, but I sure as hell don’t like confining myself to a bubble (haha- an exchange to India is certainly no bubble existence), my sister calls me ‘Fiona living-on-the-edge Buchanan’. So I enjoyed Tib-markets finest, planting a time bomb in my gut which was to go off 14 hours later.
Not one to do things by halves, that evening Kath had gone on a shopping extravaganza and we feasted on her booty- three kinds of cheeses, blue, gouda and brie, accompanied by fresh fruit, bread, crackers and fancy jam, the only thing that was missing was a bottle of fancy red. Did I mention I’m lactose intolerant, cheese is one of my weaknesses, I can eat it as long as I take it easy. Three rich cheeses after months of abstaining is not taking it easy, I was just ensuring that if I got sick it was going to be memorable.Kath went to bed and I pottered around doing uni work, concept development for my ceramics project, at 1 am I forced myself to bed- I’m trying to break my bad sleeping habits. For the next three hours I lay in bed wide awake, over heating, slightly uncomfortable, more than anything just completely awake. It was the calm before the storm.
At 4 am it hit, an explosion on the inside and out, I spent the better part of the next two hours sitting on the toilet. By 6 am the vomiting began, you know you’re in trouble when when you rush to the toilet and you can’t work out what’s more pressing the urgent need to vomit or shit(I’ve thought about and there’s really no delicate way to put it- poo, excrete, exit all matter from bowls). Kath was up at 6:30 on her way to the gym, I could still put on a cheerful face despite the internal turmoil, the worst was still to come. I called my mum between toilet bouts, I was desperate for some mum love, there’s not a lot she can do on the other side of the world, though just hearing her voice makes me feel a bit calmer. Mum always the voice of practicality asked where I had eaten and went on to drum into me the importance of hygiene and avoiding places that could potentially be unhygienic, particularly in the heat. Flash back- to the cramped room where we had left our shoes and in which the men were preparing the meals, large bowls of uncooked uncovered food perched on every available surface, nothing which even remotely resembled a refrigerator and it was the hottest day in ages. All details which had washed over me at the time, didn’t I feel more than a little sheepish when I relayed this to mum. The call came to a rather abrupt end. Whatever had gripped me just kept growing in intensity, I was puking every ten minutes, I was the vom-inator, expelling everything- absolutely everything from my body. The pain, oh the pain, pain killers weren’t an option, they wouldn’t last two seconds in my stomach. I tried all kinds of positions to make the pain stop, curled in a ball on my bed, stretched out on the mat under the fan in the front room, sitting on a chair hunched over with my head in my lap, lying on a towel in the kitchen on the hard cool tiles, the only thing which seemed to give me any sort of relief was kneeling in the bathroom with my head under the shower. The cold water on my hot feverish head seemed to numb the pain*. Not very practical, I didn’t want to waste water, so I would only do it in short bursts. Kath came back to find me looking like death warmed up, she was a gem, she really tried to make me feel more comfortable. The campus doctor was meant to be in at 8:30, between 8:30 and 9 I dragged myself to her office three times, no doctor. The assistant warden took pity on me and called to find out what was happening, apparently the doctor was on leave, then she kindly called a doctor in for me, he arrived an hour later. I was given two courses of antibiotics and told to eat lightly for the day.
I think I got off lucky, in the grand scheme of things it was only about six hours of hell followed by a marathon sleep. I slept the day away, got up for three hours and then slept for another 13 hours.
* I was that..close to crying!
