In Sickness and in Health

I am imagining this blog-post as one of those movies, you know, with all of those flashbacks and special effects; the kind where you are always sort of in the dark because the writer wants it that way but they still sort of leave you in the light of the plot; everything is really not brought together until the end, you know? Well, here’s a go.

Our story begins with me getting sick. Crap, I revealed the plot too soon. Let me try again, everything is fine, I’m better – DAMN! Here’s to spoiling the happily-ever-after. Screw it, I don’t have a future in Hollywood, here is what happened.

In a land far-far away, closer or farther depending on where exactly you are in the world, technicalities… where am I even going with this sentence? Fate finally caught up to me and I got sick for the first time since being outside of the States. It had lasted for a few days; it being a chronic stomach ache accompanied by the occasional shooting pain. Whatever, I have a high tolerance for pain and I wasn’t dying. So I started drinking more liquids, popped a few more vitamins and carried on with my life. Then I woke up with a fever, and was really tired, and was freezing and had chills, and was weak…but I went to class…and then to work…and then came home and crashed. Drained.

My Indonesia friends were convinced that it was “masuk angin” literally translated to “open wind” (if they only knew) and that it simply meant I had contracted this Indonesian wind from going outside with wet hair, or sleeping with the air con too high, or anything else that can make you feel under the weather. Anyways, to test for this threatening medical anomaly, one must receive a back massage using this Chinese oil and a street coin. I am not joking. If your back turns red, you have masuk angin; if it doesn’t, you don’t. Simple, right?

Not if you are me. When this was explained to me I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. I thought the directions were described to me in a way that said that if the oil was the indicator of the redness, not my back. I was gravely mistaken. Picture this. Me, shirtless, lying on my bed. Okay, back to the story, simmer down ladies. My friend is rubbing this oil on my back before beginning to scrape my back, my actual back, with a coin...from the street. You no doubt want to know if this was painful.

Yes, yes it was. They were carving into my back with a street coin (which we sanitized, I didn’t want a staph infection on top of the open wind). Of course my back turned red, how could it not? I had six neat lines running in pairs away from my spine, along my ribs. The best part was that my friend, a superstitious medic, burps every time they give a massage like this. To them, they feel as though it represents them taking out the bad from my body and releasing...the good? They claim it’s involuntary but I'm not convinced. So, between the sound of scraping flesh, the muffled squeals from me, and the burps from my friend I had quite the cultural experience.

I ended up having a really bad fever that night and thus decided to go to the doctor the following morning after class. I still had a fever of over 100. He said my symptoms were either Dengue Fever, Typhoid Fever or a stomach bug (with a such a wide range of diagnosis I was expecting to hear the Black Plague or breast cancer next, either one) but after some blood work we concluded that it was a stomach bug. Oh joy. After consuming only plain food (scrambled eggs, toast, cereal) for a week and getting my fever down, I can finally say I am back to 100%. Thank goodness. I can also say that I didn’t have to visit a dermatologist for any skin infections that I may have contracted after what some call the “witch-craft” I endured.