Sister Iris has said to me several times, "Catalina, you're going to have new and different experiences here this year." She was right.
To last year's list of illnesses/body issues (traveller's diarrhea, head lice, parasites, fleas) I have now added foot fungus (thanks to the shower at Dr. Tony's, I think; easily cured with an antifungal cream and shower sandals) and a nasty infection that wiped me out for the second week of March and left me slightly asthmatic to the present day. It happened thus: I went out dancing one Friday with a couple of friends, all excited about seeing a live salsa band, and had a great time, but came home coughing and with a sore throat. I blame the smoke they kept pouring onto the dance floor for the sake of a cool ambience. By the next morning I had a fever. Since my stomach was fine (thank God), I figured it was a virus from drinking from the same water bottle as everyone else in the group and would go away in a day or two. When it didn't, I went to the doctor in the town's medical post, a very sweet, huggy, talkative friend of Sister Consuelo's named Ana Maria; and sure enough she gave me an antibiotic.
That night was quite an exciting one. Consuelo's aunt, Señora Fransicsa, was still in the house at that point with her 19-year-old daughter Elena and the 12-year-old Rubén, waiting for her operation to get a new heart valve. In the evening, duped into walking by those lying fever-reducing pills, I went over to the church choir rehearsal (now in the building connected to my house!), and an hour later was laid out in my bed once more with a raging fever. Getting up to call the doctor and ask her how to adjust the doses of the various medicines she'd given me was one of the biggest physical efforts I have recently made, but I knew I had to do it or I'd lie there and burn up. After another fever-reducing pill, it took an hour to come down to the point where I could sit up, but my temperature was still 38 C or about 100 F, with at least three hours before I could take another pill. Iris, who hadn't gone up to the other house yet, brought me a cloth and a bowl of vinegar: "Here. This is how you bring down a fever." And I didn't mind the smell of the vinegar dripping off the cloth and soaking into my pillowcase, my hair, etc, because the soaked towel drew off the heat from my forehead like a dry towel soaks up water. Every time I took it off to re-wet it, I could touch it and feel the heat radiating from the side that had been pressed against my head.
Iris and Magdalena then went up to Delicias with instructions to call them if we needed anything. In the house was me, Maria Laura, and Consuelo's family. I dozed peacefully for a few hours with vinegar on my head. Then at almost midnight, Elena woke me up to ask if I had any blankets I wasn't using. ("Blankets?") Her mother was lying in bed with a fever, shaking with chills under a pile of bankets. I thought, oh God--this isn't a 23-year-old with an infection, it's a frail late-middle-aged woman waiting for a heart valve transplant. So, feeling almost normal again, I got up and poured her some hot tea while her daughter massaged her and kept her warm. She was shaking too much to sit up in bed and tried to sip it through a straw. We tried to give her one of my fever-reducing pills--and she retched and threw up. At which point I freaked out and thought, she needs medical attention. Called Iris to see if Iris could go with her to the medical post in Delicias, the only one open at this hour. But Iris said no, in her condition it's more dangerous to move her than not to move her; the solution is to massage her feet and give her hot things to drink to take away the chills. Despite the proven miracle of the vinegar, I discovered that I am still an American who believes in science and drugs rather than massages as the way to cure illnesses: I was not satisfied with this answer. So I then proceeded to call my doctor at home, woke up her mother, who refused to wake Ana María because that would involve going over next door (presumably the family all lives in a sort of complex of connecting houses) and waking up the kids, and did I know what time it was? I knew perfectly well what time it was and I knew perfectly well that none of us, Maria Laura or me or Iris or Magda or Fransisca's children, were doctors or nurses, and we simply didn't have the right knowledge to give Fransisca what she needed. But I didn't get to speak to Ana María. I think I was talking to Iris again when I suddenly felt dizzy, handed the phone to Maria Laura, and went back to lie on my bed before I fainted. And put more vinegar on my head. I'd been up for perhaps half an hour.
After a while Fransisca felt warmer again; it turned out she had managed to keep the fever-reducer pill down, and that helped her sleep, plus I'd given her half of my vinegar. I think the next day they (Fransisca and Elena) went to the doctor. But during the first two weeks of March they went back and forth from the hospital so many times, I lost track of what they were going for when. It's possible that they simply accepted the fact that Fransisca felt better the next day, and did nothing. (Perhaps they gave her lots of hot tea and massages and rest and who knows what else, and considered this "doing something"--as well as avoiding food and drink from the refrigerator. Fransisca told me several times that the reason I kept coughing was that I ate and drank cold things. Even doctors here have told me to eat and drink everything at room temperature to avoid colds... I suppose there may be some basis for this in a desert climate that changes temperature so drastically from day to night, from cloudy morning to sunny mid-afternoon, and where the humidity from the nearby ocean gets into your lungs. Who knows.)
All during that second week of March I struggled to get back to normal, resting, taking my pills, trying to walk a little or do little things around the house. Mostly I felt bored and useless. But I read a lot of an excellent book, An Experience of Spirit: Spirituality and Storytelling, by John Shea, and I wrote a song. Parts of it kept occurring to me when I was lying in my bed with nothing to do. The theme is getting over disappointment and learning to live with it, as another job of mine during February and March has been to get over a crush I had last year and move on. But reading the book on spirituality, I connected the romantic part of the song with another verse about someone who gets tired of waiting to find what she needs in religion, and decides to move on from that too and live without it. I guess it's about unresolved longing. (For those who care, I never play the tonic chord as A major, it's always an A major 7th.) I'm very happy to sing it for anyone who will listen.
By the end of that week I felt good enough to start auditioning little kids for this year's 4th and 5th grade choirs in Fe y Alegría! More later on that, my work in general, and why life here is insanely busy. But on the sickness front: the next weekend, Fransisca had a sort of attack where her whole chest hurt. She was sitting in bed or on a chair, rocking a bit, and sighing, Ay, ay ay... Ay, Dios... ay, ay, ay, Elena, I can't take it... Elena stayed constantly by her side, calm and cool, rubbing her back and bringing her things, but she couldn't do much. Rather than going immediately to the emergency room, Fransisca's older son Lucho was called to come get them and go with them, and they waited for him to get there for over an hour, because he doesn't exactly live close by. In the US I would have called 911 and put the two of them on an ambulance right away. (And the cars would pull over for the ambulance once they're out on the road. Sometimes there are issues with that here.) Eventually Lucho did come and they got in a taxi to the emergency room.
Fransisca stayed in the hospital and has been there since. Elena spent most of the next week by her side while Rubén studies in 7th grade at Fe y Alegría. But last week, Elena got appendicitis-- probably from the stress of being her mom's primary caregiver, going back and forth on the exhausting buses to the hospital, coming here to sleep and to wash her mom's clothes, not eating regularly, etc. She is an amazingly warm, caring, efficient, smart, responsible young woman who doesn't like to ask for help and prefers to handle it herself, until she can't. Now she's in the same hospital ward as her mom, recovering from her operation. Her brother Lucho has taken up a lot of the caregiving work now, and their father Victor has come down from Sullana and is now living in our house with Rubén. It helps Rubén a lot, I think, to have his dad around, and it helps us too. When it was just me, two nuns, and Rubén in the house most of the time, the poor kid had no family but a lot of foreign "aunts" trying to care for him, cook for him, keep track of him, help him with his homework, etc. It takes a lot of time and energy, having a kid in the house, even a delightful kid like Rubén. He's not rambunctious, but he has a lot of energy, curiosity, interest, and he's always smiling. He's totally into the church choir, loves singing with us, and hero-worships Luis Alberto--he's constantly asking me, "Katalina, are you going to the choir? Is there choir tonight? Can you play that song Luis Alberto was teaching everybody last night? Is Luis Alberto there?" It's really cute. Yesterday we went to the market together and he helped me decorate the cake for Sister Patricia's goodbye party.
To last year's list of illnesses/body issues (traveller's diarrhea, head lice, parasites, fleas) I have now added foot fungus (thanks to the shower at Dr. Tony's, I think; easily cured with an antifungal cream and shower sandals) and a nasty infection that wiped me out for the second week of March and left me slightly asthmatic to the present day. It happened thus: I went out dancing one Friday with a couple of friends, all excited about seeing a live salsa band, and had a great time, but came home coughing and with a sore throat. I blame the smoke they kept pouring onto the dance floor for the sake of a cool ambience. By the next morning I had a fever. Since my stomach was fine (thank God), I figured it was a virus from drinking from the same water bottle as everyone else in the group and would go away in a day or two. When it didn't, I went to the doctor in the town's medical post, a very sweet, huggy, talkative friend of Sister Consuelo's named Ana Maria; and sure enough she gave me an antibiotic.
That night was quite an exciting one. Consuelo's aunt, Señora Fransicsa, was still in the house at that point with her 19-year-old daughter Elena and the 12-year-old Rubén, waiting for her operation to get a new heart valve. In the evening, duped into walking by those lying fever-reducing pills, I went over to the church choir rehearsal (now in the building connected to my house!), and an hour later was laid out in my bed once more with a raging fever. Getting up to call the doctor and ask her how to adjust the doses of the various medicines she'd given me was one of the biggest physical efforts I have recently made, but I knew I had to do it or I'd lie there and burn up. After another fever-reducing pill, it took an hour to come down to the point where I could sit up, but my temperature was still 38 C or about 100 F, with at least three hours before I could take another pill. Iris, who hadn't gone up to the other house yet, brought me a cloth and a bowl of vinegar: "Here. This is how you bring down a fever." And I didn't mind the smell of the vinegar dripping off the cloth and soaking into my pillowcase, my hair, etc, because the soaked towel drew off the heat from my forehead like a dry towel soaks up water. Every time I took it off to re-wet it, I could touch it and feel the heat radiating from the side that had been pressed against my head.
Iris and Magdalena then went up to Delicias with instructions to call them if we needed anything. In the house was me, Maria Laura, and Consuelo's family. I dozed peacefully for a few hours with vinegar on my head. Then at almost midnight, Elena woke me up to ask if I had any blankets I wasn't using. ("Blankets?") Her mother was lying in bed with a fever, shaking with chills under a pile of bankets. I thought, oh God--this isn't a 23-year-old with an infection, it's a frail late-middle-aged woman waiting for a heart valve transplant. So, feeling almost normal again, I got up and poured her some hot tea while her daughter massaged her and kept her warm. She was shaking too much to sit up in bed and tried to sip it through a straw. We tried to give her one of my fever-reducing pills--and she retched and threw up. At which point I freaked out and thought, she needs medical attention. Called Iris to see if Iris could go with her to the medical post in Delicias, the only one open at this hour. But Iris said no, in her condition it's more dangerous to move her than not to move her; the solution is to massage her feet and give her hot things to drink to take away the chills. Despite the proven miracle of the vinegar, I discovered that I am still an American who believes in science and drugs rather than massages as the way to cure illnesses: I was not satisfied with this answer. So I then proceeded to call my doctor at home, woke up her mother, who refused to wake Ana María because that would involve going over next door (presumably the family all lives in a sort of complex of connecting houses) and waking up the kids, and did I know what time it was? I knew perfectly well what time it was and I knew perfectly well that none of us, Maria Laura or me or Iris or Magda or Fransisca's children, were doctors or nurses, and we simply didn't have the right knowledge to give Fransisca what she needed. But I didn't get to speak to Ana María. I think I was talking to Iris again when I suddenly felt dizzy, handed the phone to Maria Laura, and went back to lie on my bed before I fainted. And put more vinegar on my head. I'd been up for perhaps half an hour.
After a while Fransisca felt warmer again; it turned out she had managed to keep the fever-reducer pill down, and that helped her sleep, plus I'd given her half of my vinegar. I think the next day they (Fransisca and Elena) went to the doctor. But during the first two weeks of March they went back and forth from the hospital so many times, I lost track of what they were going for when. It's possible that they simply accepted the fact that Fransisca felt better the next day, and did nothing. (Perhaps they gave her lots of hot tea and massages and rest and who knows what else, and considered this "doing something"--as well as avoiding food and drink from the refrigerator. Fransisca told me several times that the reason I kept coughing was that I ate and drank cold things. Even doctors here have told me to eat and drink everything at room temperature to avoid colds... I suppose there may be some basis for this in a desert climate that changes temperature so drastically from day to night, from cloudy morning to sunny mid-afternoon, and where the humidity from the nearby ocean gets into your lungs. Who knows.)
All during that second week of March I struggled to get back to normal, resting, taking my pills, trying to walk a little or do little things around the house. Mostly I felt bored and useless. But I read a lot of an excellent book, An Experience of Spirit: Spirituality and Storytelling, by John Shea, and I wrote a song. Parts of it kept occurring to me when I was lying in my bed with nothing to do. The theme is getting over disappointment and learning to live with it, as another job of mine during February and March has been to get over a crush I had last year and move on. But reading the book on spirituality, I connected the romantic part of the song with another verse about someone who gets tired of waiting to find what she needs in religion, and decides to move on from that too and live without it. I guess it's about unresolved longing. (For those who care, I never play the tonic chord as A major, it's always an A major 7th.) I'm very happy to sing it for anyone who will listen.
By the end of that week I felt good enough to start auditioning little kids for this year's 4th and 5th grade choirs in Fe y Alegría! More later on that, my work in general, and why life here is insanely busy. But on the sickness front: the next weekend, Fransisca had a sort of attack where her whole chest hurt. She was sitting in bed or on a chair, rocking a bit, and sighing, Ay, ay ay... Ay, Dios... ay, ay, ay, Elena, I can't take it... Elena stayed constantly by her side, calm and cool, rubbing her back and bringing her things, but she couldn't do much. Rather than going immediately to the emergency room, Fransisca's older son Lucho was called to come get them and go with them, and they waited for him to get there for over an hour, because he doesn't exactly live close by. In the US I would have called 911 and put the two of them on an ambulance right away. (And the cars would pull over for the ambulance once they're out on the road. Sometimes there are issues with that here.) Eventually Lucho did come and they got in a taxi to the emergency room.
Fransisca stayed in the hospital and has been there since. Elena spent most of the next week by her side while Rubén studies in 7th grade at Fe y Alegría. But last week, Elena got appendicitis-- probably from the stress of being her mom's primary caregiver, going back and forth on the exhausting buses to the hospital, coming here to sleep and to wash her mom's clothes, not eating regularly, etc. She is an amazingly warm, caring, efficient, smart, responsible young woman who doesn't like to ask for help and prefers to handle it herself, until she can't. Now she's in the same hospital ward as her mom, recovering from her operation. Her brother Lucho has taken up a lot of the caregiving work now, and their father Victor has come down from Sullana and is now living in our house with Rubén. It helps Rubén a lot, I think, to have his dad around, and it helps us too. When it was just me, two nuns, and Rubén in the house most of the time, the poor kid had no family but a lot of foreign "aunts" trying to care for him, cook for him, keep track of him, help him with his homework, etc. It takes a lot of time and energy, having a kid in the house, even a delightful kid like Rubén. He's not rambunctious, but he has a lot of energy, curiosity, interest, and he's always smiling. He's totally into the church choir, loves singing with us, and hero-worships Luis Alberto--he's constantly asking me, "Katalina, are you going to the choir? Is there choir tonight? Can you play that song Luis Alberto was teaching everybody last night? Is Luis Alberto there?" It's really cute. Yesterday we went to the market together and he helped me decorate the cake for Sister Patricia's goodbye party.
Fransisca (center), with her daughter Milagros and Mili's daughter Iara (left), her son Rubén, and her niece Consuelo.
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