Thursday, July 12, 2012

Diga Ahhhhh

After 5 months of (almost) perfect health in Chile, I can now officially say that I have been sick in a foreign country; navigated my way through Chilean laboratories, a lime-green doctor's office and a crappy 24-hour clinic;  been pricked by Chilean needles and peed in Chilean cups (well ok, just one of those).  Although none of these things were necessarily on my South America bucket list, I have crossed them all off nonetheless and come out on the other side, relatively  unscathed.

It all started about three weeks ago when I suddenly felt nauseous and lightheaded in the middle of one of my classes and had to leave work early.  When I got home, I promptly went to bed and knocked out for 16 hours.  In the morning I felt a little out of it, but overall okay.  For the most part I was functioning alright at that point although I had a few more weird dizzy spells over the next few days. Then on Saturday, when I was walking home from work, I started to get a pain in my right side that felt like a cramp from running.  After a few hours, it went away and I forgot about it until it came back with a vengeance Tuesday morning at 4 am.  I woke up freezing with an extremely intense pain on my right side.  I spent almost the whole next day in bed and finally caved and went to urgent care the day after that.  A few hours and 20 thousand pesos later, I had a prescription for pain medication and an appointment for an echogram a week later.

Luckily my boss was not too stoked about the idea of me waiting a week to know what was going on and immediately made me an appointment with his doctor.  I went the next day and was recommended for 8 diagnostic tests.  48 hours later I had the results to all of them (drum roll please).  Turns out it was salmonella, e. coli AND a kidney infection.  The dynamic trio had me completely out of commission for about a week total but now I'm pretty much back in action.  I finished up with my cocktail of antibiotics and alphabet soup (pictured above) on Monday and tomorrow I'll retake the e. coli test.  Once I'm sure all of the bacteria is gone, I can finally get back in the water after 3 weeks of not surfing. 

The recovery process has been kind of lengthy but after a few days of antibiotics, pain killers and fever reducers, I started to feel much better and went back to work.  In the midst of my recovery, Jeff and I made a quick trip up to Arica/Tacna to renew our tourist visas last weekend.  Like I've said before, Tacna is nothing to write home about but Jeff was excited to get his first taste of Peru (in the form of fast food pizza and tocino del cielo no less) and spend some more time in Arica.  We had a nice time but I'm hoping my next border hopping mission will be something new and a little more exciting.
 







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