Hey Friends...
You know those moments, when you think to yourself, “Now how in the world did I get here… how did everything in my life culminate to this present situation?” Well, I had one of those moments this week. On Monday, I found myself laying on an IHK (International Hospital of Kampala) cot, having a legitimate mental break down… bawling my eyes out, the kind of sobs that come with snot, and heaves, sucking in the air around me, the kind of breaths that are somehow never deep enough, wondering how I even got there…
I guess I’ll rewind to the beginning of the week… (I apologize in advance for the gruesome details)
On Monday last week, I noticed a bite of some sort on my right leg, it was about half way between my ankle and my knee, on the right side. All of us always wake up with strange scratches, bruises, and bites that we have no clue how we got every morning. It pretty much looked like every spider bite I’ve ever had, so I wasn’t too worried about it. On Tuesday it had gotten a little bigger, and the circle of skin surrounding it started to become hard, tight, and red… I continued figuring it was just a spider bite, and that it would go away…
Throughout the busy week, the gradually growing leg bite wasn’t my biggest concern, and the pain wasn’t that noticeable. I just kept convincing myself that it was getting better. On Saturday, however, my walk was reduced to a limp at times, and when I returned home from the various adventures of the day, the lower half of my leg and my foot started to swell. I decided to stay home and write instead of going to Prayer Mountain with the rest of my house. (With all the people coming and going it’s hard to keep up, but two more long-term volunteers arrived last week Laura, and Torrie, and they’re awesome.) We all agreed that I should probably go to the hospital in the morning.
It was so good to just sit and write, sipping a warm cup of African tea, the cool evening breeze encompassing me through the open window, and an amazing music playlist guiding my jumbled emotions onto a blank word document. I’ve come to really, truly, honestly, love writing, and it’s weird, because I never thought I would even like it. But over these last two years it’s become my passion, my outlet, and my escape. It has become an art form to me… a way to originally, and effectively capture an idea, a story, truth. I am nowhere close to beauty yet, but I like the process of striving for it. So I guess some people have their cameras, some have their paintbrushes, some have their instruments, but I have a QWERTY keyboard and I wouldn’t want it any other way… My laptop has become a haven of brainstorms, vents, and written pictures that I use to remember the spirit of people and places, an ever changing record of my developing perspectives, and views. I have tons of various projects that I work on, CLD text stuff, hundreds of pages of future book and movie ideas that may never ever work out, but it’s fun to dream, and a years worth of journals, and memoirs that I love creating, tweaking, and editing pretty much everyday, grasping for that perfect string of words that will make someone experience what I experienced, and feel what I felt…
I left my computer to charge in our living room, took three Ibuprofen pills to make certain I could sleep throughout the night and went to bed. When I woke up on Sunday morning, the pain in my leg was pretty intense, and I hobbled out to breakfast. After a few more Ibuprofen pills I started looking for my phone in the living room next to where I had left my laptop the previous night. Except, there was no laptop, and there was no phone. I just figured it was in someone else’s room that hadn’t awakened yet… I called my phone from Susan’s and it went immediately to the “we’re sorry this number is not available” recording… meaning that someone had turned it off… My heart began to race, and the juices in my stomach began to churn and rise. We woke up the rest of the house to look for the missing phone, and computer, but only discovered more things missing. Susan’s backpack holding her American phone, and ipod, Julie’s Ugandan phone, and Jeremy’s shoes were all gone too. We still don’t know how it happened, but it did, and there was no where I could go, and nothing I could do to escape the hopelessness surging through every vein, and every thought.
There were periodic seconds I needed to stop moving and thinking so I could concentrate on not vomiting, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, because I feared a break down. I ran out of the tension-filled house and let out a frustrated scream (not free of profanity I’m afraid) and then gathered myself enough to put on my I’ll-be-ok face for everyone else. But there was no way I could compel myself to go to the hospital.
Our friend, James the Man, (we call him that because he’s just the man, you’d understand if you met him) and Susan did a salt-water remedy on my leg that James said would make it go away. Later that night we were watching a movie on Torrie’s laptop and the wound just started to gush blood in spurts. As I pressed the tight swelling toward the hole, more blood, and what I thought was puss started to come out. Jeremy was sitting next to me, and excitedly exclaims, “That’s not puss, those are eggs!” I get sick to my stomach, and Laura gets gauze and a towel to catch the oozing. Jeremy has dealt with these infections multiple times before and says we need to press it all out. I don’t have a very high pain tolerance and my leg had already been throbbing without exerting any force on it, with each squeeze, the pressure was more than I could handle. Finally by the third excruciating press I had both arms around the arm of the couch, gripping as hard as I could, crying out, tears falling, and Jeremy yells “Oh my God!” as an egg sack breaks some more skin and bursts out of my leg, “it almost hit my eye… This is epic!” and blood continues to squirt, like I’ve seen in Tarantino movies. (Well maybe not that bad, but it was really crazy.) We repeat the process two more times, me screaming, Jeremy squeezing, and calmly uttering “Sweetheart, it’s going to be ok” and two more sacks pop out. By the end of the torture it looked like a bullet hole. We figured we got the most of it, so we disinfected the wound with hydrogen peroxide and put antibiotic cream and a band-aid on it. The next morning the swelling had decreased significantly, and the hole had become more level with my skin, but it was still oozing, so Susan and I decided to finally go to the hospital.
The hospital isn’t that easily reached and we have to take two taxis, walk half a mile, and then get a boda, and an hour and a half after departure we get there. I fill out a card at the reception desk and it gets put behind a multitude of other cards. There are not enough places to sit in the overcrowded waiting room, and my leg starts bleeding through the band-aid. It catches the eye of the others in the room, and I remove the band-aid to a chorus of gasps, and awe-filled noises, it felt pretty badass to be the biggest spectacle in an African Hospital. The nurse finally calls my name and I get led through a series of short hallways, past the consultation rooms, through a door, morbidly and incorrectly labeled “casualties” and to a bed amongst other beds with very sickly looking people. The nurse takes a sample of the puss, and tells me to be strong because they have to clean everything out of the hole. The nurse’s assistant comes in and begins to squeeze my leg like Jeremy did, except this time only blood is coming out… and I am already crying. Another nurse’s assistant comes in, and gets out a syringe and starts loading “liquid antibiotics” removes the needle part and inserts the plastic into the hole in my leg and injects 5ml of fluid. Susan is holding her breath stroking my left leg, and I am trying to breathe, gripping the side of the hospital bed, and the nurses shout “sorry” in harmony to my passionate groans. When they remove the syringe a large, bubbling, foaming, yellow cloud explodes out of my leg, so they wipe it, and do the same thing again, with the same result. The third time, all 5ml goes directly into my leg and they look to each other, and at Susan and me, and exclaim, “it is too deep, we don’t know what else to do.” The head nurse comes in and tells me that I’m going to have to consult a surgeon. And then I really started crying.
So there I was having a complete dramatic break down in the middle of an African Hospital, every person on a hospital bed was turned and looking at me, and all their moral support was staring too. The nurses tried to explain that it was over, for now, they weren’t going to squeeze my leg anymore. But the tears came harder, I tried to regain composure, but I failed each time, so I stopped caring about putting on my I’ll-be-ok face, and I just let it all out. I didn’t have any tissues to wipe my nose, and I couldn’t see because of the volume of tears. And Susan, being the best best-friend in the world, kept apologizing for my pain. I couldn’t even talk, I was just sobbing, crying because my leg hurt, crying because I want my writing back, crying because something gross laid eggs inside of me, crying because I can’t afford another laptop, crying because our house was violated, crying because Africa is so messed up, crying because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life, crying just because…
I guess this is the part of the email where I usually say something encouraging or hopeful… the worthwhile realization amidst/after the storm, and I’m not really sure what I have to say right now. I’m on intense antibiotics, and my leg is getting better by the hour, Torrie has a laptop that she said I can use to type my update emails. I still have pen and paper, and the core thoughts behind every page of writing I’ve lost, and I’ve somewhat regained my mental stability, so does that make everything ok? Well, it has to be ok, because there is nothing else I can do. There is nothing I can’t afford to lose, nothing that is truly unrecoverable, and nothing life requires of me except to breathe.
I forget that Africa wasn’t meant to be a feel good experience, it’s not summer camp, or a warped Disneyland for volun-tourism… it’s a place filled to the brim with disease, corruption, and chaos. It is raw, and I am vulnerable, and it’s somehow scary and brilliant all at once. I have never been in so much pain or felt so much love, cried so much or laughed so much… and it’s that extreme duality that intrigues me, that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, that has taught me that breathing, not laptops, not phones, not comfort, not jobs, not health, not houses, not money, is the essence of life, and I’m learning to be thankful for each singular inhale.
Know that if you could see my face right now, it screams “I’ll be ok,” and if you could meet the people I live with and work with everyday, you’d know why. I’m glad for who you are, and who you’ve been in my life. You’ve given me an endless list of things to be thankful for when I selfishly want to feel sorry for myself… I had my dramatic mental break down and I’m recuperating and ready for what comes next…
Breathing,
Nicole
Ps. My individual responses may be fewer and farther between these days, because I can’t use wireless internet anymore, but know that I appreciate each and everything I receive…
