Alive and well in Managua

I apologize for my long absence on the blog, although I think that my excuse is probably pretty good. As most of you know, I have been in Managua for the past week and a half struggling through Dengue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever. It’s known as break bone fever for a reason. Luckily I did not feel like all of my bones were breaking, just my legs.


It all started at about 4am last Wednesday night when I woke up with a killer headache/body ache. No big deal, I thought. I must just be dehydrated. Silly me. By Friday I decided that I should probably get some blood work done just to make sure all of my vitals were normal. I really did not think it was possible that I had dengue (even though there have been 35 cases in my neighborhood in the past 3 months). My blood work came back so messed up that the director of my health center made me go back to the lab and have it re-done, thinking that there must have been a mistake reading it because there was no way that my white blood cell count was down to 1,100. After talking to the PC medical office, they told me that I needed to come to Managua immediately because they wanted the fancy westernized hospital to test me and figure out what was going on. At this point I was convinced that I was dying. Not only did I feel like I was dying, with a fever of 103, but the PC office wanted me in the hospital in Managua. Nothing good was going to come of this.


Gracias a Dios, my friend Jill was in town to visit. She helped pack me up and get me onto a bus at 6AM to go to Managua. Let me tell you what is not fun: riding a bus for 10 hours when you have dengue, especially when the roads are unpaved. The next couple of days were a blur. I laid in bed a lot. I had a lot of blood drawn. And I felt awful.


I have been in Managua for a week and a half and I am feeling like a new person. I don’t feel great yet, but I feel a lot better. Mostly I am weak; a symptom which I have heard will last for a month or 2. Awesome. I have been out of site for 2 weeks and won’t be going back for another 2 weeks, which has me pretty worried. Remember how San Carlos is cursed? Well, they are used to volunteers leaving and never coming back (seriously...other people have packed up their things and sent them to the US). I will be going back, just not for awhile. I would love to go back this week but we have language training in Masaya all next week, and so it just doesn’t make any sense to go back to San Carlos for 2 or 3 days when it takes 10-15 hours to travel there. Even worse is that for a week after language training I will be going to Sabalos (an hour from San Carlos, down river) to translate for an eye care brigade. July is just not going to be my month in San Carlos.


Hopefully I will be medically cleared this week and will wander the country-side semi homeless until language training starts. I am going to go see Mamacita in Dolores (my training town) for the weekend, watch the futbol finals and start class on Monday. Because I have been out of site for 2 weeks, I haven’t spoken Spanish in 2 weeks, which should make class interesting to say the least. I don’t think reading subtitles on the television counts.


Thank you for everyone’s concern. Being sick abroad is really awful and mostly I just missed my mom (who offered to come and visit, but in my fever induced mental state I decided I didn’t need it). Thankfully I had good friends taking care of me (hopefully who will not catch Dengue from being around me) and a great Peace Corps medical staff who took my calls at all hours of the day. When you come and visit I will make sure that I have plenty of bug spray around so that you too do not get the Dengue bug.