So this was an odd weekend for me.  Friday night/Saturday morning around 2am I woke up absolutly freezing.  I thought, “hmm, that’s odd”  and pulled myself closer to myself and wrapped my blankets farther around me.  That’s when it happened.  Pounding headache, chills, and a general feeling of never being warm again.  That’s when I knew it had begun.  I got up…pounding increased…threw a jacket on, shut my window, and tried to fall back asleep the best I could.  But no matter what I did the pounding headache would not let me fall asleep.  It felt like my head would crack open or my eyes would fall out of my head.  At least at some point the chills stopped only to be replaced by epic sweating and feeling like I was burning up.  This back and forth continued all night and around 4 in the morning I got up and checked my temperature.  It was about 102-105 degrees and would continue to hold at that temperature for the next 24 hours.  At 6 in the morning, after not having slept a week and hallucinating a lot about Kazakh case endings (another blog within itself–the grammar, not the hallucinations) I called the Peace Corps Medical Officer (PCMO) Dr. Victor.

Dr. Victor is one of those incredible human beings that seem to have done everything and yet think nothing of it.  Our professors while studying abroad were other humans like him, so was my 12th grade Calc teacher, and my grandmother.  People who just have all of these stories relating to everything that they seem to pull out of a hidden carpet bag like Mary Poppins.  He is an ex-Soviet military doctor who has served during wartime for the Soviet Union and in Africa for the Peace Corps.  He has the funniest, and most serious, stories from both services and he somehow can always sense what a volunteer is really dealing with.  A volunteer may complain of some small affliction but Dr. Victor can look past it and see the greater problem at hand.  So at 6 am I called him and told him how my night had went.  He asked a series of rapid fire questions in his heavy Russian accent (coolest accent ever) and told me to meet him at my school at 8 am (luckily for me he was making a site visit that day anyways).  So at 745 I dragged myself out of bed, threw on some semi-appropriate clothes and went to the school for what was supposed to be my one hour of Russian a week.  I get there, get asked one question in Russian (which is a language I’m not fond of to begin with), want to cry, and quickly leave the classroom to lay on the floor outside (very NOT Kazakhstan).  Eventually the teacher makes me sit in a chair where I wait for Dr. Victor.  He checked me out, sent me home with some instructions, and told me to call him if anything changed.

I don’t remember much more from that Saturday other then around lunchtime everything started to come out of me.  I started vomiting and let’s just say, the other end wasn’t so pretty either.  The fever and the migrane continued and made drinking water a near impossibility (which was bad because between my bathroom visits and how much I was sweating, I was losing a lot of liquids).  I know that I spelt through the entire day and that I didn’t eat anything and maybe had half a liter of water.  Bad News Bears.  That night before I went to sleep I took some Tylenol PM (hoping to sleep through a lot of the night) and woke up around 2 am again, this time absolutely soaking wet.  It was almost like I had jumped into a pool and then gotten into bed.  My clothes were soaked, my blankets were soaked, even my pillow was soaked.  But!  My fever had finally broken!  Even though the headache wasn’t gone immediately, I knew that things were going to get a lot better.  So after a change and flipping my blankets around I went back to sleep for the rest of the night.  Sunday brought little change expect my temperature wasn’t quite as high and my headache began to lessen little by little.  My bathroom visits continued (but minus the vomiting…you know what that means!).  But Sunday was also a blur.  I did manage to eat a bowl of soup over the coarse of the day and drink more water then Saturday but I was weak.  And dirty.  I only shower fully once a week anyways (on Sundays) and with all of the sweating thrown in I looked like death.  So that evening I showered, changed my sheets, and tried to have the appearance of wellness as much as possible (to encourage further wellness).

Monday I felt a lot better but Dr. Victor still instructed me to stay home one more day.  Which was very smart of him, I would not have been able to function through a whole day of school.  I was very weak, walking across the apartment made me light-headed, and I was still making bathroom runs a little more frequently then I would have liked.  My friends stopped by in the afternoon to fill me in on what I had missed and by then I was pretty much back to normal.  Today I am happy to report that I ate ice cream during lunch today and felt (mostly) fine all afternoon!  But yes, I did lose about 3-5 pounds this weekend from all of the sweating and expulsion of nutrients, I say it as a joke but it was in no way/shape/or form something I wanted.  Especially since I’ve lost weight by just switching the type of food I’ve been eating.  My host mother walks around calling me a skeleton (which is by no means anything close to the fact) and is now making it her personal mission to re-fatten me up.  Given the fact that I’m in Kazakhstan I anticipate having those pounds back before the end of the week.  Eat eat eat!