On Sickness

At first being ill makes you exhausted. Later it makes you worried. And at a certain point, it makes you downright furious. I’ve just about reached that point here in Yogyakarta. I wasn’t naïve enough to expect not to get sick on this trip, but this is more than I signed up for (well, actually not really). This past week has been spent falling in and out of illness, with my stomach being the focal point of all the trouble. I can’t tell which has more nasty bugs here – the food or the internet café computers. Everything is starting to piss me off – my medicine not working, my body not recovering fast enough, not ever being able to really trust the food here, the MOSQUITOES (may Allah curse their tiny souls), the heat, the smog… Even things unrelated to my sickness start to get under my skin at times. I’ve begun a downward spiral of cynicism that is probably only exacerbating whatever illness I have at the moment. I think it might be necessary, though, to temper all the enthusiasm I had coming into this trip. But what irks me more than anything else is that my sickness has started to interfere with my research here.

On Saturday I had planned to travel to Parangkusumo with Nur to start doing interviews, but I was so sick on Friday night that I had to cancel everything for the next day. I think I fell ill from eating some sketchy food at a rumah makan padang – something that sounds great in theory but is actually pretty horrible in practice. What a rumah makan padang is is a restaurant where there are plates of all kinds of pre-cooked dishes stacked up in the window, and you pick and choose which ones you want. Sounds delicious, right? Perhaps, until you start to think about it and then realize that all those dishes of food have just been chilling there for God-knows-how-long, bathing in their own juices. And I'm not convinced that the restaurant owners are rushing to change them over every few hours (or even days - it's a 24 hr restaurant)... Needless to say, my stomach was not pleased with my decision to eat there, and proceeded to perform for me its best rendition of Krakatau. It was the worst 6 hours of my life. Doubled over on the toilet, puking up water, I wondered how much more abuse my body could take before it gave out. One or two days was my guess. I tried to take small sips from my bottled water, but every drop made me more nauseous. Dizzy and weak, I made my way to the next room and laid down on a bed of cold porcelain tiles, wearing just my t-shirt and a towel. It was three in the morning. When I finally felt stable enough to turn on my side and try to rest, I was greeted by a friendly horde of mosquitoes. I weakly fended them off while drifting into dreamland.

[note: me writing and posting this precludes the possibility of me still being horribly sick - so don't worry too much ;)]