Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  The bite and the rash it spawned, inconveniently festering on my left arm (I’m left-handed)

Tuesday 7/14/09  Gulu, Uganda

Ten days ago, I was bit by what was most likely a spider.  After two trips to the hospital, two shots in the arm, one shot in the butt, a fistful of pills, and lots of rest, I’m finally almost normal again.  I didn’t initially know I had been bit.  I woke up to a small hive-like rash on my wrist and thought nothing of it.  By that evening, a small bump had risen from the rash.  By the next morning, the bump had morphed into a tiny mound.  By that night, the mound had swelled to a volcano, and a menacing red line followed one of my veins from the bite up to my elbow.  Scared by this, I went to the hospital.

Doctors didn’t know to make of it.  “We haven’t seen something like this before.  What bit you?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Well, whatever it is, it poisoned you—this line up your arm is proof of it.”

I lost the ability to use my left hand for two days, and I watched in horror as the red line slowly crept from my elbow up into my armpit.  Finally, just after it climbed out of my armpit and crawled onto my chest, the line started retreating.

I still have a healing wound on my wrist, but my arm and hand are fully functional now.  Yeeeehaw!

Living here has been hard on my body.  I feel like I’m persisting here, rather than existing with little effort.  I often lose my voice from inhaling the dust that gets kicked up from the red dirt roads.  I was floored by malaria a few months ago.  My stomach is always either recovering from or slipping into bouts of unease.  I remember once reading that American soldiers were at an incredible disadvantage from the moment they set foot on Vietnamese soil simply because their bodies knew absolutely nothing of living in such a place.  When everything about a place is foreign to your immune system, you push through your minutes, living just out of reach of the health that once incubated you.

I’m also not sure if my body is reacting to the shock that sedentary living has inflicted on my system.  While cycling, I exercised five hours a day, four or five days a week.  Now, with the exception of 15 minutes of push-ups to wake myself up in the morning, I’m doing almost no exercise.  I’m amazed at how easily I shifted from cycling a couple of hundred miles a week to doing almost no physical activity.  Were I back home (near pavement), I’d be skating or running almost every day.  Here, though, with almost no paved roads, no longboard, and thousands of local Ugandans who stare so unflinchingly at white people that running is an uncomfortable affair, I’m not doing the physical things I normally would be doing at home.

Another change in the way I’m now living lies in the way I think.  While cycling I had reached the point where I had control over the way I thought.  Because fantasizing about the future or the past made the cycling harder and more laborious, I had become relatively good at keeping my thoughts focused on the present moment and the scenery around me.  Thinking this way, day in and day out, left me feeling mentally strong, because clear, calming, thick thoughts often overpowered agitating, flighty ones.  Now that I’ve been in Uganda for four months, however, I find myself struggling to keep my thoughts focused and productive.  Quick, small, choppy, fantasy thoughts of pizzas I’m going to share with friends back home in the future shoot through my mind and distract me.  Comets of childhood memories rocket through the atmosphere of my mind when I’m writing at work.  I feel my brain firing differently here.  It’s working like it used to out in Japan and when I was living back in Jersey:  It’s generating quick thoughts and is easily distracted.

Could this mental shift, coupled with my lack of exercise, be making me vulnerable to illness?  I don’t know.

I do know one thing, though:  My body is not at its strongest here.

Above:  A close-up of the epicenter, complete with a mixture of bodily goo seeping from it!