Chapter 2 - Sick

Sick. There's no worse feeling. It leaves me emotional at the best of times. Wanting my Mum to wipe away the sweat with a flannel like I was a child. A few thousand odd miles away with your insurance just run out in a West African country ain't a good situation to be in.

Back at my ranch, I tried some coke. No sooner had I sipped a mouthful than it came up and sent my stomach into spasms of fire and brimstone and intensely painful cramps. If you've never shaken violently, it is exactly that. My knees were doing the hokey-cokey and my shoulders were like jelly. Uncontrollable tremoring from sudden cold overwhelmed me. Simultaneously, I broke out in a cold sweat. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and curled up in a ball, shivering with the sudden drop in temperature that was the chronic chills, then broke out in a burning hot fever and tried to rip away at my clothes. I was writhing on the bed in paroxysms at this point and my housemate James came in, took one look at me and said ‘I'm going to get a nurse.' For the five minutes it took him to get her I was thrown from one hemisphere to the other. Within seconds I would be burning with a tropical fever and the next shaking in icy Nordic cold, all with the added luxury of stomach cramps, aching joints and occasional hurling nothing but hard knots of air from the bottom of my lungs. At some point, I brought up a satisfactory amount of black bile that may have been tar. Smokers beware.

The nurse was in the room and I heard her unambiguous diagnosis, "He's got malaria. We need to take him to hospital right away.' It felt odd hearing those words. I felt like there were three of me. One who was racked in pain in this body, one who was in a mental frenzy, lurching about trying to get a grip and not panic about the implications of having a serious disease, and another more distant strain of me (or part of my mind) totally out of synch with both of these who was watching proceedings ambivalently, wondering whether this was real.

Details are sketchy. I remember being slumped in the hospital entrance in a wheelchair. It was dark and deserted. I was struggling to get out, to lie flat and collapsed onto a bench. It was dark and squalid, I remember thinking how unusual it seemed to have a black and green hospital. I remember wanting to just say "I'm ok, I'm ok." To try and beat it myself. I remember being scared of the hospital. I remember wondering what I'd read while I was there and how I'd do without music. I remember James looking over me, and sweat sticking the hair to my face and vomit coming from somewhere over my chest and looking at him worried and trying to transmit some expression that said ‘Jesus, James. This is a bit fucking much!'

The nurses in African hospitals don't fuck about. Sympathy and understanding don't save lives in Africa. They asked me which ward I wanted to be in. They wanted to know which could I afford, I hadn't a clue. They threw me in a private ward with three beds. I was in the corner. Someone somewhere in the hospital was screaming over and over. James said, "I'll go. I'll be back first thing in the morning." I almost wanted to ask him not to as a Ghanaian woman forced two drip needles into the back of my hand. The first sprang out of the vein and blood pissed all over the place. I wondered if the needle was clean, if my blood might clot, if I was going to die anyway…she jammed it back in and told me it was quinine. That was what started sending me slightly deaf. But not deaf enough to smother the screeching moans of the guy downstairs screaming and screaming about his leg, his leg…. I was given some drugs; perhaps to stop some of the spasms and convulsions I'd started having and send me to sleep. I remember thinking that of everywhere in the hospital, I bet this guy with the leg ends up in my room. Shortly after he was wheeled in and he wept and moaned all night long. At one point I felt strong enough to walk and on that first night I left my bed to go talk with some of my friends.

“Nice to see you guys. What are you doing here and why are you all so dressed up?” We were sitting on the floor of a hospital corridor. About 20 of my oldest friends, some who I hadn't seen for years and years, were sitting around chatting, drinking wine, eating nibbles and generally having a bit of a soirée. One friend said to me, "well, we came because you're ill." He wasn't the only one of them wearing a tuxedo But he was on his own. “Angie not with you?” “No, she couldn't make it but she sends her love.” Strange that, others were there with their wives but not Benji. And where was Nick? Surely one of my closest friends would be there. Ahh, here he is. Not dressed up. Typical. But he's very warm, unlike some of the others who haven't bothered to ask how I am. And Nick, where are you staying tonight? I just landed haven't found anywhere. But there's plenty of places about. Cheap too, so you'll be ok. But it's late so you will let me know that you found somewhere. Yeah of course I will. Thanks for coming. Pretzel? No, I better not. Can't keep anything down.

We chatted for hours. Then, later, the drip was behind me on wheels and I was walking, head down zombie-like trying to find my room, wondering where the hell they’d all gone. The easiest way back to the room was to follow the moaning. He must have been at it all night. The rest of the hospital slept and was still. The moaning guided me in like a beacon. The guy was gargantuan, tall and obese and he had had his leg amputated very recently (recent enough to still smell the decaying flesh) and he was in a bad way about it. The man in the middle bed was quiet as a mouse and slept through the whole affair. I came to at morning and saw a whole family praying round him. He was on his way out. One of his family took one look at me and started praying for me and the rest of them joined in, circling my bed like carrion. The dying man shot me an ungracious look from his bed like I was stealing from him. I was drenched in sweat and my body ached as if I’d been run over by an elephant. The doctor came in and gave me a glass of water which, though I sipped, came up instantly as I drank it.
“You have malaria,” she said. “You stay here ‘til you’re better.”
“And where are my friends this morning?”
“You haven’t had any visitors yet.”
But they were here. I got insistent about this and the fever span my brain to a new level of fuckedness. I twisted and grinded on my bed, panting and spewing into a bucket, onto my chest, in my hands…. I was on a rehydration drip which was going straight in, straight out. The quinine seemed to muffle my hearing and my eyes sweated with the fever. I felt like I was dying underwater, burning in boiling water and pounded by rocks. But through it all I needed to know where the hell my friends were because I’d spoken to them, I knew I had. I became obsessed with knowing if I was also losing my marbles. I had seen about twenty of my friends, some dressed in suits, some in tuxedos, sat around together shooting the bull gently, refused their food because I told them it would make me sick as soon as it touched my lips…

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6