Part II - Illness, Boredom

Sometime on Monday May 21st Courtney began to feel ill, and towards the night she developed a fever and started to get shooting pains in her stomach. The next day she still had a fever and the pains were quite intense, so I went next door to get a thermometer and ask advice. It turns out the three Canadians had all gotten food poisoning from the restaurant attached to our complex, and no longer eat there. I grabbed a thermometer from the Finns and ran back to Courtney. In an idiotic attempt to sterilize the thermometer, I poured boiling water over it, expanding the mercury far beyond its capacity, and shattering the end of it, spilling blobs of mercury over the sink. My mind flashing through any information I might know about mercury gas and poisoning, I covered my mouth with my shirt and ran into the bedroom and closed the door, where Courtney was in bed to tell her what happened, as she continued to have intense stomach pains and obviously needed to go to the hospital. That was a low point. So I went next door (a businessman has an office right next to our room) and talked to him for the first time, asked him about mercury and if water from the sink was recycled in the complex (he said no), and if I could use his phone. We called Ephy who came to pick us up and bring us to one of Kakamega’s hospitals. According to our health insurance we’re supposed to call their hotline in Toronto BEFORE going to the hospital if we want everything to be covered, so after dropping Ephy and Courtney off at the hospital, I dashed out to the post office/telecom building to try make a collect call to Toronto. After much frantic inquiry it seemed that nobody knew what a collect call was, and there was no operator, I bought the largest phone card I could find and called the number, to be informed I had ‘two and a half minutes’ remaining on my card… which got me through the automated voice prompts and a minute of talking to the guy on the line, I don’t know if he ever got our full ID number, but I said forget it, the money’s not the important thing, and rushed back to the hospital to find Courtney drinking a pink goopy substance from a cup. The hospital then tested her for typhoid and malaria, and the results came back positive for typhoid, and negative for malaria. Perplexed (and frightened) by her typhoid, Ephy decided to take us to a private lab to redo the tests, thinking that the hospital was not reliable and might give a diagnosis simply to sell the treatment. The private clinic gave the same results, but the lab technician told us that a typhoid vaccination could give a false positive… so we went back to the office and tried to use the internet to get friends at home (thanks Erin and Craig!) to call the travel clinic we got our shots at to find out if they had given Courtney Typhoid vaccine or not. Of course, the time difference meant that the clinic was not open in Canada, so we had to wait around for and hour and a half in the office waiting for morning to come in Canada, while Courtney sat drooped, looking like she was dying, on a plastic lawn chair. Once we knew it wasn’t typhoid we figured it could be food poisoning and we went back home to give Courtney a liquid diet and hope she’d fight it off.
The next day she wasn’t any better, so with the help of a contact a neighbor had in another hospital, we brought her to a different hospital, where she was inexplicably brought to the pediatric ward. Nonetheless the doctor seemed quite sure she had malaria (even though we’re both on anti-malarials) (and even though both tests said she didn’t have malaria) and prescribed a 4-day pill treatment, which we picked up from a chemist (as well as a new thermometer to replace the Finns’). Alas, the medication gave Courtney new pains and symptoms, so after a few days we didn’t know if she was suffering from malaria, or malaria treatment. The good news, of course, is that by the end of the weekend, she was feeling much better, and the only thing that stuck around is a congested cough which she still has.
Another aspect of Courtney’s illness is the boredom of sitting around our apartment all day with a limited number of things to do. Now that she’s better, we still stay indoors all evening, as it gets dark at 7pm sharp and we’ve been advised not to go out at night. We have a TV in the room with 3 channels on it – two Kenyan broadcasters and one from a satellite which occasionally changes… but it’s been the ‘Hallmark Channel’ for about 2 weeks now, which broadcasts old family movies and between them repeatedly shows the same clips from a handful of shows as special ‘Hallmark Moments’, even though they generally involve things blowing up and people canoodling. The Kenyan stations have news several times a day, sometimes in English and sometimes in Swahili, as well as an assortment of North American shows. Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’ is fun to watch, but ‘The Swan’, a reality competition based on taking ‘ugly duckling’ women and giving them radical reconstructive plastic surgery is only fodder for our conversation… but we still watch it. Other than TV we’ve been playing cards and reading books and not much else. In a recent trip to Kisumu we picked up a chess board, a book on how to learn Swahili, and a laptop, so we’ve got more things to do now but once work picks up we should have more engaging things to do in the evening.