You may have noticed a certain musical theme to some of my entries and this one is no different. Back in the day, New Order released a video called PFD, short for Pumped Full of Drugs. I can only assume it was a reference to their earlier southern Africa tour, taking in hotspots such as Lilongwe Chameleons. In this case however it’s a reference to my two trips to hospital over the last weekend – once as a visitor and once as a patient (what have you done now? I hear you all shout!)
Well, firstly as I’m sure you’re all aware 5th December is International Volunteering Day around the world. This year’s theme was “volunteering for a clean environment” to tie in with the Copenhagen Summit (these UN boys, they’ve really got it all joined up haven’t they?) Connected to all this I see that the Maldives and Nepal governments have been holding their cabinet meetings underwater and on Everest (you can work out for yourself which was which). Perhaps it’s a South Asia thing. I wonder if Sri Lanka will follow suit. Where would you like your government to hold its cabinet meetings?
Anyway, the idea this year was to get a load of volunteers down to the maternity unit at one of Lilongwe’s hospitals and do a bit of environment cleaning. So we all trooped down, did some cleaning, toured the wards giving out goodie bags to new mums and listened to a load of speeches. On reflection, outside a maternity ward is perhaps not the best location for giving a speech. I came to this conclusion while I was listening the Minister for Natural Resources tell us about all the government was doing to an accompaniment of blood-curdling screams from within.
Following on from this I went to a volunteer party then back to the house. When I got there I was feeling quite hot with a small headache, which I put down to being out in the sun all day. So I had a shower, put the fan on and lay down to cool down with lots of water. By the time I went to bed I was feeling really washed out. I didn’t get much sleep, what with the multiple trips to the loo and the bed being bathed in sweat. Sunday morning I just lay there not getting any better. So I decided I should go to the clinic. Nilesh took me round (still very little in the way of fuel) and I collapsed on the way to the ward, by which time they’d worked out it was malaria.
So they hooked me up to a very nice drip to rehydrate me. It was also a very good mechanism for pumping me full of drugs – either by injecting them into the saline/glucose bag or into a rather fetching pink gadget in my hand. This was all very well except that I still needed to go to the loo on a very frequent basis. So there I was, drip stand in one hand and dodgy shoulder in the other.
I thought I was in a bad way but actually I was to come to regard this as the golden period of vitality and health. Because then came the quinine. Gin aficionados among you will be able to explain the exact connect to me but I was now effectively being intravenously injected with gin and lucozade!
Quinine is apparently famous for 2 things – curing malaria and its side effects. The first side effect I was to experience was throwing up. The impact of this was a doubling of my shuffling to the loo with my drip stand. Not having eaten much in the past 24 hours there wasn’t much to throw up but still off I shuffled. This continued for the next day or so, over which time I ingested a few bags of glucose at most and exgested a variety of shades of bile with depressing regularity.
By Monday I was most definitely back to my peely waly normal complexion, with no indication of ever having left Scotland. On the occasions when I had any energy at all I spent the day lying in bed, groaning pitifully. Any other energy had to be reserved for shuffling. I would lie there and they would come and stick big syringes into the pink gadget containing painkillers, anti-vomit stuff (I hate to think what it would have been like without it!), more quinine and anything else they fancied.
Basically, imagine the worst hangover of your life, add in the effects of the dodgiest kebab/curry you’ve ever had, multiply that by a hundred million and then you’re approaching how I was feeling on Monday evening.
Then over Monday night things began to turn. I’m now looking back on this as stage 1. The vomiting began to stop and the shuffling lessened. I think what had happened was that, late on Sunday they’d realised that there might be something more than just malaria (I had specifically mentioned giardia to them when I was admitted but they poo-pooed me (geddit?)). However, they’d put me on some antibiotics – something else to stick in the pink gadget, and these seemed to be doing the trick.
Come Tuesday I was approaching a vaguely normal human being again. One that was able to sit up, be freed from his drip stand and even visit areas of the ward that weren’t the toilet. By Tuesday evening I could even eat something. Then came the onset of stage 2.
Before going to bed I’d taken the precaution of sorting out the mosquito net, fixing the window screens and putting on some spray. I was damned if I was going to catch more malaria in hospital. There then ensued a hilarious scene where I was going round the room with a can of Doom (great name!) trying to nab a particularly noisy fly when the nurse came in.
Nurse: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Trying to get that fly”
Nurse: “What fly?”
Me: “Can’t you hear it?”
Nurse: “I can’t hear anything. There’s no fly in here.”
It was at this point that I’d been experiencing side effect number 2 all day – a buzzing in my ears! People had mentioned this to me but I’d just put down those random noises to things going on in the hospital. Now I understood why it sounded like my phone was always ringing when it actually wasn’t. A bit sheepishly I got into my blue mesh enclosure and settled down to a good night’s sleep at last.
About 11.30 what do I hear but this drilling noise coming from two doors down (they certainly weren’t drinking and having a party). Bit late for a spot of DIY I thought to myself. Especially in Malawi, where everyone goes to bed at 9. Even more especially for those who’ve not had any sleep for the past two nights. The nurse came in to apologise for the noise, saying that someone was getting a plaster cast put on.
Then there starts up this music. Were they trying to drown out the drilling I wondered to myself. Maybe they were having a party after all – a new sort of Tupperware party where you demonstrate power tools. Perhaps Vince can enlighten us on this particular subgenre. It sounded like a cross between Pink Floyd’s “set the controls for the heart of the sun” and the Orb’s “a huge ever-growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld”. Now, musical purists among you (Hamachan, are you there?) will say there are no similarities at all between these two items but suffice to say it was some sort of new age/cosmic/prog rock/ambient/krunk/post ambient prog/post-avant/agit-psych/alt-scuzz/spacey/leftfield type piece. For those of you less familiar with some of these subgenres, I would recommend contacting my Falkirk correspondent or taking a trip to the Brixton Windmill.
Eventually I worked out that the music was also imaginary (bit like the merits of krunk). Now, I can just about understand why I might be visited by fly or phone noises but Pink Floyd???
So I’m lying in bed with some low-level Pink Floyd lulling me to sleep when side effect number 3 kicks in. As if aural side effects weren’t enough, I also had the pleasure of visual ones. Yes, hallucinations! They were benign and innocuous but too numerous to recall, as they were all pretty short and they lasted all night but here are a selection of characteristics:
- The greased lightning scene, which then morphed into a sort of pet shop boys video then into something like a Peter Gabriel video.
- They were projected onto the back of my eyelids but continued to appear when I opened my eyes. They were both colour and black and white and some even came with dialogue or audio (imagine a low-level version of the Eraserhead soundtrack if you will).
- Lots of clips (some of which I’d seen, others were probably not based on anything in particular) featuring the subgenre disaster movie (wind). This I realised was due to the fact that the fan was on in the room.
- In fact most of the hallucinations were related to the room in some way. For example, people sliding down a slope, which turned out to be the exact same angle of the mosquito net. My glasses were lying next to me in bed and when I opened my eyes the clips continued being projected exactly onto the shape of the lens.
- A random red pattern (turned out to be the lining of the pillow), which then morphed into a forest of soldiers preparing for something unseen going on at Wimbledon.
- Old Masters and other famous works of art.
- Millions of darkly dressed people in flat caps marching in the pouring rain (Jarrow March?)
- Lots of replication – a single person, which then panned out to reveal more and more of the same and then they all started running away from something.
- And so it went on. And on. And on.
After a Star Trek all-nighter you’ve got the option of going to bed for a good sleep but after a quinine all-nighter you won’t be getting any sleep any time soon. So now we’re on 3 nights without sleep and I’m sure my mum and dad will vouch for what I’m like when I don’t get enough sleep! And there’s only so much you can do to get out of a dopey state (no red bull here and the coffee is generally made from chicory), especially when you’re in a room with no telly and no internet.
A short word on the staff at the clinic. They were all very good, if a little slow to respond. Let me give you a couple of examples:
- Having to ring the reception on my mobile to get someone to attend to me.
- The cook was a very charming and amenable, yet very slow and deliberate man. He would take your orders for lunch about 11 and it would arrive at 1. Now, there were only 2 patients in the place and lunch consisted of mushroom soup. From a tin.
Anyway, after more hanging around trying to stay awake (in the knowledge that sleeping wasn’t an option), I was finally released back to the real world. Back chez moi I really wanted a shower but discovered there was no water. Tea time comes round and, yep, you guessed it – electricity goes off. Welcome to Malawi! You could say that I was experiencing a sense of humour failure by this point. You guys are probably killing yourselves reading all this but it most certainly wasn’t funny to me.
Sourcing something to help me sleep on Wednesday night is a story in itself and this entry is way too long already but suffice to say I slept well and emerged groggy the next morning, went to work a bit wobbly and lived to tell the tale.
Phew – after all that typing it must be time for my pre-sleep nap. I don’t think I’ll be having gin for a nightcap!
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