I arrived on Sunday in India, jet lagged and tired. Monday’s work day was long and grueling because I was still feeling tired. Tuesday was a little better because I wasn’t so tired, but that was the least of my worries.
Sunday I started eating Indian food, and it was ok. I say ‘ok’ meaning that the food was palatable but not necessarily tasty or good. Most of it was spicy but not too tasty, which isn’t my favorite type of food. I love spicy food, but it has to taste really good, meaning it has to be spiced for taste and the heat of the spice just comes with the territory. Here it seems that the chefs spice the food for the heat and the taste might as well not matter. It’s actually kind of sad because I was expecting all this tasty food and instead I got bland, hot food that is barely palatable.
By Tuesday I was no longer feeling so tired, so that was good. However, at lunch the food just smelled strange to me and about an hour after lunch my stomach began to feel very queasy. We had a meeting in another building after lunch and as we walked to the other building I felt like throwing up. I mentioned this to my co-workers and they offered advice like, “You’ll be alright,” and “Grab some Imodium later.” Such a big help they are…not! I managed to make it home to the guest house before anything really bad happened though.
When I arrived home I lay down on my bed and tried to focus on my stomach. The pain there felt like small explosions in my intestines, both upper and lower. I thought a face hugger was going to rip itself out of my sternum and start laughing at me. So, being nearly delirious with pain, I was essentially paralyzed on my bed. It was at this point that I had the sudden, urgent need to go use the restroom.
For the sake of decency I won’t document all of the horrible things that happened in that bathroom over the next eighteen hours. I will say, however, that I was constantly moving back and forth between laying on my bed suffering to being in the bathroom suffering. I much prefer lying on the bed, by the way. The whole time I was getting more and more dehydrated, so I managed to get some bottled water from the guest house staff.
An aside about the bottled water they have in the guest house. This stuff tastes REALLY funny to me. It always tastes like it has a strange aftertaste. I have asked everyone else about it and they tell me it tastes normal to them, which makes me think it must be either in my head or in my taste buds. It tastes nasty though.
Anyway, I didn’t go to work the next day due to my need to stay very close to the bathroom. I spent most of the day finishing the Harry Potter book, lying on the bed in pain. It’s amazing what a book can do for you when you are in pain. It helped me to not feel so alone and so sorry to be in India. I just realized that I read five of the seven Harry Potter books in foreign countries. The first four I read in Panama and the seventh here in India. That’s so strange.
While I was sick something interesting happened: I missed home. When I was on my mission and got sick, I always ended up thinking “I wish I wasn’t sick.” Here in India however my main thought was, “I wish I wasn’t in India.” The mission is very different than a business trip, but I never realized that till now. I felt well enough to function by the end of Wednesday (the day after I got sick).
There has been one side effect that has stayed with me though. Every time I walk into the cafeteria here I feel like throwing up from the smell of the Indian food. The food here is mostly South Indian food (most of the Indian food that Americans know and love is North Indian food, about a thousand miles away from here), which has a very distinct smell to it and is very spicy. Too bad spicy doesn’t equate to tasty as well; a shame really. The smell makes me sick because it is the same food that made me very sick originally. So now I can barely eat any of the food they cook here. I have since discovered a few of the restaurants around the area and the FabMall (like a convenience store on campus here). I eat most of my dinners from places like those. Its kind of expensive but I can expense most of it, so it should be ok.
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