Wednesday (10-22-2008). When stomachs attack.

I am not going to lie—there was some bad stomach fallout today. This isn’t a case of poetic justice. I don’t solely blame the guinea pig: I tend to get sick when I combine ice-cream with too many meat products in a day and I definitely overdid it with a ground beef quesadilla at 9:30 pm last night.

Everybody with a foreign stomach I am told, gets sick at least once while traveling to South America. I wasn’t hospitalized like Ryan had to be two weeks ago. Yet at least. I woke up by 8:30 am a little exhausted and felt okay. Then it hit me all at once with a shocking abruptness. Suddenly I couldn’t stand up without falling over. I spent the entire day convalescing, bedridden and delirious, ate virtually nothing and did my best to drink liquids but probably not enough to fully hydrate myself. I swung in and out of consciousness and struggled with extreme chills and sudden overheating. My head was like a lead weight. Only around 5 pm, after an entire bedridden day, was I able to sit up and walk around a little bit. And all along was the panic about the possible illnesses I could have contracted from the rainforest:
Dengue
Malaria
Yellow Fever
Cholera (unlikely because there is an extremely low incidence (possibly zero cases) in this country but still…)
Dysentery
A parasite
An infection from the stick that went through my foot

But it’s most likely a case of gastroenteritis with dehydration. Very uncool though. Hopefully we’ll be able to still make it to Cuenca if I feel better by tomorrow.

At 2:30 pm, when I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to stand up or walk to Canadian House or stand in front of a room teaching students without fainting—Ryan called Diego and informed him that I couldn’t come in. I feel really really bad about this. I really wanted to finish off what I had started and I was having a pretty good time in some of the classes. Also, I felt even worse abandoning the people at Canadian House who really needed somebody to fill in those classes. Ryan dropped off the books and thus ended my brief stint as an English teacher in Ecuador.

Fingers crossed I feel better and don’t have to go to the hospital tomorrow.