Tag Archives: illness

A Perfectly Lovely Sunday

Posted on by

0

photo (1)

Image courtesy of Emily Chapman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I spent last Sunday vomiting up a wide variety of food and drink. Veggie burger. Orange juice. Blueberries. In my house. In my dad’s house. Out of a vehicle onto Morningside Drive, in front of a family out for a bike ride. (My profuse apologies to whoever’s streetfront that was.)

Unprepared as I was for the sudden strike of gastrointestinal upheaval, I wound up having to call my dad and ask him, feebly, to retrieve me so that if I collapsed from dehydration, someone would notice and take me to the hospital. (The cat, though he is a lovely roommate, is not very considerate about these things.)

I livetweeted the whole event, of course, because I am disgusting. When I returned to work on Tuesday, I was reminded of which coworkers follow me on Twitter, because they all started conversations with me by saying, “Oh good, you’re not throwing up anymore!” So that was illuminating.

Continue reading →

Hanging out with my broken brain

Posted on by

0

4834956303_7f17592325_z

Image courtesy of Scott1723. Licensed under CC 2.0.

I was 15 when I had my first migraine. My family was at a moderately-fancy movie theatre, and it was a bright grey day, and I looked over into the parking lot and noticed that it appeared to be moving, which seemed unusual. I poked my dad and asked him to confirm whether the parking lot was moving or whether I was having an aneurism.

On the downside, the parking lot wasn’t really moving. On the upside, not an aneurism!

The migraines, a legacy inherited from my dad’s side of the family, didn’t make much of an additional appearance until I was in college. Either I was a remarkably low-stress high school student, or something about routinely eating fruits and vegetables staved them off until I started feeding myself a diet consisting of store brand boxed wine and Amy’s microwaveable meals. Continue reading →

NGO Yenta

Posted on by

0

It is Friday morning here, which means that I do not have classes. Permenant three-day weekends are both great (free time!) and terrible (boredom, probable hatred of my host siblings with school on Friday). But on this particular week I am very, very glad for this setup because it allowed me to sleep off the remainders of a disgusting intestinal ailment that struck Thursday morning.

I do not know what I ate that disagreed with me, but it did so with gusto. As a result, after coming home from school yesterday, I had a four-hour nap. Then I was back in bed at 10:30 and slept for another 12 hours. I was awake for maybe 12 hours of yesterday. I feel better, though still not up for competitive eating.

(As an aside, I learned this week that if I am in my room with my lights off, my host mother just assumes I am not home. She didn’t realize I was in the house for the four hours that I was asleep yesterday. Whoops.)

I leave Monday for my rural visit. I’ll be staying with some employees of APROFES, an organization that works on women’s empowerment in a way that’s less development-cheese than that sounds. In particular, I’m interested in their role as a facilitator of that process–most of what they do is talk to women who would like funds/assistance of the NGO variety, find an NGO that is equipped to provide those funds/assistance, and put them in touch with each other. They’re like a development yenta.

Continue reading →