Just so you all know...

I'm still alive.

I'm even doing better, which is great. The nasty rash is less noticeable and I'm not feeling as bad as I was.

Now if I could just lose this irritating runny nose and if I didn't have a bug bite that felt like a lion gnawing through my ankle....

But I'm re-entering society again today.* This should be good since if I have to sit around on my own anymore I think I am liable to become clinically insane.

Thanks for your prayers everybody...they are probably the reason you don't have a raving lunatic for a friend/relative right now! (I would really appreciate prayer about the bugbite though, I know it sounds dumb, but it hurts extraordinarily badly, and I can't really gnaw off my leg like a fox** in a trap even though I want too.)

Jessica

* This may even be interesting since this means a trip to Lebamba while the President is supposedly visiting, but his wife just died so he may not be coming, we shall see. If anything exciting and post-worthy happens, I'll let you know, no worries. Even if nothing exciting does happen though, I'll be able to get salt, which I am excited about.

**I don't know if foxes actually do this, I've read that muskrats do, but I don't really feel like comparing myself to a muskrat... *EDIT* It turns out that during one 4 year study of animal leg traps 26% of foxes did chew off their legs, so I don't have to be a muskrat. Hurray.

It's official...

So if you've talked to me in the last few days, you probably know I've been mostly miserable since Sunday.

At first I thought it was a cold...then I thought I was dying. The latter has been the most prevalent conviction since then..

I felt like I'd been hit by a truck at first, then I was nearly convincecd that I had long hot needles being jammed through every joint, bone, and organ in my body. Luckily, feelings are decieving, and there weren't any actual pieces of metal attacking me (I think). 

I basically slept Sunday evening through Thursday morning. 

Then, on Thursday I did school with the kids because I wasn't feeling quite so awful and my fevers were down to around 99* or so. 

We had a fun time learning about St. Patrick's day (I was too sick to do school on the Tuesday during the real holiday...but it worked out)

Then I went over to Joanna's with all the kids (Zach, Forrest and Emma--the new kids on the block-- came to school with us that day and to lunch). But at lunch that feeling of, "oh dear, I think I'm dying..." started to return. 

So I walked home. And ended up having other stuff to do like identifying a large snake that was just like the one in this house (except this one was a lot larger) and a skype date. At about 4 I started really feeling horrible and my fever was almost 102*. So I took a nap, the rest of the evening is actually really hazy. I remember being cold and taking a shower to get warm and still feeling cold. I remember Lisa leaving (she had told me she was but for some reason I thought she meant some other day...) and then I slept. 

That evening my dad was online and he was nice enough to talk to me while I mourned for myself and tried to explain my misery. Then he told me to go to the hospital in the morning and see a doctor.

This whole time Lisa had suggested that perhaps it was Congo Fever...something she had gotten. But then, she said when she had it she had bone crushing pain and couldn't get up.

I maintained the whole time that I did hurt and that it felt exactly like a flare of fibromyalgia (except for the fever and headache behind the eyes). I'm used to pushing through that, so I did.

Anyway, she commented again last night to keep an eye out for the rash that would be a sure sign of the fever, except this time she said it'd start on my chest...my response? "Oh, like this?"

I'd noticed my neck/chest looking a little mottled, but that's where one of my tan spots is and so it always looks weird to me. Color is funny looking, I'm used to milk white. 

But then we couldn't decide if it was a rash or if I was just patchy...so the plan was to go down to the hospital today and see one of the doctors.

When I got up this morning my fever wasn't as bad, but I felt awful. I couldn't tell if the rash was worse, but I was pretty sure it was a rash.  I knew there was no way I could walk down to the hospital since I didn't want to walk down to the kitchen even.  My headache was so bad that my vision was flickering weirdly. So I took a shower (to get warm again...still freezing, which is a sign you're not quite right when it's in the mid 80s. ) and went back to bed instead.

Lisa came back at 11:30 or so, and I was embarressed that I'd fallen asleep again, so I got up and tried to act natural by standing like a zombie in my dark room staring at the wall. Realising that was not so impressive I grabbed my hair gel. Who doesn't stand around using hair gel  on their mostly dry hair in the dark?

Lisa said Karen was here, so I went down and she saw the rash and Lisa was sure it was one now too, and they decided it was Red Congo Fever. (So dad, I didn't go down to the hospital, but I did have a house call by a nurse practitioner...Lisa wanted me to tell you that)

Lisa was really excited about this, first because she diagnosed it and second because she said this makes me an offical missionary now. 

I'm not sure that I'm quite as excited as her. But they did tell me I needed to stay home and rest otherwise I won't get better and that made me happy because that's what I wanted to do but I felt like I should go watch the kids since I've been so absent this week.

So now I'm about to go back to sleep. At noon. Because I can barely keep my eyes open. I'd appreciate your prayers that I recover soon.

Your now official red and achy missionary,

Jessica

"When I look at your face I feel sick"

That's what my roommate told me over lunch. I think it was one of the funnniest things I've heard in a long time. Here's the story:

I was filling up water bottles with our filtered water. This is important, because without water you die, and if you drink the river water out of our faucets you can get sick.

Here is a picture of our water filter in all it's purifying glory:
You take off the lid, dump in the dirty water. It drips down through these clay sticks into the lower tank. Then you put a bottle under the spigot and fill it up. And Voila, clean water for drinking! (although, if the water that day is particularly brown from the sink, then it can still be a bit yellowish even after filtering).

So there I was filling up bottles, the top tank was low too so I filled it up too. When I was checking to see if I should add any more water to the tank, I saw them.

Little brown spheres. They were floating all around the edge of the water. They nearly blended in with the slightly rusty blue metal.

You have to understand how nasty this is. I had just poured myself a big glass of this insect egg water and downed most of it.

I can handle bugs in my drinks. I'll even just drink around them...but insect eggs? Really? So we took off the top of the tank to dump it and inside the filtered water resevoir, and inside that was a little ant flotilla.

I don't understand these flotillas--how they get there, why ants do that, or why it has to be in the drinking water. But it looks like a little floating island made of dead ants with live ants on top of them. Floating in the water from which I just drank. Blech...

So we dumped out the lower tank too along with most of our drinking water in the bottles. And if I get violently sick, now you will know why.

Anyway, what does that have to do with my face making Lisa sick? We reserved one bottle of water and designated it safe, because we needed something to drink (it's really not optional right now since it's been in the 90s and ridiculously humid). So she mixed in a little packet of green tea to our bottle of water. And I took a sip, and couldn't help wondering if that was a hint of dead ant flavor or a tinge of inset egg that I was detecting. I didn't say anything, but Lisa knew exactly what I was thinking, so she looked at me and said: "Stop that. Don't think about it. When I look at your face I feel sick." There was half a second of silence and then we laughed hysterically while she tried to make that sound better. I told her I was putting it on my facebook anyway, and then I thought better of it and decided to make a whole blog post of the incident!

So there you have it.

Jessica