Fevered

For once, this wasn’t a cry because I felt so much, too much—these tears came from a body that earned it, so wrung out by pain it left room for nothing else.

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In the days approaching this moment, I’d had no power over the persistent ache in my limbs, finding myself involuntarily shivering as a piercing cold enveloped my blotched skin. I now picture striking a match to the corner of a field in a controlled burn, the fire evolving slowly and burning vegetation down to ashes. This ache trumped all its predecessors. A God I don’t believe in played a cruel joke on me, my skin shedding sheets of sweat like some kind of twisted baptism exercise. 

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Seated in a gray plastic chair, I’m poked for blood in a fashion I would quickly become numb to. After processing the sample, the nurses lock eyes across the room, a foreign tongue filling the air. Their lips move behind masks, forming phonemes novel to my ears, but my suspicions about my body don’t often betray me. I knew the very moment I began to sweat. Something in my body was deeply wrong. Turning their gaze toward me, the nurses use fragmented English to confirm what I already sensed. No chance I was leaving the island. A mosquito virus had taken refuge in my bloodstream.

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A lazy Susan of rotating medical staff enter and exit, checking my blood pressure, platelets, teeth, gums, temperature, stool, muscle mass. They hardly register because I’m just so exhausted. 

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The routine took on a dream-like rhythm. I’d like to say this was comforting to me, as routine often is. But predicting the very encounters with people who’d enter and the very things they’d ask and the disappointing updates they’d inevitably offer was only a sting.

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My body is home but my body is changed. Phantom parts survive in the Crest-white halls of a hospital off of a bypass in Denpasar. 

My abdomen remains, checked twice a day for firmness by the doctor I’ve been assigned. His name is Gide and he wears a Harley Davidson shirt most days. I don’t know if he knows anything about that brand, but he’s cool and he admires me because I’m American. 

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My gums remain, painfully inflamed by a weakening immune system. A trained dentist advises me that they are sore because my wisdom teeth are trying to push through. I tell her my wisdom teeth were removed years ago. 

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My arms remain, weaker than ever before. Three IVs per forearm flood my system with medical-grade virus-resistant vitamins as my body works around the clock to multiply my white blood cell count. It leaves no residual energy to stay awake, much less to lift my arms.

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My blood remains, pulsing through my veins and twice spurting out of the IV, sending me into a panic and requiring nurses to respond to the emergency button next to my bed. I don’t like seeing how easily my blood flow can be diverted from its intended path. 

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My racing mind remains, disoriented, overwhelmed, infected, contagious, building on tendencies I work so hard to overcome. Do people at home know how seriously to take this Do you think they even care Would I have made it if I got on the plane home Would I have died if What if I didn’t insist on seeing a doctor at the airport My head won’t stop pounding I need to eat I’ve lost weight and that’s so unsettling When will I get to go home I feel so worn and my arms are so weathered like tarnished metal I physically cannot consume another bottle of Pocari Sweat I’m so scared

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My thoughts hiss and crackle until I can’t hear anything else. I have a bad habit of biting the inside of my cheek. And I’m so ready to let it go. But the four hospital walls, the uncertainty, and the weight of this pain served only as a catalyst. Now when I press my tongue against the inside of my cheek, I feel scars.

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The heavy and cold parts of my body feel suspended there, but what moves with me now in each step I take is a clear and sharp image of tenderness. My mother’s body cramped on a bed right by my side, laying each night on a three-foot long couch. The dim vision of her asking the doctors questions to understand what was happening while I rest and sweat. Encouragement to eat when I’ve lost all appetite. Holding my torso while I grip my walker draped in IV drip bags, providing some sense of stability for seconds at a time in an otherwise hazy fog of weakness. But I can’t walk to the bathroom without falling. And I can’t do so much. She showers me gently. No words need to be spoken. I look like a helpless baby deer, crying in the headlights. 

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I’m not married to my body, I realize. It’s here with me now, slowly regaining color. But it’s in some far away place, too. I catch myself resisting the overwhelming terror of not being able to predict, the fragility of my body deceiving me at any point. Sometimes I crave the formula of a day in there, each moment stretching far ahead of me with clear certainty. Now my teeth search for the grooves inside my cheeks, and I let out a sigh as they settle into familiar paths.

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