NOTE: This is a very long entry, but it's length is, I feel, quite necessary to deal with the experiences I've had in the past 72 hours. And, believe me, I'm leaving out a lot of detail.

Monday started out as a good day. I woke up and lingered around downtown for a while, checking my email and scoping out the central park. After that, I went and had a quick and unsatisfying meal at a café near the park. After being sufficiently bored by the town, I headed down to the beach and sat down on the steps of a beachside restaurant. You see, I didn't want to actually sit down on the sand, as it was covered in trash, both organic and inorganic (and there was definitely the real possibility of human waste). So, I sat on the steps and began to work on a bracelet. As I was working, several people came along to talk with me.

One was an old insane begger, another was a younger, but also fairly instable, Honduran tourist who wanted to practice his almost non-existent English. But a few other folks were quite fun to talk with. Two of them were sanitation workers, who spent their days cleaning up the beach after the tourists who used the sands as garbage bins. They were Garífunas, and spoke their own language, Spanish and, in the case of one of them, English, from having lived and worked in the United States. I also spoke with another artisan who made bracelets, drums and polished coral (which is now illegal to harvest, thank the gods). They were all cool people and I had a great time chatting with them. Little by little, as I was chatting with them, I realized that I was starting to feel a little bit... wierd.

I couldn't say that I felt precisely bad, but definitely tired and somewhat "off." I excused myself and planned to come back later to interact some more; but first I had to switch hotels. So, I went back to where I was staying, packed up my gear and hauled it over to my new hotel. Dropping my pack down in my new, cheaper, less beautiful and spacious room, I realized that I really did not feel well at all. I felt exhausted and was sweating a little bit. I lay down and slept for a couple of hours, waking up in a hot sweat.

Standing up, I had a terrible headache, was dizzy, definitely feverish and was sweating profusely. I headed downstairs and ask the woman at reception if she knew how to get to the hospital. She told me just to hail any cab and ask to go to the hospital. Simple, huh? Well, I made my way out of the hotel and down the street, where I proceeded to walk several blocks in the midday sun, semi-delirious and dizzy, trying to find a cab. Finally, arriving at the central park, I just stood alongside an intersection and waited and hoped. I must say, whenever you don't need a cab, they're everywhere and won't leave you alone. However, at this point, the city seemed to be devoid of taxis completely. I tried to flag one cab down, but apparently the hospital wasn't in the direction his other passenger was going, so he couldn't help me. He probably wasn't too thrilled at the obscenity I slurred as I stumbled off, looking for someone who could carry me to what I assumed would be safety. Finally, I did get ahold of a cab and I got to the hospital fairly quickly at that point, it was just outside of town, alongside the major highway connecting Tela with the interior of Honduras.

I paid the driver and staggered into the compound, walking another hundred meters inside to reach the hospital. When I did arrive, as delirious as I might have been in that moment, I knew I was in big trouble. The hospital was filled with fifty to seventy five people, all in one small central passage. Most of the people there did not seem to be in such terrible shape. There looked to be a few cases of broken bones, a few bad cuts, but other than that, it seemed that people were bringing their babies to get check-ups. I came in, not knowing what I had... maybe malaria, maybe appendicitus... I was a little bit stressed out. I began to ask around, as there was no one in obvious control of the situation, to find out where the doctor was, how I could get to see the doctor, if someone could help me, etc. People just pointed in the direction of the doctor's door.

I finally just gave up and sprawled out on the ground in the middle of the plaza, exhausted. I was to the point where I had no shame; if it took me acting like a dog and lying on the ground to get the medical staff's attention, so be it. Finally, after having waited and asked for help for about an hour, a nurse finally took me in to see the doctor. After asking me what I was feeling, he immediately concluded that it was probably a case of malaria and send me to the laboratory to get bloodwork done. They took some blood and told me to go outside and wait five minutes for the results. I lay there for a half an hour on the ground outside the laboratory listening to people talk about me in full voice, as if I wasn't there.

They talked about how bad I looked, about how I surely had malaria, about how I was going to die. One woman felt it important to strike up a conversation with me and talk about what the side-effects of the malaria medication would be. That conversation ended with me yelling at her, on the verge of tears, telling her I didn't want to talk. I couldn't think straight anymore, I was lost in a cyclone of feverish confusion. At some point, someone told me to get up and directed me to a baby-changing table, where I lay for another hour and a half, awaiting my test results. I would, from time to time, ask people who were passing by what was going on. I never really got any results from that. Finally, having waited for two hours for my test results, I got up from the table. I needed to go to the bathroom rather desperately.

I asked around and figured out where the facilities were. However, upon arriving, I realized that I was not at all disposed to using them. The bathrooms at this "hospital" consisted of two wooden shacks with seatless toilets. And, apparently, the users were expected to bring their own toilet paper, as none was provided. I wasn't going to go without toilet paper, so I made my way upstairs into the airconditioned offices that were above the hospital and basically walked into someone's office and used their restroom. When I came out, the office workers were none too pleased with my "abuse" of their facilities. Of course, at that point I didn't care at all. I was too far gone to care about reasonable regulations, much less regulations such as these. How can collapsing, sick people suffering from diarrea be expected to use restrooms such as this "hospital" provided?

When I got back downstairs, my test results were finally given to me and I went and talked to the doctor again. After sustaining myself against his desk for a few minutes while he carried on a phone conversation, he asked me a few more questions and then gave me three perscriptions to take to the pharmacy. "Come back when you have these medications," he told me. Ultimately, I feel that this doctor's decision to have me go and pick up the medication myself was a fairly bad call. Although, who could blame him? The hospital, serving, certainly, hundreds of people daily, had only one doctor and a few nurses. In my case, however, it would have been helpful to have recieved some assistance.

By the time I reached the pharmacy, I was on the point of collapse, leaning against the metal bars on the outside of the pharmacists window. When he gave me my medication, I staggered a few feet and then collapsed onto the ground near where I had laid earlier on the baby-changing station. People, this time, did seem to notice, and after a few minutes a group of women woke me up and had me get up on the baby table and, it seems, went and told the nurses what happened. After a little while - I'm not sure how long, as I was unconscious - a nurse arrived and brusquely shuffled me over to the nurses' station.

Here, she vigorously applied an IV (which, if you haven't had one, is spectacularly painful; or, at least mine was) and hooked me up to a little baggie of solution that, I supposed, should do something helpful. She moved me over to another room where I lay on a metal table, sleeping for the next few hours. During that time, my IV came loose several times, covering my hands and part of my shirt in blood.

When I awoke from this little nap, I found myself very thirsty, confused and in pain. I called out for help for some amount of time, probably between fifteen minutes and a half an hour. No one came, and I felt too weak to raise myself off of the table. Finally, the nurse that had assaulted me before came in to get some equipment for someone else. I called out to her, "Excuse me. But I need some things..."

"Like, what things?" She replied, impatiently.

"Like, water?"

"There isn't any water." She turned her back on me, and I stared at the large container of water that stood on the table behind her.


I called out to her several more times, asking her how it could be that there was no water in a hospital. She repeated several times that there was no water, and then proceeded to ignore me. I eventually pulled myself up from the table and, dragging the apparatus that held my IV bag, whose wheels did not function, I made my way out to the entryway of the hospital and asked passersby if they would please get me some water. Finally someone did, and another person got me a Gatorade (which is, I have found, a very popular drink in Honduras).

I sat there, in the entryway of the hospital for another couple of hours, until my IV bags had dried up. I couldn't think about anything, I couldn't think in any normal sense of the word. I could only attempt to comprehend the situation I was in; I was so mixed up at this point that I felt confused as to why I was in Honduras. When my IV bags finished up, the same nurse who put the IV in took it out... sideways. Yes, I swear to God the woman took the needle out sideways. I don't know what traumatic event this nurse had in the past with redheaded men, but it must have been something horrific.
I limped down to the exit of the hospital, still very ill and limping like a beaten puppy. I was bleeding from my hand and on the point of vomiting, except that I hadn't eaten since that morning. I climbed in the cab and made it safely back to my hotel.

The story since then has been one of sweaty agony. I'll leave the details to my reader's imagination because, frankly, it's too graphic to go into. But, let it be said that I took my first food on Tuesday morning, near lunchtime: a packet of crackers and a Gatorade. Since then I've been working my way up, moving from watermelon to chicken soup (artificially flavored, you vegan fascists!). Today, I ate some oatmeal and bananas. This evening I had my first actual "meal," consisting of some beans, tortillas and eggs.

I'm recovering, and I'm sure I'll be at 100% within a few days, but I must say that this experience has left me feeling very different, in ways that are hard to describe. The words that kept running through my mind this morning were: "La vida ya no tiene sabor" (life doesn't have flavor anymore). It's a strange sensation, but I feel somehow disconnected from life more and more, a sort of negative detachment, not the good kind that buddhists talk about. The kind of disconnection that numbs, that reduces all colors to black and white and all flavors to bitter.

I feel, to a certain extent, like the protagonist of Satre's "The Wall," who, faced with his own demise, ceases to care about anything of this world. It is absurdity, but with a tragic twist; the side of absurdity that sees no point in existence.

I'll get back to you.