My First Week of Work and a Visit from Dengue

Sara and I started our work as volunteers in Comayagua this week. This is what I recall:

I had been sick for a couple days with a sore neck, back, and joints, headache behind the eyes, fever, some vomiting, and lots and LOTS of diarrhea. I had resisted going to the hospital because I was convinced it was something I got from making food in our not very ‘hygienical’ kitchen and I wanted to fight it off since we had another 7 weeks to live in the house. Being sick like this also reminded me of the time we were sick in Nepal for a week and all the weight we lost from it and after 3 years of Dallas and 3 months of Manteca, a six pack was in my near future again if I could only hang on a little longer.

On Wednesday, realizing that I could no longer fight this stomach bug nor miss another day of our first week of work, we decided to check out the Honduran Hospital system. We had already heard some horror stories about the medical system, but heard it was standard procedure to give blood and a stool sample for stomach illnesses and a buddy of mine told me that he got an IV when he went in which sounded really exciting that morning in my very dehydrated state.

Sara came with me first thing in the morning and after a blood test, a very awkward stool sample (Sara had to hold my IV bag in the men’s bathroom), 3 IV bags, and seven hours we found out that my plaquetas were very low and that I might have dengue fever. The doctor asked me to return the next day to see if the plaquetas (platelets) bounced back. He said if they didn’t it could be a very severe kind of dengue which results from bleeding from all orifices and patients have to be hospitalized so that they can monitor them. He gave me a bag full of pills and some bolsas of floura (the stuff that gives you the good bacteria back, segun Sara) and I went home plumper from the IVs but not feeling that much better.

I was impressed with Comayagua’s hospital care it was very clean and had a friendly staff. I have been told that Honduran doctors shoot first with the needles and ask questions later, but in my case they didn’t give me anything until they gave me some IV’s and took the appropriate tests. I thought it was unusual that during the whole time there they did not use gloves at all not even for IV inserting or collection of samples.

And so it’s Friday now and the first week of work is done. I can honestly say I only worked about 3 hours all occuring on Monday before the diarrhea began. The 3 hours consisted of an awkwardly short meeting with the mayor and another very dengue sweaty meeting with our counterpart. I thought it was a very unlucky, unproductive start here, but my lovely wife reminded me last night that I have already been infected by one of the four types of dengue in the first week of two years (there are supposedly only 4 kinds of dengue and you are only able to get infected once by each one). Pretty productive week afterall :)