Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Sick

I have been feeling a cold coming on the last few days. All of my friends have been coughing, sneezing, wheezing and all the other gross stuff that comes with the territory. I have been trying to avoid it and stay as healthy as possible, but I am being to think it is inevitable.

I have been very fortunate while living here, only getting really sick a few times. Some foreigners find that they are always sick since their bodies are not use to the different set of germs that float through the air here. But this new bout of feeling under the weather has caused me to reflect on the first time I was sick out here.

I had spent the whole night feeling awful, I couldn’t breath lying down, I was to weak to sit up, I kept having to run to the bathroom… it was just awful. I decided to skip class the next morning, but forgot to call my classmates to let them know I was not coming. When I didn’t show up for class and I wasn’t answering my phone ( it was to far from the bed for me to make it in time)… both my classmate and my teacher came running over to my room to see what was wrong. The teacher went to get the school doctor, but my classmate started to make me chicken noodle soup( it was just a package of cup-of-soup), but it smelled so good and reminded me of home. I had just gotten propped up in bed ready to drink my soup when the school doctor and the teacher arrived. The doctor took one look to see what was in the cup and deemed it unsuitable to drink when I was sick. And then in a flash of a moment, before either my classmate or I could do anything to stop him, the doctor took the hot cup of soup out of my hand and tossed the contents out of my second story window. Trust me I had enough energy to scream out my protests… but the doctor insisted it was unsuitable… that I needed to be drinking flour water. Boiling hot water with two to three table spoons of flour in it. GROSS. Both my classmate and I were so mad, that soup had come in a care package from home… we have to use that stuff so sparingly, I mean even if I wasn’t allowed to drink it, my classmate could have.

This time I am going to stay away from any school doctors and just administer my own treatment of orange juice and chicken noodle soup in the quietness of my own room.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Karen,

Here's hoping you feel better soon. In case you run out of chicken soup, I hope you can make it over to Youtube and enjoy this vintage Sesame Street skit all about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODkHPk8ADnA

I love you,

Bruce