I’ve been sick since March 11th. (I know this because we left on our trip March 10th and that’s when Mark gave me his sore throat.) Mark has been sick since the end of February. Since we got back from our trip at the end of March I’ve been spending my weekends sleeping in bed and getting better, then getting worse again during the work week. Except last weekend we both got sicker and I got fed up. 

• My father’s remedy, which has been given to him by wise women in Montreal (our pediatrician in the 1970s), Nigeria, China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh:
  A bowl of steaming hot water;
  Twigs of the wise woman’s favourite plant;
  Lean your head over the bowl and breathe.
• The steam is the important part. Each wise woman has her own twigs and the technique works well in every country anyway. The western MD left out the twigs entirely. The twigs make you feel like you’re doing something medicinal and they make the house smell nice. Eucalyptus is common. 

Mark and I spent the weekend steaming ourselves. It may have helped. I used a little eucalyptus oil in the water, which was probably a bad thing because it stung our eyes and we spent less time breathing steam than we would have otherwise. Twigs would have been better, but so would unadulterated steam. 

I hauled Mark in to see his doctor on Monday. It was a walk-in clinic so I was hoping to be seen too, but no such luck. I don’t have a file there and they weren’t going to open one.

• Mark’s doctor’s remedy: 
  1 cortisone nasal spray;
  1 cortisone inhaler;
  Plenty of sleep;
  Regular hand-washing.
• He also got prescriptions for a chest x-ray and an antibiotic, the latter to be filled only if the former shows pneumonia.

So far he’s still coughing a lot and doesn’t feel much better, but he did sleep through the night last night for the first time in a while. 

I went in to work after my failed attempt at a clinic visit but was sent home for coughing too much. I was planning to stay anyway (I don’t always have to work face-to-face with people, and working alone in my little cubicle is not much less restful than sitting around at home) but changed my mind when I got whole-body aches. Crap. The flu. I didn’t get a shot this year.

I went to my clinic yesterday. Mark dropped me off and swiped a face mask to wear going to his x-ray clinic.

I was seen first by a nurse, who didn’t introduce herself as such. I started to realise she wasn’t a doctor when she started asking me questions and writing down the answers without looking at me. Doctors look at you because they’re trying to figure you out. When she asked me what medications I was taking and she’d never heard of them — I had to spell them out — I knew for sure she wasn’t a doctor. She did a swab for a quick strep test (negative) and sighed, said I’d need to see a doctor and took me to another exam room where I was seen by a medical student.

Yaay! I love being seen by medical students. I get to participate in their training and it’s fun to compare what they do with what a doctor does. The medical student carefully went through a standard checklist of questions and turned up notable but irrelevant facts about my poop. She enjoyed listening to my heart, though it had no connection to my cough, just because I have an interesting murmur/arrhythmia. We reviewed my history related to my heart purely for the sake of education. Then she went away to present to the doctor.

When they came back together, the doctor quickly identified that I’d had asthma as a teenager and that my whole-body aches had started only the day before and were therefore from a new virus and not relevant to my complaint of six weeks of coughing. He also made a connection between my heart murmur and my recurrent colds and coughs: I must not use stimulant cold medicines! They are bad for my heart! I assured him that I do not use stimulant cold medicines: they make me feel like crap. (I had always assumed they made everyone feel like crap, but that other people found that more tolerable than their cold symptoms. Now I know that they really do make me feel worse than they do other people.) It was quite cool to compare a newbie and an experienced professional asking questions about an everyday, very banal complaint. They were both smart and nice, but one was better at it. 

• My doctor’s remedy:
  2 asthma inhalers, one cortisone to be used for two weeks to a month, and one bronchodilator to be used for four days or as necessary.
• I should keep them around and use them again next winter when I get sick again and keep coughing long after I should be better, because it’s probably just irritation at that point.  

Anyway, this post is not because I think anyone’s interested in the details of my cough or poop. It’s because I’m interested in the way different people approach similar problems.

My father didn’t ask questions to try to figure out exactly what was causing our misery: he didn’t need to. He could hear us both hacking away and shared the remedy that he uses successfully to ease his own distress when he is hacking away.

The doctors asked fairly pointed questions and took measurements to determine exactly what was wrong. Mark was determined to have a virus and post-nasal drip and given the appropriate remedies to ease his distress; I was determined to have a virus and asthma and given the appropriate remedies to ease mine. For both of us that means cortisone inhalers.

Question: what is the relative efficacy of steam with eucalyptus twigs vs cortisone inhalers? I know from experience that steam has a greater risk, because my sister ended up in the hospital for six days with second-degree burns after tipping a bowl of boiling water into her lap trying to steam her sinuses. And I can bring inhalers to work but I can’t steam my head at work. So even if they were equally effective there would still be reasons to use inhalers. But… is there a fundamental difference between my father’s remedy and the doctors’?

The other question is more philosophical. Going to the doctor gives me peace of mind, and that’s really what I went for. Not the inhalers. Now we know for [pretty] sure we don’t have chronic infections. Mark will know for sure that he doesn’t have pneumonia (but will be able to treat it if he does). This peace of mind is important to me. I want to be told specifically what the problem is and what the scope of it is. I don’t want the uncertainty of thinking we possibly have something worse than usual or worrying about what we’re doing wrong that is dragging things out so long. Without access to doctors, would we be steaming away and not fretting about it? Either steaming helps or it doesn’t. Either we get better soon or we don’t. Would the peace of mind issue become a non-issue?

I suspect it wouldn’t. I don’t think the idea that we become fatalistic when denied information is really borne out by experience. I think we can look around and see that people are pretty free about inventing information when they don’t have it, and give themselves peace of mind that way. I think the exercise of seeking out information when we don’t have it instead of making up an answer is probably at least as valuable as the answer itself, at least in the situation of persistent respiratory thingies in otherwise healthy adults.

Then there’s judgement about when knowledge is necessary to peace of mind at all. Up to what point do we tolerate not knowing, before we either try to find out or make up an answer? What does it say about me that my intolerance for not having descriptions of the exact causes of our coughs sent me to the doctor when I have a perfectly good home remedy that appears no less specific than the pharmaceutical one?

Besides that I felt like crap, of course.

Yesterday my father and I were enjoying the springs in our respective cities. Yes, at -6C it was coldish (normal for March 1 is -1C) but it was sunny and the birds were singing.

That my father was enjoying the spring weather is remarkable because he just arrived back from West Africa: you might think that the hot and muggy weather of Monrovia and Accra might set him up to interpret an Ottawa March 1 as winter. But no, the birds are singing: it’s spring!

I remember when I was about four or five and my father was trying to get me to put my things away, I finally told him that I didn’t care. If he cared, he should put them away. He called me a princess. I was confused because in the books I read, princesses were always virtuous heroines but by his tone of voice my father didn’t seem to be praising me. I tried to get him to explain but he had lost patience by then.

When I was about ten or eleven I was sitting at the dining room table working on a craft and dropped something on the floor. I was about to lean over and pick it up, when I realised that I didn’t have to. I didn’t need it right away and it was perfectly fine sitting on the floor until I did need it. All I had to do was remember where it was. This epiphany was accompanied by a worried suspicion that I was going to regret my insight.

Anyone I have lived with has, with a single exception, complained about my messiness. With that single exception, none has cheerfully accepted my other contributions to the household as adequate compensation for needing to pick up after me.

When living with that single exception, who did not, after all, pick up after me, rather the opposite, the house was so filthy that when a pregnant friend we were chatting with on the sidewalk needed to pee, we lied and said the toilet didn’t work. I think that was when I faced the fact that there was something seriously wrong. We never discussed it.

In Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, there’s a scene where a pathetic, dependent character breaks something and there’s glass on the floor. This is one more contribution to a discouraging sequence of events, not because she attached value to the broken thing but because “now she would have to remember.” As in, it doesn’t occur to her to sweep up the shards; instead she will need to spend the rest of her life trying not to cut her feet by not walking in that spot. I was shocked to discover that I was a type.

For a couple of years one of my annual objectives at work in my performance review was to clean up my desk. I never really got around to doing a complete job. My boss eventually gave up. For the past four years or so my bosses have been elsewhere — Winnipeg or Mississauga or Toronto — and have not seen my desk.

It’s not that I like being messy. I don’t even like ordinary cheerful clutter; I love a stark, open, spare space. One of the first things I did upon getting a regular job was to hire a cleaning lady. It’s more that it seems too complicated. I like doing laundry, and do it diligently even if it means hauling it to a laundromat, even if it takes all weekend. Laundry is self-limiting. There is not an infinite amount of stuff that could theoretically be put into a washing machine. Once it has been washed, it needs to be folded and put away. Very simple. Not only that, I know where laundered things go. Clothes have drawers and shelves and hangers; sheets and towels have closets; dog blankets go back on dog beds; soft furnishings go back where they came from. If I start to clean a house I never know when to stop: there’s always something I didn’t get to and feel guilty about, always a decision that I don’t know how to make.

Mark determined that part of my problem is that not everything has a place to go. I feel bad when stuff is lying around in heaps, but it’s not as though changing the situation is always a simple matter of putting it in its place. There often is no place for it, so more radical intervention is called for. When he moved in he put a lot more storage in. It helps. 

Still, the other day someone said that if I were an employee, she’d fire me; that if I were a roommate, I would be out on my ass in two days. She doesn’t even know me that well. It’s just that obvious.

My boss is in town for a day. I cleaned off my desk this morning in preparation, which mostly consisted of stashing papers and the binders into which they are some day to be filed, into drawers and bins where they will be invisible to the casual visitor. Still, I feel better.

Mark has been stomping around crossly for the past few weeks, issuing dark warnings that we both need to change if we value the relationship. I’m not sure I can change, exactly. But perhaps I can put “cleaning off the dining room table every Saturday” into the same doable category as “laundry.”

After returning from Bangladesh and a too-short stay with family, my father is back in Liberia.

*** *** ***
Dear Family and Friends,

Back in Liberia. I spent this afternoon with the Minister for Education and his deputies. They all say they will be up most of tomorrow night watching the inauguration and the balls. All over the world – or at least in my small sampling – people are joyful about the new direction they see in America.

My previous time in Liberia (2004), there was a short break in the war that had lasted fourteen years. My assignment took me to villages where people were rebuilding homes, shops, bridges, wells, roads, and whatever other infrastructure competing armies, often made up of children, had taken into their heads to destroy. The villages were doing their best to reintegrate their ‘lost’ young people, many of whom had done terrible things. The returnees were doing what they could to be accepted back. There were three short, intense wars in 2005, but now there is a stable and reasonably competent government headed by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. There is hope again… sort of. USAID is helping rebuild teacher education. Our team of three is spending six weeks to evaluate this effort and suggest improvements.

We’ve been in Monrovia since Wednesday. The attached pictures may give you some of the flavour. We’re off tomorrow for two days to see schools and teacher training colleges in the countryside. We’ll come back to sharpen our survey instruments then head back out for more intensive interviews and observations for the next four weeks.

Lunch today was cassava leaf stew with fish, chicken, and shrimp… and rice.

Update on Beli: She’s bought a rickshaw and some rice. She rents out the rickshaw and will sell the rice in small packets. Her life as a businesswoman has begun.

Affectionately,
P.