Sick Man

I don’t know if there’s a good time to be sick. Mildly sick, maybe, like when you can get your body temp somewhat high that you’d convince your boss that you need to stay home and rest, when all you wanted to do was to read or play books or videogames you just got your hands on.

On the opposite, I haven’t thought up a list of worst times to be sick, but if I were to do that, “while traveling” would rank high up. In my past 6 days I was spending every waking hour loathing that fact, suffering through my fever as I traveled Taiwan’s locales.

I usually deal with my sickness by resting and fasting. This fever I contracted on Taiwan, though, came when it’s not convenient for me to be lying on a bed all day, covered in blanket and taking drowse-inducing pills. I spent my days there busy, and even as my condition wore me out I had to stay awake, doing my job. I needed a fast cure, even one that might not be the best cure. I did not know how to do this, so I consulted from an assortment of people – relatives, people who handed out those brown Chinese medicines with weird bitter tastes, acupuncture therapists, and doctors who prescribe western medicines.

When it comes health advices, I find myself surprised that there’s rarely a consensus. In my six days recovering from a fever, I’ve heard one guy tell me that I should not eat because fasting is a way for the human body to clean up, but then another guy would say that, in spite of the lack of appetite, I should eat lest I don’t take in any nutrients that would cure the disease. One would tell me to not take a bath, another would say it’s ok to take a bath – and with the weather reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s hard to not resist a shower now and then. The only thing that people agreed on was that I needed to get some sleep, but then even the condition of sleeping was subjected to debate, like if it’s ok that I sleep on an air-conditioned room or should I sweat it out in the absence fans and air-cons.

In six days, my back was all red because of Gua Sha (a Chinese back scraping treatment), I’ve spent 30 minutes with needles punctured on both my hands, I’ve gone to “nasal treatment center” (that rose in popularity because of SARS and H1N1) where my throat and nose were dabbed with weird concoction sticking on a cotton swab, and I got some neck twisting massage that was so rough that I’m surprised my breath still hasn’t left me. And then, finally, I went with eating pills, which let drowsiness hit me as fast as a train traveling at bullet speed would kill me. I don’t know which of them were most effective, but although my fever has gone away, I still have persistent cough bugging me.

My days in Taiwan, all spent in illness. I don’t think I have much travel insights for this time around. There was something I wanted to say in this post, but some time in the writing, I forgot what it is.