I’m trying not to disappear but being sick is such a PITA and I’m not getting better as quickly as I would like and I don’t like whiners. I seem to have started all of you on this path of my dengue and post dengue experiences so I’ll keep on.
My main problem now is lack of energy, lack of breath, and leg cramps as side effects from some of the medicine. I returned to the doctor yesterday, completely wiped out. I had stopped taking several of the prescriptions because they seemed to be causing me to get leg cramps at night. I’ve had problems with that before and the pain is so intense that I’m terrified of them. I was mentally wondering what I would do if my life depended on taking something that I knew would give me cramps, I’m still not sure. Without the steroid inhaler, I wasn’t breathing very well. I felt so bad that I thought my oxygen levels must be really down again. The headache is my constant companion, the extreme exhaustion as well.
On top of this, some really good friends that we haven’t seen in two years were in town for a short while and I wanted to spend time with them. I tried, I wasn’t a lot of fun but I really pushed myself to stay up and go places. They were wonderful and came here to the house a lot and just sat around with me and were happy to continue on their own when I ran out of steam.
So, I was pretty down when I returned to the doctor on Monday. I admitted everything I had stopped taking and told him why. I also admitted my huge fear of the cramps and the pain. He was great, he told me that there are other options for medication and we would find the right ones together. He tested and examined me again and I was relieved to find out that my oxygen levels were not back down where they had been. My blood pressure is pretty low but since mine is usually low it isn’t too bad.
He spent a lot of time with me talking about when I use the inhalers, telling me to change and use them in the afternoon so the highest level of medication is available at night and in the mornings, my worst times. He changed my medication, he reassured me, he had his assistant go over the procedure for using the inhalers several times, making sure I got it. While I’ve had these things for years I don’t think anyone has ever really gone step by step with me in their use. By the time Mimi and I left, I could feel the effect of using one of the new ones and could walk and breathe much better. Going over, I was so dizzy and out of breath that Mimi had walked with me, I was grateful as I was afraid I’d fall.
There are some up sides to this, and I’ve been looking hard for them. One thing, all of my doctor and treatment visits are only in Spanish. I’ve added some medical terms to my meagre vocabulary. The Spanish word of the week is los calambres or cramps. I had to look that one up last week as espasmo which I originally used was causing confusion. I also can now pronounce oxígeno easily, it used to tie my tongue in knots.
Oh, did I mention the red raccoon eyes I got from the potassium? That was merely irritating and funny. One of the anti-cramp medications I got last week was potassium and about an hour after I took it, while I was sitting at the RV park talking to our friends, my eyelids, eyes and cheeks turned bright red. I couldn’t see it and my friends asked me about it as I was leaving but I just shrugged since I didn’t know what they were talking about. I got to the doctor and he asked me about my eyes, again I was just confused and there were no mirrors. When I got home I realized what they were talking about and how weird I looked. I stopped taking that med too. Yesterday the doctor told me I could half the amount but I should take it for about 5 days because many of these medications reduce the amount of potassium in my blood, thus cramps. I can live with rabid raccoon eyes if it keeps the cramps at bay. When I mentioned that I was eating a banana a day, he said that wasn’t enough and that if I wanted to get more potassium from food I should also eat a whole tomato, a glass of orange juice and some kiwi. That is exactly the recommendation that Manuela our housekeeper in Akumal had given me when I told her about my last couple weeks. Folk wisdom is pretty good in many cases.
Sunday night, a friend and commenter from my blog arrived from Alaska to get some dental work done. She’s been great too with my lack of energy and was fine with me taking her to get our feet smoothed instead of walking around looking at sights. They had the most wonderful recording of the Ave Maria on the stereo and I think getting a foot massage and listening to that was the highlight of my week. Your priorities sure change when you get old and I’m feeling really old this week.
First off, you guys are GREAT!! I’ve had many offers of thermometers, real ones with mercury, and some friends here in town spotted one and bought it for me. So, I’m set on the thermometer thing. A little more embarrassing, showing how out of it I can be with new things, when I was at the doctor they had one of those new, digital ones with the pointy end… and they stuck it under my arm! It didn’t poke me like they do under the tongue, it seemed to read accurately, I felt kind of stupid. I’d no idea that the new ones are apparently designed for under the arm not under the tongue. I suppose putting a thermometer under your tongue is as old fashioned as a clock with hands.
So, that was the good news. This past weekend was pretty bad, I didn’t even get downstairs at all. The fever is pretty much gone but the headache is debilitating, my energy level is below zero and I’m having a serious shortness of breath problem. So, today we went around the corner to the lung clinic. A friend has a cousin who is a doctor there. He was great, his news was not so great. Probably this has less to do with the dengue anymore and more to do with my decreased immune system from the dengue as well as my COPD. I had a very, very low oxygen level. That probably explains the headache as well. He has me going for a nebulizer treatment twice a day for the next 3 days, taking some antibiotics, he changed my inhaler and promised he would have me feeling normal again. That would be really nice.
I was up and about all day today for the first time in over a week. I’m pretty tired but holding up. I took a pic of me hooked up to the nebulizer but it is soooooooo horrible that I had to put a filter on it. When did I get this old?
When Sheila dropped the lab results off last night, I couldn’t figure out what they meant. There wasn’t a line that said anything like “dengue: si o no”. My leucocitos are low normal, my monocitos are high and my plaquetas are very low, everything else was normal. So, today I went off with my test results to the free doctor at the Ahorro pharmacy I usually use. I explained, she read the results, she said it is generally leucocitos and plaquetas that are indicative of dengue and from the looks of my test, I have it. She wants me to go for the same test again tomorrow and if the plaquetas have not gone up, or if they have gone down further, I should go to my doctor. If they get too low, I would need blood. She did a short exam, blood pressure, temperature, lungs and heart and all was fine. The good news is that she said since I’ve had this for 5 days, it should be over in 3 more days. I’m ready for that.
Since I was out and about, I went to the San Benito mercado to get some fish food. It’s much cheaper there and the fishies were almost out. I wasn’t on my game though, I bought some flowers and the deal was for half a dozen for $20p and she only gave me 5 stalks. Then I went to the regular grocery store in search of something that would look appealing to me to eat. I think I’ve had a bagel and a bowl of cereal in the last 3 days. While I was in Superama, it began to pour rain with thunder and lightening. This is not really the time of year for this kind of storm. The lights were flickering and the rain was beating the corrugated roof so hard it was impossible to hear. As I was coming down the escalator to the parking garage, I looked across the street and there was a guy up on the roof between a bunch of rebar towers and some other high metal objects. I was thinking that wasn’t a great place to be during a thunderstorm when lightning flashed and the thunder boomed right on top of it. The worker glanced up through the downpour, crossed himself and went on about his job. That’s a lot of faith.
Itty Bitty the 3 legged kitty
One thing I was really happy about is that even though I was feeling horrible, I got up Saturday morning and got the jeep to the upholstery shop. I’d made a deal with them to put new zippers on the windows and sew and patch the places on the canvas top that were ripped. I got up again that afternoon and took a cab up there and picked it up. They did a really good job, it cost the equivalent of $150us and I think the top will last at least a couple more years. The best part though, is that I had windows to close while I was driving home in the deluge.
The Teenagers, Mancha and Ocho
I don’t have the energy to mop up the water in the hall that blew in during the storm and I haven’t even gone upstairs to see how much water came in the bedroom since all the doors were open. Whatever, it’s just water and everything is rock or concrete. This is the only house I’ve ever lived in that I don’t have to worry about water. Not worrying about water or fire, that’s a very nice feeling for a homeowner.
**see how cleverly I snuck in pictures of all the cats without making those who hate reading about my pets suffer?
Mimi took this picture of me the other day, I’m under the comforter below the cat and next to the dogs.
I started feeling punk last Friday. Everyone laughs at me because I’m always cold but this was worse than usual. We had gone to lunch in the warmth of the afternoon but as it got closer to dusk I started getting chills that wouldn’t stop and I was so cold I was really miserable. I was pretty close to stealing some of the tablecloths from other tables to wrap around me when we finally left.
This week is the big spay and neuter clinic and Mimi is very busy. We got to the airport at 9:30pm to pick up two volunteers that are staying with us. I was trying to be pleasant but as soon as I could I went to bed. I’ve not left it for long since then. The headache is not horrible but it is constant and that wears me down. The fever is not super high but it is also constant and gives chills and aches.
Speaking of fever, can I just say that I hate digital thermometers and all I really want is a REAL thermometer, with mercury and a smooth glass bulb at the end? We don’t get sick very often so every time we want to know if we have a fever we seem to have to go and buy a new thermometer. The one my mother used when I was a child was still working 40 years later, I wish I knew what happened to it and could get my hands on it. I was hoping that we could buy one here in Mexico since this is not as bad of a nanny state as the US. When we decided to find out what my temp was, we located two of the digital ones. One wouldn’t even turn on, the other turned on and after 3 minutes of that sharp pokey end under my tongue said I had a temp of 104.4F I knew that wasn’t right, that’s approaching brain damage and I just wasn’t that delirious. So, Mimi went out and could only find another digital, in fact it looks exactly like the previous two except this one is in Centigrade and the others Fahrenheit so they must be pretty old. All that so that I now know that I am running somewhere between 100°F and 101°F, I had to use my iphone to convert from Celsius because I just don’t do body temps in C. Why I needed to know this I’m not sure, I think it makes me feel less guilty about just staying in bed for days.
By last night, Mimi was mentioning Dengue Fever fairly often. I don’t think that is what I have, the fever is not high enough and I’m not is horrible pain. I ache, my head hurts, I’m chilled but none of the dramatic stuff that you hear about with dengue. Still, better to know. So, today my friend took me over to the lab at a hospital nearby and I got the dengue test. We were in and out in under 10 minutes and the cost was $129pesos, less than $10us. She will pick up the results this evening and drop them off. Just another thing to file under the ‘better to know’ label since there is nothing they can do for dengue anyway. Actually, I will probably go to the doctor if this isn’t dengue and if I continue to have this fever since it might then be something they could actually do something about.
All this tossing and turning and shivering has made me a bit over emotional. Last night about 6:30pm I heard people come in downstairs, I thought I heard Mimi’s voice and I was waiting for her to come up and see how I was. 15 minutes went by, then 20 minutes and I started to get mad. I knew that I was really just upset that I was sick and that having someone else to get mad at was putting the blame elsewhere. I couldn’t seem to help it though. I heard laughing and what I was sure was Mimi’s voice. Finally I sent her a snarky text message, ‘when are you going to come up and see if I’m still alive’ or something like that. No response, more laughing. I fell asleep. My phone woke me up and it was Mimi telling me she was still at the clinic and hadn’t gotten home yet but would be up to see me as soon as she got here. I was so happy that she wasn’t home, I kept telling her how glad I was that she wasn’t here and ignoring me. I may have been a bit delirious.
I’m off to bed again, I’ve been up for almost an hour and I’m getting cold. Wish me luck and if you see one of those real thermometers with the mercury and the glass – buy it for me or tell me where it is. I promise not to break it just to play with the mercury, even though it was a lot of fun.
We went to a pre-NYE party on Saturday night, there was a lovely dinner. The next day though, I started getting sick to my stomach. Apparently a couple of others who also ate the salad were sick as well. It can happen, I just wish it hadn’t happened on NYE and to me.
The upshot though, is that we canceled on a party on NYE and stayed home. It’s the first time since we moved in here that we’ve been home at midnight on NYE. It was an eye opener. It turns out our across the street neighbors are big on this holiday and like a lot of boom with their new year. At midnight, the city lit up with fireworks, the rat a tat tats of smaller firecrackers, and the huge booms of the M80′s. It was like the news used to be from journalists on a hotel rooftop in Beirut. We were on our roof, watching the dazzle and listening to the booms from all over the city.
Our neighbors came out from their party with a life size dummy representing the old year. They leaned him up against the front of their house and their metal garage door, poured some gas on him and lit him up. It turns out they had stuffed him with M80′s. Whoa! That guy went off for about 5 minutes with the loudest booms imaginable, it was like taking your headset off at the firing range and firing rifled slugs from a shotgun. It was loud. When the dummy seemed to calm down a bit, the neighbor would run over and drop huge strings of M80′s on him to get him going again. Meanwhile, the flames licked up the side of the house and the garage about 5′. It’s a bit unnerving to see flames running up a house, I had to keep reminding myself that houses here don’t burn.
Occasionally, something in there would shoot out across the street and over our heads, I ducked down under the wall several times and started wondering what I would do if one landed in my fish pond. Luckily the wind was blowing to the side and everything sailed by to my neighbors. The street was full of smoke and people who came out to watch along with the party guests from across the street. At one point a cop car parked at the end of the street for a bit, waiting for it to calm down before driving on by.
We had no idea that our house was ground zero for so many explosions. It’s making more sense now that whenever we would come home on NYE, the dogs were totally traumatized. The dogs spent the night huddled on our bed shaking, the cats were under something and no one came out until it was light and quiet.
Mimi took some video of the old man of 2011 burning on our neighbors house, she missed the first half but got the rest. It’s kind of fun, about mid way through at 1:20 minutes a big bunch go off. At the end, the neighbor comes out and throws a bucket of water on it. The next day they swept up the debris and it was as if it had never happened.
I feel bad that I was missing for so long without at least leaving a note. I’m fine and everyone else is fine too. I didn’t mean to disappear, it just happened. This is a busy season here, lots of parties and visitors and events. I also was feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much time I spent on the internet. It seemed that a bit of a break was in order. I had some good times and some bad times in the last month and I needed to just attend to life in person. I do appreciate the emails I got and I apologize for worrying some of you. I won’t do that again, if I need to take a break I’ll at least leave a note, or little cookie crumbs of information so you know I’m still out here puttering and pondering.
I have lots of pictures and even some short movies, all of them can be clicked to enlarge. They will have to suffice to catch you up on what I’ve been doing.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends.
Our best friend visited for 10 days. We went to the Yucatán State Fair and had a blast. It was one of the last days so the sale barn was really intense. I took a short video so you could hear and see it.
We attended the most beautiful and elegant wedding of the season, perhaps of the decade. Really a spectacular event at a spectacular location. It was at a nearby Hacienda, the chapel was the location of the wedding ceremony and the huge lawns nearby were filled with glowing tents and elegant table service. There were bands and a dance floor, a fabulous dinner, around 500 guests, everything perfectly done.
These are two of the special cocktails of the evening, a tamarind-chile daiquiri and a mango-chile daiquiri. Sorry I forgot to take a picture before Debi and I had tried them.
Luminarias were lit and floated over the chapel after the ceremony.
The dinner tents and bandstand, it was a perfect night with warm breezes and stars shining.
I hope you enjoy these catch up peeks into our life over the last month. Lots of love to all of you and I hope that 2012 is wonderful year for all of us.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Pedro Infante (1917 – 1957) for a long time. My friend Nancy wrote one recently and it reminded me.
Last semester in my spanish class we read a book called Las Batallas en el Desierto by José Emilio Pacheco. It’s a great book, very short, about a boy growing up in the 1950′s in Mexico City. The discussions we have in class when we are reading a book are fabulous. In one, talking about a passage where he mentions many idols of the 50′s including Pedro Infante, we talked about the similarities between Pedro Infante in Mexico and Elvis Presley in the US. There are more than a few similarities.
Both were singers and actors, both were enormously popular sex symbols who also were macho enough to be popular with men as well. Both mainly appealed to the working class, this is a distinction that we tend to ignore in the US but which is openly discussed in Mexico. Both are still revered many years after their deaths. I don’t know if there have been sightings of Pedro since his death but it’s possible.
Pedro Infante was born in Sinaloa near Mazatlán, thus the statue there that Nancy showed in her blog post. He died here in Mérida in a private plane crash a short distance from the end of the airport runway, in the southern part of the centro. The statue above of him on a horse holding some kind of award is located at the sight of the crash, I went and found it today. It’s at the corner of Calle 91 and Calle 62 if you want to go yourself. I’ve heard that every year on the anniversary of his death in April people come there with flowers and candles.
Pedro was a better actor than Elvis, at least in my opinion. I never thought Elvis was very believable as an actor. Both were great singers, different styles, different times but they both had an enormous effect on the music of their time.
While I was googling around about Pedro, or Pedrito as the ladies called him, I found several clips of his movies. There was one series of 3 movies, a fourth was planned but hadn’t been filmed when he died, called Nosotros Los Pobres, Ustedes Los Ricos, and Pepe, El Toro. Here is a short clip from the first one, it shows him in his prime, acting and singing and looking handsome and strong. ¡Qué guapo!
Here is another clip of him from the movie Los Tres Huastecos where he plays 3 roles, 3 brothers who are very different. This clip is a great song as it is the type of music I think of as Son Jarocho but is called Son Huasteco here. The Huasteca is a very beautiful area of Mexico, in the hills above the Gulf of Mexico that covers parts of 3 states, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas. I am guessing that Son Jarocho (a traditional music from Veracruz) is from the Huasteca area of the state. At any rate, this is very similar to the Veracruz style of call and response, Son Jarocho. Pedro plays the army captain, the priest and a third brother that I didn’t see in this clip. It’s really a beautiful style of music and this is an excellent example, well worth watching for Pedro (x2) and for the music. I believe the woman is Blanca Estela Pavón, she has a lovely voice.
There are a lot of stories about his death, not surprising since his life was one of scandal and gossip as well. He was a rake, a pilot, a motorcycle aficionado and a lover of all things beautiful and fast. It was said that a warrant had been issued against him in Mexico City because his second wife had sworn in court that they were never divorced when he married his third wife, making him a bigamist. He didn’t want to fly back to the city on a commercial flight as he expected the police and the newspapers would be waiting for him. He was co-piloting an old plane with a friend, on his way to squash the warrant and get everything fixed, perhaps a bit under the weather from the night before and who knows… something went wrong. The plane veered off shortly after takeoff and went down in a working class neighborhood.
Mexico declared a national day of mourning, when his coffin was returned to Mexico City it was mobbed at the airport, the country mourned its biggest idol. As with Elvis, class plays a big part in who is a fan. You won’t find the fresas in the malls singing his songs but you will still hear his music coming from the open doors in the working class homes and bars of the country.
