A very Scooby Doo health update

Well, its been a rough-and-tumble couple of weeks. I think the best way to describe it would be by comparing it to a typical episode of Scooby Doo. “Really, TJ? That's how your gonna describe it?” Oh yes. Yes I am.

If you're unfamiliar with the general plot progression of a typical episode of Scooby Doo I'm sure you can zip on to youtube and find a million of them right now. Here's how it works. Every episode starts out with the gang going somewhere when the Mystery Machine breaks down and they get stranded at [an abandoned mill]. At first the gang is distressed, but relieved to be somewhere that has other people. That is usually when the locals come and and say something like, “It's be best to get as far away from here as possible. Don't you know about [the swamp thing]? Its been terrorizing the town for weeks.

Fred eventually says something like, “Hey gang, lets get to the bottom of this.” And Shaggy and Scooby make some remark about going to regret that decision. Eventually the gang has a run in with whatever spooky thing is in question and they catch [old man Smithers, the ex-foreman]?! Velma explains why it was obviously this person, Shag and Scoob high five that they can go back to eating cheeseburgers, and Daphne... come to think of it, what did Daphne ever bring to the table? Fred at least drove (and wore ascots).

Its right about then that you start saying to yourself, “There's no way [old man Smithers] really did it. I can't prove it, but if the case is really shut what are we going to do for the next 25 minutes that this episode is on? It can't be 5 minutes of crime fighting and 25 minutes of Shaggy and Scooby eating cheeseburgers, can it? They haven't even had their signature chase down a halfway of doors yet. They obviously didn't catch the right guy and had better get back to work.”

Before you know it, the gang goes back to enjoying their time at [the abandoned mill] only to discover that [the swamp thing] still exists and they had better catch it for sure. Hilarity ensues, Velma loses here glasses and Scooby's [swamp thing trap] ends up catching the thing that they find out that it wasn't really [old man Smithers] after all. It was really [the real estate mogul that wanted to turn the mill into a haunted house].

As an adult watching the show with your kids (or by yourself, that's cool too) three things are probably running through your head. The first is utter disbelief that Casey Kasem is really the voice of Shaggy. And the second thing is that how could your kid think for one second the first guy they caught was really the one that did it because, hey, 25 minutes of eating cheeseburgers. The third is why do they always think they'll have gotten away if not for these meddling kids. What is it these kids do that real police are not capable of?

I'm guessing that you are nowhere close to putting the dots together and mainly just wondering why I spent the last 500+ words shoddily describing every Scooby Doo episode ever. Well, it helps describe the progression of my health the last several weeks. At least in my mind it makes great sense, but that could be a result of the toll the last two weeks (or 25 years) have taken on me.

It was great that Christina got sick first. Not for her obviously, but for me. I thought. Maybe. Sure, she spent three days in the hospital recuperating, but I got into the clinic and out in less than three hours with the same diagnosis knowing what I was expecting. I caught [the swamp thing] in the first five minutes of the episode and was ready to get out of dodge and eat cheeseburgers for 25 minutes. Figuratively. Very figuratively.

Getting diagnosed and put on antibiotics in the wee hours of Sunday/Monday kept me fine till maybe Thursday. Thats when I started feeling markedly worse. By late Saturday I was in a bit of pain and having massive diarrhea again and a bit of a fever so I had friend take me down to the clinic to get more blood work down. (Medical services here are just kind of ala cart. You walk in and ask, “Give a blood test” and then they do it. You also sometimes have to interpret the results yourself.)

Having determined that the infection was way down and my white blood cell count was normal, I though it would be just a phase of the recover. One of my friends that took me to the hospital, his wife had the same thing last month and it took her over 3 weeks to beat this thing. Christina on the other hand was looking much better after only a week and seemed normal, so I was wondering where I, a healthy, manly young man, would fit in.

Where I would fit in was, after spending an hour or two on Skype Sunday night telling people how well I was doing, abruptly left those conversations and than collapsed with severe dehydration brought on by four days of intense diarrhea. I am not joking when I say it was the most intense pain I've ever felt in my life as my entire body cramped and spasmed uncontrollably until making it to the hospital (what felt like) hours later until they gave me an I.V. and a couple injections in my butt and tried to control my fever of 103deg.

This would be [the swamp thing] roaring back to life after thinking I had captured [old man Smithers] or whatever his name is. After a week of antibiotics and medicine and thinking it was just a gnarly case of paratyphoid, it turned into a GNARLY case of paratyphoid. To know how bad paratyphoid is, just think A) typhoid! That doesn't sound very good, does it. And the only word that shows up more than typhoid on it's own wikipedia page is salmonella, so B) salmonella! The only time I ever hear about salmonella in the States is when somebody gets like a $1M settlement from Taco Bell for getting sick, overlooking the fundamental flaw that the “victim” was willing to eat at Taco Bell in the first place.

(Editors note: Too bad there was no way to get the typhoid and salmonella to work against each other. I was reading a couple of months back about an experimental trial in which the “doctor” used HIV to attack and cure a patient's leukemia. Too bad that sounds REDICULOUS. Imagine hearing this from your doctor: “Yeah, so it appears you have breast cancer, but we're gonna give you some Ebola and that's gonna clear it right up by morning. Maybe...”)

So how is TJ now? Worlds better. I spent three days in the hospital getting constant I.V. bags and antibiotics directly pumped into me. Because, you know, severe diarrhea and dehydration for four days! And three days in a Mozambican clinic was quite enough for me, I'll tell you that. I came home a week ago Tuesday and have been resting up and getting my strength and weight back little by little each day. To give you an idea what the dehydration had suddenly done to me, I checked into the hospital the same weight I entered high school in. Granted, I entered high school 5'9” and fat, but now I'm 6'3” and handsome (take my word for it). That just ain't right.

The takeaway from the story is that, aside from being at the sickest point of my life, I was well taken care of. When people get sick here we always buddy them up because things can turn really bad in a heartbeat, so the whole week before (and after) my hospital visit there were people around helping me and checking in on my and minding me., and its great how when people are really down the kids all pitch in to help. The second takeaway from the story is that I've got some great friends here that several times dropped everything in the middle of the night to drive me to the hospital, (because Victor was in Zimbabwe). The third takeaway is that there is really a great community here that we've built up. Both weeks I was in bed sick there was at least a daily visit from a neighbor, a pastor, friends from the barrio, the kids' friends from school, that were all coming by to visit and pray with me and for me and offer to help out around the house. God's grace was very evident these last couple weeks and its very plain to see there there's lots of people here that really care about me.

So whats next? Barring any relapse, I need to be getting my strength back. I'm eating well and just being patient as my body is recuperating. I've been back home for 8 days now and Monday I managed to walk out the the market for the first time. Today, I went around the city doing some grocery shopping. It left me pretty tired though and I've just spent the rest of the day lying around (and thinking about Scooby Doo). I could still use prayers that I can get back to full speed, because I still feel only around 50% energy wise.

Service With A Smile - Health Update

In the first several centuries of Christiany (and even in modern times, though often not publicized) some Christian communites had the hallmark of always being sick. They weren't identified as people who always wore WWJD bracelets or attended every single conference to come through town or be annoying by responding, “I think you meant to say Merry Christmas.” when people use “happy holidays”. The reasons for this was that, as you can imagine, people were diseased a lot (there's a reason life expectancy for much of human history was only 40 years until the last century or so) and the folks that stepped in to care for and minister to the sick were the Christians. They'd not only say, “Let me tell you about Jesus,” they'd also say, “I'll take care of you.” Because of this, it was often these same Christians that would themselves get sick by taking care sick people they were ministering and evangelizing to.

I'm not saying this to try to make myself sound super awesome or martyr-ey in any way, I'm just saying that service (aka worship) can and should involve sacrifice. Even if it's unintended.

OK. Enough prose, cause I'm pretty exhausted. Last week a boy here had a really bad case of diarrhea and was in the hospital. One night he pretty much exploded all over his sheets and clothes. Not a pretty site. While Marta took him to the hospital I spent the morning washing his sheets and clothes and helping clean up his bed. Celso got better, and I got worse.

Based on what we can figure out, I am Patient Zero. However, I was not the first to show symptoms. Christina started feeling sick and spent all day Sunday with diarrhea and vomiting and went to the clinic with Victor on Sunday night when it was clear this was not a normal case of diarrhea. So when I started experiencing all same symptons at about midnight I wasted no time in calling for Victor to come get me to join the party at the clinic.

We figure that Christina had contact with me and only started showing symptoms first because she already was fighting another infection. Because of my contact from helping Celso I was probably the first carrier. What we've got is typhoid-salmonella. Its technical name in English is paratyphoid, which is borne of a strain of salmonella bacteria, but that doesn't mean we're only para-sick or para-miserable. I got discharged only few hours after getting diagnosed and was back home by 5am on Monday with medication, at which point we filled all the kids on to what was happening and started an orphanage-wide cleaning of absolutely everything except the dirt. So far nobody else has gotten sick, so we're very thankful for that.

As for now, I've got just a huge feeling of malaise. I'm exhausted constantly and have a small but nagging stomach discomfort and no appetite, which is bad because I really need to eat a lot. Christina is doing much worse than I and as of now (Tuesday afternoon) they still have her at the clinic under observation. We both could use prayer but especially her as (unless I turn for the worse) she has a longer road to recovery.

What is mildly amusing about the situation is that Sunday night I was talking with friends on skype saying how awesome it has been health-wise because not since my infection in April and the wedding debacle in July have I even had a runny nose. Not two hours later I feel like that dude in Alien as the alien is exploding out of his stomach. Yah, on second thought, not mildly amusing at all.

Thanks for keeping us in prayer and for all the notes of encouragment and especially all my Nampula friends that have been calling/stopping by to check up on me.

I'll try to keep folks updated, but expect content to really slow here till I get better. Caio.

In Which We All Get A Touch Sick

Some weeks are better than others. This last week has not been one of those weeks.

On Saturday, the orphanage hosted a wedding reception for a couple from our church. This involved about 250 or 300 people all coming by for lunch after the ceremony. It was basically an open invite to all the kids, teens, and young adults from our church (maybe the adults had somewhere more important to be) along with the family of the couple. This presented a unique challenge. Namely, it was how to convince people they were going to eat.

Wedding receptions here are notorious for one thing: running out of food. It’s not uncommon to have 200 show up for a wedding and to have food for maybe only 100 of them. What’s worse is when there is a conscious decision by the couple to only buy food for 100 people, knowing people are going to be left out. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as you’ll see) this was not the case and there was more than enough food to go around.

However, this does not mean that the attendees have any piece of mind over the food situation. Telling people that there is enough food to go around usually just makes them suspicious. And when everybody attending the reception is coming from a place where drought, famine, food shortages, and hunger are very real things it is not uncommon for fights to break out over the last plate of food.

Nevertheless, telling everybody there would be enough food to go around did not mean that there was any sort of order or calm in the line to receive food. This is where my job comes in. Most of us here at the orphanage all had some sort of responsibility Saturday: organize parking, make sure there’s enough water for drinking, help out in the kitchen. My responsibility was to to keep people orderly so a riot didn’t break out in the food line. It was a job that turned out to be stressful but thankfully uneventful when all was said and done.

“Well that doesn’t sound so bad,” you say. I would mind you to remember that this was only Saturday, and the weekend was far from over.

On Sunday morning I got up and went about my day getting ready for church. I had not so much as gotten dressed when my stomach started grumbling something fierce. Sparing you from any details, I spent most of the morning in the bathroom with a case of diarrhea. Before continuing, I will apologize for those of you that think this is gross, because it is gross. Still, at the same time I ask you to keep an open mind that here in Mozambique this is something which effects people at least once a month here and it’s a really common part of our life.

And the funny thing is, because it is so common here, it is talked about all the time. When greeting people in America with a simple “How are you”, if the person is sick you might hear, “Eh, I got a case of the sniffles” or, “I’m feeling a little under the weather.” If somebody ever says, “I’ve got a case of diarrhea” you tell them to shut up and keep it to themselves. At the most, they might say they have a stomach ache. Here because it is so common an occurance you can be buying something from a street vendor you don’t even know, ask him how he is, and he’ll tell you if he has diarrhea or not. I’m not even kidding. Folks are not put off by talking about diarrhea.

Here at the orphanage, the first thing that people are supposed to do when they sick is tell somebody else about it. This is so we can keep track of how long somebody has been sick and how they’re progressing. It is also so we all know and can be on guard if it’s a bigger problem. So back to Sunday morning: After a little while I pull myself together and head out of the house to let some folks know that I’m sick with diarrhea. At first, I didn’t find anybody, and thought they all might have left for church already. Then, when I made it around the corner to where the bathrooms are, I discovered them. Everybody in the orphanage had taken a chair and just set themselves down by the bathroom. THE WHOLE ORPHANAGE had come down with a case of the runs!!!

There is really no way to express the scene that I witnessed. I think because people so often get sick with one thing or another there’s a certain amount of “gallows humor” about everything here. As each person would leave the bathroom they would raise a fist and shout “Viva Diarrhea”, which was responded to by the rest of those in line with shouts of “Oye” which is kind of like our version of saying “yee-haw”. Weirdly disturbing? Yes. Funnny? Definitely! When everybody is sitting around in discomfort it’s the little things that will lift your spirits.

As we set about to start the task of figuring out just which meal we all ate gave us diarrhea the answer quickly presented itself. Soon, we started fielding phone calls from the pastors at church asking what happened at the wedding yesterday and why everybody that attended was at home with diarrhea. It doesn’t take Nancy Drew to figure out that something we ate at the reception got EVERYBODY sick. However, there were two kids who didn’t get sick, which made it slightly puzzling. After a little more sleuthing, we figured out the cause of the diarrhea was from some bad beans, as the people who were sick didn’t have any beans.

Now, just because folks were making a joke in light of a bad situation, don’t think that Sunday was all fun and games. It wasn’t. It sucked. And it sucked a lot. Many people, including myself, were feeling better come Sunday night, but still about half of the kids weren’t willing to venture more than a few steps from the bathroom.

Come Monday, much of our gang was feeling better, but still about ten people were suffering from what was being dubbed “The Replay”. By the end of the day Monday those numbers were down quite a bit to only five or so kids, but at this point the diarrhea had morphed into just a general stomach illness.

And then in the middle of the night on Monday/Tuesday I was struck with a case of “The Replay”. But because on day two the diarrhea had morphed into some different, equally unholy form of ailment I spent the whole night vomiting out the entire contents of my stomach . Thankfully, in the big picture there were only about 4 or 5 of us that were still sick at this point so the whole orphange wasn’t joining us. Unthankfully, we were each throwing up stuff we ate so long ago that we don’t even remember eating it.

We’re mostly on the road to recovery, and I’ll keep you posted if this happens to become “The Replay - Part Two : Revenge of the Replay”. But in light of everything that has gone one, I just want to explain why I’m telling you about any of this in the first place. I contemplated not telling any of this but I decide to go ahead and do it for several reasons.

The first reason is that it was a major event here. Most major events get put here for you guys to know how our lives are going, and everybody getting sick for 2-3 days is a pretty major event. Its already being referred to as “marriage of diarrhea”.

A second reason it my continued mission to help you get a grasp for what life is like here in Nampula and the orphanage, and a part of that life is diarrhea. On average, a kid will pick up a minor case every month or so, that’s just the way life is. If infants get diarrhea in the jungle they can die from it. It is unpleasant, but it is not uncommon. And while diarrhea is not contagious, it usually seems to hit at least 5 or 6 kids at a time when it does come.

The third reason I’m letting you know is because I want you know that every single day we really need/appreciate your prayers and support. While God is always good to us here, its only because we’re continually seeking his favor and asking for his help. And as many bad things that could have happened from eating tainted food, that fact that we came away with only diarrhea and upset stomachs is a sign of Gods grace.

So until next time, here’s hoping that that your food is a little bit healthier than ours.

In which we catch the wild geese (the geese are the mattresses)

When we last left our hero (that’s me), I had spent three days at the Port of Nacala awaiting the release of a container that contained new mattresses for the orphanage. The donated mattresses came on a freighter and we were paying a do-nothing broker that was supposed to do all the work for us. Well, seeing as three days had passed and I wasn’t gonna get any tanner, we packed up and headed for home Thursday night.

To top things off, about little while before the three hour car ride home I started feeling tired and feverish. After a very long three hours with my head basically shoved out the window to try to cool down we arrived in home. I think the fresh air had done me some good, cause my fever had started to go down, but I was still not feeling super well. I went to sleep that night with a fever and the determination to get up and be the first person at the clinic in the morning.

In the meantime, Victor had received a call from the boss of the broker we had been using. The boss, upset not that his reputation was being destroyed but that he was losing money after we made him pay for our food and hotel all three days, gave Victor his word that the mattresses would leave the port Friday and practically begged for us to come back to get them. Victor went back with Charles, Maurio, the boy and the Fatman on Friday (day 4 od the debacle).

Malaria Update

Well, seeing as I don't have much energy or care about having an awesome and carefully worded update on how I'm doing I'm just going to put it all out there. For those of you who went to the wikipedia page for malaria right away and tried to figure out what's going on, you're probably super confused. Here's the super simple run down of what's happening.

• Malaria ends up giving you (among other things) a fever. Its usually a 24 or 48 hour cycle. For me, I've been getting a fever starting around 4pm and continuing until the middle of the night, breaking, and then the fever leaving early in the morning.
• After that, the cycles continues and during the day I don't have a fever. But, as you can guess, I feel pretty much like crap. From not sleeping much at night, I rest a lot during the day and kind of wait for my temp to return in the evening.
• The test to know if you have malaria is widely available and cheep ($3) and the medicine is about he same. After my first fever I went and got the test and started taking the medication. People get into trouble when they wait because they fever leaves and think they're golden and the 24 or 48 later it returns and kicks their butt.
• Everybody reacts different to the medicine. For the type of malaria I have there's about 3 or 4 different medications to take. The pharmacists just start with whichever will mess you up the least. All the medications will mess you up. Some people get worse from the medicine and then start taking a different kind. Some people get better within hours after taking the medicine. Others get worse and then as soon as the medicine stops feel right as rain.
• I've not gotten worse, but I've definitely not gotten tons better. The medicine does a number on you because it has to in order to get at the malaria. Most people start feeling better after they've finished all their medicine. So for me I'm guessing I cross that bridge sometime this afternoon.

Thanks for all your prayers, and sorry for keeping folks in the dark for so long. No, you do not need to come and rescue me, and yes, I will get back to 100 percent eventually.

and go Seahawks!

The one where TJ gets malaria

Yes, I have malaria. If y'all get a chance to pray for me it'd be much appreciated. I'll post more info later when I don't feel like I'm going to throw up.

And I'm not dying, so don't freak out.