Monday-Friday March 10-14

Nothing too exciting here in Seville. Just lots of classes. On Monday morning I noticed I wasn’t feeling well, and Tuesday I felt worse. Wednesday I couldn’t even get out of bed so I slept through my two morning classes. I had a fever and an incredible headache and was vomiting every few hours, punctuated by really painful stomach aches. I couldn’t keep any food down so I was starving and really dehydrated. On Wednesday, after sleeping through my classes, I told my host mom how sick I felt, and she gave me some medicine and made me mint tea, which was great. For lunch and dinner she made me white fish with vegetables, which she said would be “muy suave” (very mild/delicate) for my stomach. It tasted good but made me feel significantly worse, and I slept very little that night.

Thursday I was supposed to take an exam at the CIEE center, but I emailed my professor Wednesday night saying how sick I had been and that I hadn’t been able to study because of it. With that done, I pulled clothes on and dragged myself to the clinic down the street. Less than stellar doctor’s visit there: I wrote my name on an index, and I realize now that that index card is my “file” at the clinic; the doctor literally wrote my symptoms on the card and put it in a card catalog. Sketchy. She didn’t even ask me if I have allergies or any medical condition. She laid me on a table, jabbed me in the stomach (probably to make sure I didn’t have appendicitis) and proceeded to prescribe me three different medicines: one for headaches, one for stomach aches, and one for fever. Then she told me not to take all three at the same time, because that would be too much medicine and I might react badly to all of it at once. Basically I was supposed to choose which symptoms were the worse and tackle those. But the doctor was very clear about one thing: she stared me in the eyes and asked me “Is your host mother feeding you white fish with vegetables?” Confused about how she knew that, I responded that yes, I had been fed far too much fish. She solemnly looked at me and simply said “No more fish.” To emphasize the point, she put me on an all-liquid diet and gave me a list of allowable liquids, which I was to present to my host mom. I don’t think the liquids were important at all; I think the only reason she gave me the list was to ensure that I didn’t eat any more fish. She may have saved my life after all.

I still wasn’t better Friday, when I left in the afternoon with Beth S., Beth K., Maggie and Sarah for 5 days in Amsterdam and Brussels. But I guess I figured I might get better pretty quickly, and if I was too sick I could always get a quick return flight…