An Extended Account of Sickness and Pain. In Two Parts. (Peru & Bolivia)

Part One: "A Grim Tale Featuring Illness and Little Human Contact"

I left Quito (Ecuador) 8 days ago. After 2 nights on buses, I reached Lima (Peru) a coastal city where a few pleasant green boulevards lie among huge wastes of sand and brick and corrugated iron.

Decades' worth of immigrants - mostly highland indigenous - live in shanty towns on parched, dun hillsides. They fan out each morning to beg, work as maids, or sell sweets and assorted junk at traffic lights. My experience of South America is that you can tell how screwed a country is by the amount of people working the traffic lights.

That night, on a bus south from Lima, I sat cursing all the sleeping people around me, watching horribly tired as a near-full moon inched down towards the barren desert hills. The Pacific lay below to my right; a low arch of breakers thudded onto the shore, thin jets of water spurting back seawards.

The next night found me in a hotel bed in Puno - only 6 hours from my final destination of La Paz, but too wasted to finish the journey.

Puno is at 4,000 metres on the shored of Lake Titicaca, "The Highest Navigable Lake in the World". The lake is home to what's left of the Uros, a people who build floating islands and boats from the reeds fringing the lake, and who used to live off Titicaca's birds, algae and fish. The Uros have intermarried with the landlubbing Aymara indigenous, and those who still live on the islands earn their crust by selling souvenirs and showing gringos around their homes.

My fatigue soon found an ally in uncommonly severe diarrhoea. At 7:00am, I staggered downstairs briefly to pay off the tricycle rickshaw man I'd contracted to bring me to the bus station. A long, liquid day followed, reaching its high point as I raced desperately back to the hostel after a foray to the "Mercado (market) de Contrabando". The owners of the hostel were out, and I sat on the hostel steps in the chill of the altiplano (high plateau of Peru and Bolivia), hoping my hosts wouldn't whiff me when they arrived.

The next day, my butt-corking pills got me to La Paz in one dry piece. The last part of the bus trip was really something. To the left of the dark green altiplano was the Eastern Cordillera - a magnificent, uninterrupted line of ridges, snowpeaks, and jagged rockfaces. This was on a whole different scale from the isolated volcanic snowpeaks of Ecuador.

Next up was La Paz itself. You could think of this city as a massive crime against natural beauty. It's almost as if a metropolis of a million people had been plonked in the Grand Canyon. I don't think I've been in a capital city remotely as impressive. Beyond the deeply-rutted tan walls of the canyon you can see one of the huge peaks of the Cordillera del Este.

My diarrhoea was still going strong the morning after I arrived, so I called into the Hospital Metodista, where they told me I was dehydrated and they should test me to see what kind of infection I had. Result: typhoid. Hurrah!

Luckily, the hospital isn't too expensive, so the days ahead won't empty my wallet like a 10-foot mosquito would empty a mouse. The diarrhoea stopped at the time I entered the hospital, and I don't feel all that bad. In fact, the main source of consternation has been a lad of 17 who was brought in this afternoon. He had been out with his friends and taken absolutely the wrong drugs. Every so often, I hear him from down the corridor, screaming mad fragments and curses, howling in a deep, unearthly voice. He actually sounds possessed (that's not just writerly crap). In between attacks, his family stand in the corridor, out of their minds with fright.

But over the last half hour or so, things have quietened down, and outside my door I can hear the family talking more, and some of the tension has drained from their voices. So hopefully the guy will be ok.

I'm out of here tomorrow (Easter Sunday - on the third day I'll rise again).

(Written in my hospital bed in La Paz, Bolivia, Saturday 19th April 2003.)

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PS The possessed drugtaker turned out fine.

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The day I got out, I went to get some dinner near my hotel. I finished off the meal with a juicy, gooey piece of cake. I almost immediately started breaking out in a rash.

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Part Two: "The Great Itch"
(Written in my hospital bed in La Paz, evening of Monday, 21st April 2003.)

At first, as the rash spread across my body, I was intrigued by its strange bisymmetry, its raised whitish plateaus flanked by rounded orange crenellations. However, the aesthetics of the situation were soon definitively overtaken by a sensation that thousands of tiny ants were scattered under my skin, darting from nerve end to nerve end, gnawing and tweaking. There was no chance of sleep.

I put on some cream and tried not to scratch, but every few minutes I lapsed, nails digging, moving frantically from armpits to scalp to soles of feet. My frustration grew as the itching stopped my typhoid exhaustion from reaching sleep. By 3am, it was too much, and I got a taxi back to the hospital. By the time I arrived, the rash was raging - every second, my brain was receiving scores of messages from all over my body, screaming "Scratch me!" "Scratch me!".

I was put on a cortizone drip. This calmed the neurological frenzy somewhat, but not enough for me to sleep. The ants crept down to the soles of my feet and began to chew, raising inflamed spots. The itching was vicious, as if some malign reflexologist were trying to drive me out of my wits.

By 9am, I was crying from pain and frustration at my sleeplessness. A doctor came and prescribed me antihistamines. As they flooded into my vein, the itching vanished in an instant, and my mind became peacefully groggy. I carried my drip frame to the toilet. When I lowered my trousers to take a pee, I noticed with shock that my foreskin had ballooned horribly.

"Nuuurrse!!!".

A urologist came to my hospital bed and prodded my distended conkerbill. It would go down with the rest of the rash, he reassured me. That was what I needed. I slept.

That afternoon, I lay gazing out the window at a stretch of the great canyon walls of La Paz. The occasional thought flickered through my tranquil brain.

I watched the southern sky as night approached. Clouds still glowed in light as the land lay shadowy below. Beyond, the sky changed from white through darkening shades of blue. The evening light moved eastwards from the clouds; their blackening forms merged slowly with the canyon walls, leaving only faint blue streaks of sky.