always talk to Brazilian strangers; never talk to the mosquitos

About a week ago, I wrote some horseshit about how Amber just has a little flu. Ooops, I'm dumb.

The mistake was an easy one to make at that moment. I had just gotten over a flu (really), and Amber had the same symptoms. She spent one day with a high fever, and then was better the next morning. I wrote the blog entry that afternoon--I thought she was on the upswing, and I was just kind of bored, trying to nurse her back to health using my mediocre hostel-cooking skills.

Shortly after I wrote the blog, she got messy. The fever shot back up and she got really nauseous. She barfed up both the advil and the soup.

I got indignant. What, you don't like my cooking???

The next day, her fever was still flying. She kept the advil down this time, but still was feeling pretty foul. Off to the emergency room, where she took a malaria test (negative), and got a prescription for...drum roll please...tylenol and vitamin C. Brilliant! We hadn't thought of either of those.

The next day--Day 4 of the illness--she was blazingly hot, vomiting, and incredibly weak. Couldn't even make it to the bathroom without help. I'd already taken her to the nearest ER, and there wasn't a whole lot they could/would do for her. Kind of a scary situation--I had no idea where else to take her.

Enter our angel, a young Brazilian architect named Paula. She just moved to Manaus two months ago, and she lives in the hostel while she (slowly) looks for a suitable apartment. I'd barely spoken to her, but we had exchanged pleasantries over breakfast every morning, and she knew that Amber was sick.

Without even knowing our names, Paula made a few phone calls for us. Her aunt is a dentist in Manaus, and has some useful connections. By 1:00 that afternoon, we were in the best private hospital in Manaus.

The next 24 hours were pretty damned ugly. Amber had a fever of 104 degrees (40.0 celsius) when we got to the hospital, and I don't think that was her highest. Her blood pressure was dangerously low (I didn't quite catch the number, but the nurse was vaguely horrified), and she was taken to her room in a wheelchair.

They hooked her up to oxygen, and stuck an IV in her. She went through six IV bags in the next 24 hours. She had diarrhea on top of it all, and I had the pleasure of going in with her so that I could hold the IV bag up while she did her business. I think that probably bothered her much more than it bothered me. Amber isn't exactly the kind of person who enjoys needing my help to take a dump--especially when she was making bathroom trips every hour or so.

IV in, watery poo out. Loverly.

With lots of (injected) drugs, the nausea and fever subsided overnight. I slept in a small chair by her bed, just in case she needed something, or if translation services were required. Somewhat surprisingly, none of the doctors we spoke to throughout this whole thing spoke English or Spanish--or at least none of them tried to speak either language with us, in spite of the fact that they invariably heard me speaking both. My Portuguese isn't great, but it's better than Amber's, and I had no interest in leaving her alone for more than a minute or two.

By morning, Amber was stable from a fever/dehydration point of view, but started to "menstruate." She had just finished her period ten days earlier; it wasn't menstruation, really. Just a convenient exit for dead platelets.

After Amber's fifth blood test in three days, the doctor pulled Paula and I into another room for a chat. Told us that she had hemorrhagic dengue, which is the scary flavor of the disease. Basically, platelets die like crazy, and the body tries to expel them. Luckily, Amber has a vagina as a convenient escape hatch. When men get hemorrhagic dengue, the blood gets to choose another exit orifice--eyes and gums are surprisingly common.

The slightly-panicky doctor insisted that Amber couldn't set foot outside of a hospital for three or four days, and sent us to the (public) Tropical Disease Hospital for further testing, and probably for a long stay.

I should mention that angel Paula was around for most of this. She stayed with us from 1:00 in the afternoon until 9:00 the first day, then came back at 9:30 the next morning. She accompanied us to the other hospital, and stayed with us until the end.

Luckily, this story is mostly over. The doctors at the third hospital did some more tests, fed her some tasty soup, made us wait awhile, and then sent us home. Said that she had a bad strain of dengue, but not the worst--hemorrhagic, but not the scary brain-bleeding sort. She could go home ("home"...a youth hostel), but had to return in two days for a fresh consultation. Lots of hydration fluids, fever meds, nausea meds, etc.

We escaped from Hospital #3 on Tuesday, and returned for a quick chat on Thursday. Today is Friday, and she's doing pretty well. Still weak as a kitten, but fever-free for over 48 hours. She has an incredibly itchy dengue fever rash (broken blood vessels in her skin, on her entire body) that has interrupted her sleep. It apparently can't be medicated (we've tried, hard), but at least the worst of it seems to be over. We're heading back on Tuesday for more tests, and I don't expect to travel again for another week--it takes a long time to rebuild her platelets and white blood cells, both of which are still desperately low. Not dangerous or anything, but travel is a really dumb idea until she feels much better.

The moral of the story is, mosquitos really suck. If you see one today, smash it for me.

The other moral of the story is, wonderful strangers really don't suck. Amber spent 24 hours at the private hospital, and then they refused even to charge us for it. Paula's family had made sure that Amber would be taken care of, and completely for free. And Paula spent most of two days with us in the hospitals, translating from the doctors' Portuguese to my "Portunyol", and making sure that we effectively navigated the bureaucracy.

I have absolutely no idea what would have happened without her. My Portuguese is conversational at best--fine for ordering food or talking about the price of plane tickets, but not so good when I need to completely understand every word of a doctor's diagnosis. They usually understand when I speak (fluent) Spanish or (Spanish-accented, Tarzan-ish) Portuguese at them, but it's tough for me to catch the nuances of medical Portuguese. Paula saved us from a lot of unpleasantness.

I promise that my next blog will be much more fun. In the meantime, let me know if you have any brilliant ideas for a good thank-you gift for Paula and her aunt. It's tough to appropriately thank somebody who does something like that for you.

And if any of you are worried or curious about Amber's illness and want some more details, feel free to send me an email (cbibilos@gmail.com)--I have a little bit more energy for answering questions right now than she does.