Destination: Jaipur

I went to bed Saturday night planning on an early morning train to the Taj, then an afternoon train from there to Jaipur. I went to sleep finally around 1, and was awoken by a wrong number at 5, so I decided to give the Taj a miss for now and head straight for Jaipur on a 1:30 train from the same station near my hotel (relatively). I had somewhat figured out the online system for the trains, and while I could not make an online reservation (not yet at least, I’m convinced there’s a way even though I’ve been told there is not), I did get all kinds of helpful information about available trains (trains the same folks told me were full/not available). So, feeling somewhat accomplished and anticipating a minor struggle at the station c/o ‘The Namesake’ et al, I hopped an autorickshaw and was walking into the station at about 1130.

About an hour and a few hot tears later, I sat down at the platform, general admin ticket in hand for the train I wanted. Turns out the Indian ticketing system is comparable (at least in Delhi) to Egypt, only on a massive scale – lines were 20 or 30 deep, I was sent all over the place and heard contradictory ‘advice’ at every turn. It was frankly an infuriating experience. The train turned out to be 4 hours late, with standing room only, and an Indian kid who would not stop asking questions eventually saved me from standing for 6 hours by joining me on a trek for another train leaving from another station. We took a bus (my first here – it was crowded), and hopped on the train just in time. We got seats, though they were in the very first coach most proximal to the train horn that screamed pretty much non-stop the whole time. I didn’t have a new ticket, but my 87 rupee (1.40USD) ticket from before insulated me from any ticket people – there were none. My strong suggestion for India – book your train ahead!

It was a pleasant ride – I listening to music mostly and appreciated being able to sit down and see a little countryside before dark. I chatted somewhat with some guys in my berth who were having an animated conversation about something that would drift my way, which is when I would ask what they were talking about – style in the US (why ripped jeans?), wikileaks, corruption, religion, etc. It was mostly in Hindi, but a guy next to me translated some. I enjoyed the ride and felt ready again to make my way into Jaipur to find my hotel of choice.

This next aspect of India (and a few other countries) I have not yet made my peace with. I am warned (with reason, as demonstrated in Delhi) to be wary of folks who try to direct me to another hotel giving any number of stories – everyone is looking for a commission. It is best to get picked up by the hotel. I figured I’d walk – have consistently figured I’d walk. Fail. I try to ignore the half dozen or so people who inevitably offer to find me a good hotel, good price, where all the backpackers go. Traffic is flying around, it is dark, and as always, there are people everywhere who all somehow know where they are going. The LP maps are pretty worthless for walking – more of a buckshot approximation of areas. It took two rickshaws to find the place, confusion about the price, but finally I stood in front of the Hotel Pearl Palace. In all, it can be a will-breaking endeavor.

I’ll post here a few photos of the train ride and Jaipur as I saw it the next day, having a walk around. Like Delhi it is crowded and hectic, but was for me much more manageable, maybe because I walked with no goal on two main roads - I was calmed by the reflections I will post next. Thanks for reading!

Photos of Qutb Minar and Delhi

Please forgive the lack of commentary or stories here, it's late and I spent a somewhat harried evening (quite unnecessary of course) trying to plan out my next few days.  My strong recommendation - if you visit India, have a plan.  The first shots are from the old city - old old old, and then from the site of the Qutb Minar, and old Muslim temple area in what was the center of Delhi a thousand years ago.  Then photos from my long walk home - show-casing some of Delhi.  Enjoy!  

There it is in the distance, about 3km away

Remains of Old Delhi

School kids playing Cricket

The site!

Some columns were reused from Hindu temples

The stump of an attempted bigger tower

Near the New Delhi train station

Cannought Place, the Bermuda hexagon of restaurants

Tomorrow I hope to be off to the Taj Mahal, then to Jaipur for a hopefully slower, more backpacker-y time.  Thanks for reading!  

Delhi day one

I made it to Delhi.  I’m tempted to say by the skin of my teeth, but the journey in wasn’t that bad – really.  The flights were very smooth (the Russian airliner Aeroflot was bulky, boxy and communist-looking), and the Delhi airport easy to navigate at 5 in the morning.  I felt vaguely sick for most of the air trip, though that passed.  Delhi is humid, about 65 during the day and in the mid 40s at night.  Driving in to town (again at about 5 or 6 in the morning), was a bit busy, but not bad, and the main streets were open and clear.  We stopped near the area I was headed for and popped into the tourism office as the driver wasn’t sure where the place was / I didn’t have the number handy.  I found the number, he called, and I spoke with someone who said they no longer have room tonight, a group is overstaying.  I am suspicious of this – it sounds like a very common scam whereby the driver gets you into a place where they get commission.  We wait for about 15 minutes for the tourism officer to come – he also calls, I hear the same thing and wonder if indeed the place is booked out (I will email them when the internet comes back on).  He suggests multiple times that I fly on to another city as Delhi is full of Indians for the Independence holiday (Jan 26) and that everything will be full / more expensive.  Again suspicious, I tell him I need to sleep and, looking the part, he finds me a new spot (Hotel Ivory) at roughly the same cost as the other (900 rupees / 20 dollars).  The taxi guy brings me and I crash there (after insisting on 900 rather than the asked 1000 – it is 2 dollars but I argue anyway for some reason and he relents).  It is 8 in the morning and I had been traveling for about 18 hours. 

My first impressions of the city were not as striking as I expected – it is certainly busy, and cars and rickshaws and peds share the road, and the traffic moves on the left (British style), but it was not hard to walk or feel safe in the taxi.  I have yet to try to find a place from another, and I expect that would be difficult, but ubiquitous rickshaws can get me out of a pinch for about 2 dollars, so I’m not too nervous. 

The city is not as dirty as Cairo, though the people I’ve dealt with have kept my guard up (as expected in the city).  When I first say down in my room with its oversized bed and no soap or toilet paper, I wanted to go home.  I still feel the pangs of ‘what the hell am I doing,’ and thinking about how much easier it is to shop at the Seward Coop and how much quieter the river walks are.  I thought hard about how difficult my initial decent into India would be, and how I would need to suspend judgment for at least a few days, if not weeks, and still I struggled to keep my composure. 

It takes a lot of effort to travel!  I was spoiled by Turkey and Sweden, but I do have Egypt and Morocco under my belt which helps tremendously.  It is also helpful to think about how much of my stress comes from a physical discomfort – it is humid, or showering in cold water, or having a crampy belly, or a headache, motion sickness, and that pervasive confusion of not knowing a place.  It has also been familiarly lonely – where I am staying is not a backpacker place, and even walking around the market searching for a power adaptor (with a hotel guide) I saw only two other white folks among thousands of Indians – both middle aged men.  But physical discomfort and loneliness both pave the way to something, and neither are so bad when I stop and think about it.  And while the internet is spotty (off all afternoon today), I do have my computer to write on and ‘Arrested Development’ and Neko Case to keep me company.  I figure I have been sad and lonely and sick enough times to know that ‘this too shall pass’ and to ride it out without too much bitching. 

My plan now is to make my gd plan – everyone asks what I going to see and I have no answers yet.  Like packing, I have a number of places laid out in little piles.  I need to figure out where these things are in relation to each other, travel time and so on, and I should be ready to go in a day or two.  The travel guy said I could hire a car and driver for sight-seeing in Delhi tomorrow for about 600-700 rupees (15USD) and I’m thinking about that.  I think I’ll stay one more night in Delhi and head out for wherever the following morning. 

I did snap a few photos through my haze this morning and this afternoon, which I will post here.  The scale and impression of the place cannot be captured here, but maybe you can imagine – it is constant horn honking, people to where I wonder where they all sleep at night, and smells typical of the streets of a busy sub-tropical megalopolis (food, animals, urine, body odor, exhaust etc).  I hope to have more interesting photos up soon.  Thanks for reading!  

Snowplow in Moscow!

Gandhi airport - shining clean

Delhi street with my 'guide' in the front

Swedish Winter Wonderland! ... and healthcare part 2

I have spent the past few days relaxing and failing to keep track of the past few days - a luxury I have now enjoyed for several months.  C and I have relaxed and taken in some Swedish sights - the Fotografiska museum, the Nobel museum (today), and a trip north to visit a college friend of Corinne's, Seth, who owns a horse farm in northern Sweden.  There were eight of us on this trip, a similar group to the Landsort trip last fall, with the addition of Nelson's spouse Mel.  We stopped at a grocery on the way up to get our grub.  

It was an exciting shopping experience

Seth, Emma and their 13 m.o. Aldo welcomed us with open arms.  They lived in a old wood frame farm house, heated almost entirely by wood stoves (mostly one downstairs that also served to heat tea and the occasional dish).  While Sweden is pretty 'green' with most people using public transport and almost everything including plastic bags on the recycle list, Seth and Emma live very close to the earth, with goats added on the recycling front and locally harvested wood, homemade this and that - it made for a very attractive visit for a bunch of environmentally acute engineers coming from the city.

Seth and the stove - the wood fire was in the upper drawer, which vented over the oven space under the hot plates

Corinne getting some lanolin from a grateful sheep

Harnessing the power of billy goat to pull Aldo in the spark (Swedish sled)

Corinne and the horsie Bucky (or as the Swedish reporter called him (fucky)

Riding the sparks!

The whole stay felt like this

The midday sun

The weekend passed very peacefully - we slept near wood fire stoves (reminding me very much of Pepin!), ate giant meals we prepared for each other, played with the animals, with the snow, with Aldo and with each other (nicely).  It was my last weekend in Sweden before flying to India on Thursday, and I feel like I had a good dose both of Sweden and of winter, that I had missed so much from back home.  It was fantastic to spend so much time with such great people - I feel recharged and ready to start planning for the trip I take the day after tomorrow.  (!)

On the international front, I'm sure you all heard about the tragedy in Moscow - it was the airport I was to have flown through on my way to India.  This along with the violence in Tunis and Egypt have raised my alarm for personal safety and the fact that this kind of violence seems somewhat common place for people - somewhere, everywhere - it only so happens that I am geographically closer this time.  I've sent notes to people I met in some of these countries now struck by violence, and feel differently about the violence having been there.  It would be difficult to be sensitive to everything going on in the world, all of the pain, but traveling to these places, again only for a few days sometimes, has opened them to me in new ways.  To put it mildly, there is crazy shit going on that is not being covered well by American media.  I would be the first to claim this (and have before many times), but reading Al Jazeera  and other non-Western sources in earnest these past few weeks have opened my eyes - particularly what they have to say about Obama and the Palestinians.  Wouldn't have expected Obama to seem more pro-Israel than Bush.  Not sure what the game plan is there.

That's that for now - if anyone has any travel suggestions for India, I'm all ears - the latest plan is to possibly check out Sri Lanka, then head north from there.  The country is too massive to see much in even two months, which is what I am looking at.  But there are certainly some highlights (mangrove forests, tigers, the Taj, etc) that I'd like to see.  Thanks for reading!


And here is the second, 'post-script' portion of this post, relating the somewhat harrowing adventure of getting my medications from the US to my bloodstream.  Again, it a bit involved, and I apologize to those of you who might not be all that invested or who might not have time but who like me have a hard time stopping when there is more to read.

So perhaps you are wondering how I keep this dilapidated body chugging along over here without the comforts of American health care.  Indeed.  First, I think I mentioned (but it deserves repeating) that the care I received in Cairo (at the Cairo Kidney Clinic) and in Istanbul (at the German Hospital) was superb at a 1/10 of the cost of care in the US.  Istanbul has a thriving medical tourism culture, and the websites (and waiting rooms) of these hospitals is geared towards making folks from far away feel comfortable.  I've not yet touched Sweden's socialist health care, as it would cost me.  If you need critical care in Sweden you are covered 100%, citizen or no.  If you are a citizen, then the whole thing is covered, but if not, you do pay out of pocket for non-emergency care.  So scrips and office visits would be full price for me.

My other concern are having a nice steady supply of my prescriptions.  I take roughly 20 some per day, one set in the morning and one at night - I mentioned some of them in the post about the close call in Turkey.  I have a high deductible plan in the US which means that any charge after I pay 3000 is fully covered.  Medical expences incurred outside of the US are considered 'out-of-network' so the count starts over - I'd have to incur 9000 in costs, then after that I am covered at 50%.  Basically non-existent.  So the plan has been to ship meds to me when I am running low (insurance would not give me a years worth, and besides that would take up a LOT of space).  My pops would call in the scrips when they were up, pick them up, and ship them over easy-peasy.

I forget how much of this I explained before - long story short, without an address to ship them to, I tried the clinic, tried the embassy, no luck.  So I ended up buying a months worth or so out of pocket (about 800$), and wait to have the meds shipped to Sweden at Corinne's place.

When the time came, my Dad made an interesting discovery - I had no insurance coverage, my insurance number was no longer active, and a few calls around showed that I had not had coverage since Sept 30th, 2010.  This was likely due to a sort of clerical error - I had made my payment to school in the fall for all of my premiums, probably not an issue at all.  However, the way insurance works in the US, companies are not required to pick up coverage on someone, even if they can pay, because of pre-existing conditions (which I MIGHT have) - the new health care bill, so demonized by Republicans, would make that illegal (used to be a person with a health condition couldn't even trade jobs for fear of not being covered, not a company has to pick up coverage if the person has coverage now).  Basically, if coverage lapsed, I might be entirely SOL on the health care front, and would have to move to Canada.  Or marry Corinne and move to Sweden.  At least until that part of the bill comes into effect in 2014 (provided the Reps don't repeal it).  These were both fine options in their own way, though not really in the plans.

So I and my Dad made a few phone calls, waited until the weekend passed so CDH would be open again and I could figure this whole thing out - of course, it was Saturday before MLK Monday, which made it a long weekend.  Eventually CDH gets in touch and we are all clear - the scrips can be picked up under the coverage, saving my Dad about $1800.  Step one.  Next up was getting them here.

Sweden says that a person cannot receive scrips through the mail (which makes sense), my understanding is that they can come in with me, but to mail them would require the approval of the Minister of Health (the same in Egypt, Turkey, possibly everywhere) - red tape central.  So we decide to mail them anyway, lacking recourse.  So after the go-ahead in St Paul, the box is expedited via UPS - shipped Wednesday evening.  It is a bit uncertain what will happen once it arrives - Sweden would be in their rights to hang on to it.  I go to hang out at C's place till it gets here - scheduled at 12 Friday.  Sure enough, the doorbell rings at 1204 - package delivered!  I can go on living.  No, really it was a pretty smooth operation, but the nerves were involved.  Thanks for reading!

Contents of the package!  Yes!

Cinematic Memories

Hey folks, a reflection here given my down time - I've been thinking about these places I've seen and how I think about them now.  I realized that I am thinking about places very differently depending on how I saw them.  So this will another reflective entry, but I'll throw in some placating photos of Stockholm in January.

Snow-person!  With hat and scarf

Photo of a church steeple through the fog

From our bus stop, this is the sun at 11:30.  No lie.  11:30.  

The water before we visited the photo museum in Stockholm

The moonrise afterwards (4:30PM)

So here we go - I was sending an email to Nick (who is thinking about making a trip over here!  so should you!) and giving some advise about how to think about time and had a realization about site-seeing.  I hit Morocco at about a thousand miles an hour, planning to 'slow down' by spending two or three days per city.  This was not totally insane - the places in Morocco can be 'seen' in two or three days.  But to travel through them at that pace only really allows for seeing the city; I spent all of my time walking around looking at stuff.  I absolutely saw some amazing things, but thinking back on my time spent looking at things, and my time spent sitting and reading, or chatting with a friend, or having tea in a cafe - they seem almost opposed to each other, as if a different person experienced those things.  More accurately, that I experienced the sitting, reading and chatting, and I watched myself experience the sites.  My memories of the Moroccan medinas, the Tunisian streets, the Egyptian temples and statues, the many sites of Turkey, are cinematic, and these memories become blurred with the photos I took, other images or stories, or movies where they were featured (Petra particularly).  The places that have stuck with me were those accompanied by conversation, Corinne, or some difficulty I was experiencing (Aswan!), and then these almost overshadow the place itself.

It feels like a simple matter of being present, in the moment, as I might try to do during any other time in my life.  I am realizing now that it has been incredibly difficult to be present at these sites, as often the whole point is to revel in the architectural and artistic mastery, or the historical significance of a place.  The Pyramids and Fez are from another time, and the excitement of being there is imagining that time (indeed it can be difficult not to, though the touts at Giza tried).  Petra, particularly the Siq, is literally straight out of one of the most famous movies of all time - hard to walk down that and think of Kevin Lally in December of 2010.

Radiolab has an interesting piece on memory - that we basically construct memory each time we 'remember,' that memory is created with each remembrance.  I know that memories I have from different periods of my life feel different, seemingly dependent on who I was at the time - how I saw the world then.  It seems like when I was thinking of these places as 'other worldly,' I was remembering them as such - or conflating the places with what I thought of them, what I think of them now, with photographs and expectations.  I took photos of these places - though many do not have me in them, which fits with how I remember them.

Where my memories become imprinted with me - I was there, I was there with the breeze on my face - is when I am relaxed, not seeing but looking.  I felt present in Perge, a site I visited with Corinne in Southern Turkey.  She and I had seen two other sites that day with the strange non-couple who acted like a couple.  The ruins were just starting to blend together, and she and I were a bit sleepy.  We treated the site like a sculpture garden, like a park we could casually walk through.  We indulged in conversation about the non-couple, about the bus rides we had been on, what we might want for dinner.  It felt almost devious to stroll through ancient streets, among ruins, without giving them much thought - but I was much more myself while not attempting to appreciate the overwhelming history.

It seems like reminding myself that I am in a strange new world does less to cement the place in my mind than setting up shop in a cafe and working through a game of backgammon or one of the Nine Stories.  I've earned this knowledge, like everything else, by trial and much error; days passed without reflection or insight.  But I hope it might also be one of those life lessons that helps keep my time well spent.  Thanks for reading!  

Re-entry: Take One

We're back in Stockholm, staying at an enormous (by Stockholm standards) 3 bedroom apt way to hell and gone outside of town.  Well, not that far out, about a 20 minute bus/train ride.  There is space out here, it's suburb-y, but all brand new apartment buildings.  Yesterday, in the new warm snow, we made a snowman, with hat.  I've felt very tired these last few days, and drinking out of the faucet, showering in warm water, cooking my own meals along with sleeping early and often is starting to show results.  But, in all, it is taking me some recovery to feel normal again, even after the relative ease of Turkey.  I'm not at home, however January is starting to feel like January - my articulation struggles familiarly from numb cheeks after a cold walk outside.

I haven't yet worked through the two inch stack of receipts, bus tickets, foreign bank notes, and other scraps of paper with little stories built in to them.  I keep threatening Corinne that I'm going to embark on a story-telling binge - or purge rather - of what feels like the extraordinary range of things that I've felt and seen and experienced.  This is part of what is tiring me out, at least that's my guess (along with recovering from being sick and adjusting to the temperature difference).  And it is dark here most of the day - we have solid sunlight from about 830 to 3 (and the sun never gets higher in the sky than an early morning shadow).  So somewhere in there I feel sleepy and a little crabby.  And I barely recognize the photos on earlier posts.  Stockholm is recognizable, but also remains quite foreign and far away - I no longer have the feeling that I am welcome behind the closed doors facing the street, but that is me, no doubt.

I Skyped the other day with PJ, who is living where I lived before I left, and the blue chair I had sat in many, many many times looked new to me.  He has done wonderous things there, exerting an ownership I did not, knowing I would be leaving in a few months.  I'm not exactly homesick, what I'm feeling is recognizable, maybe a displacement of feeling detached from what settles me.  I am re-establishing my habits of home - cooking eggs in the morning and drinking hot water, reading the New Yorker (thanks family for shipping them over!), but am missing chocolate almond milk and seeing the river.  Stockholm is a home base but not home.

I don't feel homesick in the sense of wanting to be home, but the Twin Cities are exerting their gravity and that, along with 5 hours of partial daylight and feeling somewhat listless while enjoying my time, trying to relax, have slowed my happy heartbeat a bit.  C and I are combating the winter blues with some push-ups, winter walks and the Swedish remedy for anything winter related - Glogg.  Last night we watched 'First Contact,' and are working our way through 'Arrested Development.'  

Finally, I think I am feeling the pressure of not being able to really share what has been like to travel as I have - the day-to-day stories and incidents that lack substance in themselves, but have accumulated into a somewhat difficult to manage new self-awareness.  To a startling degree I now consider parts of the world with a heightened sensitivity to the people who live there, like I have familial relationships with these countries - complicated and confusing and involved relationships to a depth that belies the extremely short amount of time I spent in each place.  For the past few days, I've struggled to pass an hour without thinking about my trip so far, and then without needing to re-catagorize my thoughts on any number of subjects (geography, energy policy, ethnicities and ethnic conflict, religion, politics, language ...).  The complexity is staggering, and under it, periodically, so am I.

Of course this is all in (or out of) balance with each incredible image or experience I've had - complexifying the world is a way to be honest with it.   I would not trade them back.  They are, like my kidney experiences, the price of admission.  Thanks for reading!

Pre-partying for India

I mentioned in the last entry that I had been a bit sick and laid low, true and all, but that doesn't quite do justice I don't think, and as Corinne is spending some time studying I am left with my Acer, an internet connection and my stories, which I will indulge to share with you, hopefully with more manageable sentences.

I'll start with something innocuous - photos from Ayvalik and a few from wandering around Istanbul these past few days (yesterday really, I didn't really venture out for a day or two).

Ayvalik was a hilly port town, as I mentioned, and quaint as hell, so here are a few photos to hopefully represent some of that.

Lots of the streets looked like this - very picturesque

See?

We sat here, had some tea and played backgammon - pretty sure C was on a grand winning streak at this point

View across at the Roman harbor

Fishing boats!

Istanbul, Taksim area

The main street from Taksim to the Golden Horn

View across the Horn at sunset - that's the 'New' Mosque (built 1665)

What follows here will be prattling health stories - so those of your pressed for time or attention are excused.  After returning to Istanbul on Monday evening, we had an easy re-entry day on Tuesday - checking out the Grand Bazaar in search of backgammon sets, and enjoyed some quite time at an Istanbul library (highly recommended!).  That evening I think I started to slip a bit, feeling the usual precursors to a cold / flu type thing (small fever, tired etc).  I woke up the next morning feeling pretty beat up - achy and so on, and was carrying a fever that floated around 100 for the whole day.  I napped, was a lazy layabout, and killed the day watching shows.  The next day, Thursday, I felt the same, complained and rolled around and started to worry about the bigger health picture.  There were a few curveballs that I had worried about and thought about since leaving the Twin Cities - mainly how were these feelings related to the kidneys?  Most likely, they weren't - it almost never is - but the risks of it being kidney related are exaggerated by their consequences, which are a bit scary for this guy (and some of you I'm guessing, which is why I'm writing about this when the all-clear has been called).  



Curveball number one - I have heard that a rejection would feel something like the flu - fever, aches, without cold symptoms.  This is exactly what I was experiencing.  


Curveball number two - viral infections like the flu or a cold will make me sick, like any other mortal, but it would not necessarily make me too sick, as the physiological 'sick' feelings (fever, runny nose, cough, etc) are immuno-responses to a virus, not the virus itself - and I am immuno-suppressed.  So it seemed like a flu, but stronger than what I have experienced.  If I had a bacterial infection, the bacteria would, given a head of steam, make a run for it, go 'septic,' and I would be in real trouble (ER).  This means that when I get sick, I spend fever-addled brain energy trying to suss out if it is viral or bacterial - basically guesswork.  This seemed viral - steady fever for a full day rather than a spiking fever over a few hours.  But that thinking, trying to figure it out, was hard - and it was hard on both of us.  Me trying to figure out how bad it felt, C trying to help me remember what fevers I had had when (she made a chart).  


For those two reasons I have the blanket mandate that anytime I had a significant fever (I took this as over 101 or so) I should get my fevered ass to the ER to ensure that I wasn't (1) in rejection or (2) about to go septic.  


Curveball number three - when I had my blood levels checked in Cairo, my traco level was on the low side (Tacrolimus (along with mycophenolate) is the main immuno-suppressants between me and a kidney rejection).  It was within what's called the 'theraputic level' for the Cairo folks (indicated on the report), so I didn't think much of it, but I mentioned that to the folks back home at the TC Kidney Clinic when I called to check in about being sick this week and turns out the theraputic levels in the states is higher than those of Egypt.  Oops.  So my 2.6 (fine on a 2 - 15 scale) was pretty low on a 5 - 15 scale.   This was a bit of a red flag.


Finally, deliciously, I was on the gravy train, sliding into home, heading to the bathroom every half hour or so, though not feeling the crampies I'd associated with bad water bacteria - I let them run their course so to speak until Friday afternoon when I figured I was probably out of the woods enough to not worry about complicating any clinic or hospital treatments.  I took some cipro - the miracle drug when travelers' diarrhea is concerned, but it did nothing for me, which again indicated virus.  While it didn't feel bad per se, it did slow me down enough to factor into everything else.  


So I considered these circumstances, laying in bed, shivering like a leaf in the breeze, feeling like the flaccid piles of poo I was leaving in the Turkish toilets.  At what point would I pack up my 'overnight bag' and head over to the hospital? - and then which hospital?  Every now and then Corinne would check in from her school work, ask how I was feeling.  On Thursday, day two of sicky sick time, we went to a clinic down the street from our Hostel (this is after stopping in the pharmacy next door, asking for a blood test, and confidently being handed a pregnancy test).  While everyone at the clinic was very friendly and helpful, no one spoke English, and they didn't do blood tests.  I was feeling a little better having walked around and eaten a tasty chicken sandwich, and we decided to give it another night.  The longer I didn't feel worse, the less nervous I felt.  


Friday night came.  I took some Tylenol, feeling that the worst was behind me, and C and I watched 'Good Will Hunting' on netflix.  The movie over, my temp floated up to about 101 (after taking the Tylenol) which was kind of high, but feeling alright overall, we called it a night.  I woke up at 3, slippery with sweat, no longer feverish, and feeling like the belle of the ball - the fever had broken!  I went to shower and realized that I had finally had the travel experience so many had talked about - the Indian surprise - poo in the shorts (and some on the bed).  C kindly offered to get us new sheets and I cleaned up, too high on the broken fever to care much about anything else.  We had some laughs about it, I thought about Trainspotting, and we we went back to sleep.  


The next morning we swung over to the German hospital (where they spoke English), to check my hemoglobin, WBC, and creatinine levels.  Side story - in Cairo a quick lab test showed that I was peeing out way more protein than was advisable, and so changed blood pressure drugs from a calcium channel blocker to an ACE inhibitor (the calcium channel blocker allowing for more protien to be dumped, while the ACE inhibitor would prevent that).  HOWEVER, in the inevitable side-effect game, the ACE inhibitor I took earlier also inhibited my hemoglobin production, meaning that while I had more protein in my system, I had fewer red blood cells to make use of it.  Kind of a Catch-22.  But I was assured in Cairo that ramipril (the new ACE inhibitor) was different from lisinopril (note the suffixes!).  White blood cells would indicate infection (or, unspeakably, rejection), and the creatinine which is on the 'always check' list.  


While a little slow up the stairs, I was feeling a world better and we made our way over late morning.  To close the suspense, the labs came back fine - hemo was 11.6 (good for me, though normal is 14 - 18 ish), WBC was normal, and while creatinine was a bit high, 1.9, the nurses back home thought that was normal given the drug changes (tacro increase) and sickness.  This morning (Jan 8) I'm feeling almost good as new - we are hammering away at neighboring computers and looking forward to an afternoon ferry ride to nowhere in particular and maybe a Turkish bath, at long last.  


We (C and I, and you maybe) are extremely relieved that the situation is resolved, and that it wasn't worse than it was.  At the end of the day, the real bitch of this kidney thing is a sunny day dread that sometimes comes over me - this feeling that even though I pass under this threat or have that close call, the next one is just a matter of time.  It feels sort of like the inevitability of death - I might not think of it for days, but it returns, and always will.  After I felt much better, on Saturday or on our Sunday trip back to Stockholm, I felt clouded-over.  I feel brighter now, it is after all just a mood, a passing attitude that I wallow in periodically, same as many of us.  It is hard - this thought is the hardest one I deal with - but it is still just a thought, and it passes.  


The past few days will fade into a succession of similar days, but I thought cataloging them here would give anyone interested a flavor of what it is sometimes like to travel with a kidney transplant.  Well shit, not even that - no impatient, no midnight hospital run, this one was a freebie - though not without a considerable amount of worrying and stress to C and I.  Still, it is always worse for someone somewhere.  I'll take this lot by twos, I'm lucky as hell.  Thanks for reading!