As you can imagine life had gotten pretty stressful - I was in a foreign country - speaking a foreign language - attending an academically demanding boarding school - cut off from not only my family but everything I had ever known. My parents were "at war" with each other... And there was no end in sight...
And in early June of 1966 I "fell off the edge".
It had all started a couple of weeks earlier. My allergies and asthma had been acting up all spring and eventually it developed into full-blown bronchial pneumonia. At times I couldn't take more than 5 steps without gasping for air...
So you'd think the school infirmary would treat me, right??
Wrong... I wasn't running a fever. Their 'threshold' for treatment was 37.5C (around 99F). I tried to explain that my internal thermostat was a bit off - normal for me is about a degree cooler and I don't get above 99F until I'm half dead... They didn't care. I went in 3 times and each time the nuns gave me an aspirin and told me to get lost...
Finally one weekend it got really bad - I was skipping meals because the walk to the main campus was too painful. And by Sunday afternoon it all came to a head and my mind decided to go away for a while...
The colloquial term is a "nervous breakdown" but that covers a broad range of disorders - I think what happened to me would be best described as a "depersonalization episode brought on by acute stress".
I recall that I was sitting on a bench up at the villa rubbing my hair and watching the dandruff forming patterns on the floor. And the next thing I knew I had been disconnected...
Frankly - it felt wonderful... All the stress and pain was gone... I was sort of there, but I sort of wasn't... (Yeah - it's hard to describe.) ... I had the sense that I could have 'reconnected' if I had wanted to - but I didn't really want to :-)
I was aware that my friends were getting worried - they were talking to me but their voices were just faint echoes in the distance... I vaguely recall being walked down to the infirmary - and then I went blank...
When I "came to" I was feeling much better... Apparently the pneumonia had gotten quite severe. The "Sisters of the Never-ending Suppositories" had even called in a doctor (they rarely did that)... Yeah - the nuns were constantly shoving things up my butt... I assume it was medically relevant... At least I hope it was :-)
I was in the infirmary for about a month (maybe longer) - that's how long it look for the pneumonia to completely clear up... The infirmary was right above the classrooms so I could hear the kids outside during recess. But I mostly had no idea what day it was - except for Sundays because the schoolyard was quiet...
It was boring but it was a good boring. Without the day to day academic grind my stress level quickly dropped to an easily manageable level.
After a couple of weeks they let some of my friends visit - and the rector stopped by from time to time... You'd think they would've let my mom visit but that was against school policy. I don't think they gave her any clue how sick I really was...
And when they finally let me out I could barely walk - I was amazed at how much my muscles had atrophied... Here's a picture of me at my study hall desk:
As luck would have it summer vacation was coming up so my teachers took pity on me and let me 'coast' for the remaining few weeks... They figured I could make up all the work I'd missed after the break...
But as it turned out those were my last weeks at Ako... And that story is yet to come :-)
3 comments:
I dunno...suppositories have always seemed to me like they rarely have medical relevance...
Yeah - it is counter-intuitive... I mean - the whole system is designed to move things the OTHER direction :-)
This is an amazing blog post...thank you.
You know the old joke? The doctor gives the old man suppositories for some illness, and the old man comes back a week later. "Are you feeling better?" asks the doctor. "No," says the old man. "For all the good they did me, I might as well have shoved them up my butt."
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