I’ve Got a Head with Wings: Delhi Belly and Valium

The diagnosis is in: Delhi Belly.

It started back when I first mentioned feeling ill and I quickly fell off the deep-end into maddening illness.

What is Delhi Belly? Capture the following imagery: It starts out feeling run down and tired and that quickly moves toward feeling flu-like symptoms. The flu-like symptoms evolve into actual flu symptoms and a cloud of “uncomfortable stomach issues” build up like a storm on the horizon. The body temperature rises steadily until the fever takes ahold of the body reducing it to a sweaty, spasming and quivering puddle of pallid, gooseflesh. Then those clouds that have been gathering on the horizon move in hit with the relentless intensity of the monsoon and the quivering pile of skin must frequent the loo for one reason or another at intervals of about 5 to 30 minutes….for days.

No appetite. No food. Water is taken in and comes right back out.

The only relief comes in the form of Valium, sweet valium, which is sold over the counter here like aspirin.

Now, before you “say no to drugs” types mount your high horse, answer me this: If you were in a developing country, in a hotel room with no windows except for one that opens up to the common hallway, you can’t eat because the sight of food sends you running for the toilet, you cant sleep because you are soaking wet with your own sweat and shivering like a jack-hammer, you have lost all sense of day and night and know only that its freesing cold outside and you are in an all marble room with no heat and you can’t take anti-biotics, what would you do? Suddenly, poppin some valium and passing the hours and days away in a haze doesn’t seem so bad now, does it? I didn’t thinks so.

This leads me to an explanation of the title to this particular entry. The onset of this delightful ailment and the self-medication that has followed has left me with “A Head With Wings” by Morphine in my head and it has been stuck there for days.

There could be worse songs to have stuck in your head and you lay under your threadbare blanket and watch the paddles of the fan move in a slow, steady beat as the occasional cockroach moves across the ceiling (lucky they are starved and emaciated during the winter). The whimsical saxophone riff drifts across the brainwaves as I move seamlessly from a surreal fever-wracked reality to dreams and back again.

Yes, it could be worse….I could be stuck in this room with “Sweet Home Alabama” stuck…in…my… head………..shit.

Hey, did I mention they sell Valium like aspirin here?