Learning through Sickness

The bulk of the past two days have been one long menacing nightmare. After a relaxing escape filled with great food and good health in beautiful Kerala, I came down with a fever, chills, headache, body aches, and diarrhea as soon as I made it to my main destination of Hubli, Karnataka to start project work.

Almost at the very moment of arriving to Hubli after a total of 21 hours of train riding (12 hours from Cochin-Bangalore, 9 hours from Bangalore-Hubli), I fell completely sick. To make things worse, a few hours into my sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke from itching bites all over my sweaty body ultimately forcing me to half-consciously stumble into the bathroom for an unwanted cold shower. I'm hard pressed to recall a night's rest as terrible as this one. Putting it all together, the night was made of a miserable mix of ingredients: a fever, an aching body, a dozen mosquito bites, the mental stress of thinking of what those mosquitoes could be carrying, and the desperate need for sleep after such tiring travels.

The following day was filled with more of the same. I tried my best to rest as much as I could to beat this bug, but found it difficult to overcome my body's uncomfortable oscillations between hot and cold. I lost all sense of time. Every time I dozed, I had an irritating, incomprehensible, and reoccurring dream (or should I say nightmare) filled with feelings of stickiness and stress. My day went by at snail's pace.

The second night was bad but not as bad. And luckily today has been much better. I saw a doctor to make sure my illness was nothing serious, and by this afternoon I felt noticeably better. Most likely (and hopefully) my sickness was due to basic case of food poisoning based on its short duration.

All in all, as terrible as this cloudy experience has been, it has brought with it many benefits through recognition of its silver lining. And by seeing the value through the struggle, it definitely helped me maintain a more optimistic attitude to the course of things.

Through the ordeal, I've learned and reflected on the health care system in rural/low-income India by going through it first-hand. Overall, I witnessed the system's lack of service capacity and its barriers to entry for the community's poor. As an illustration, I waited two hours past my scheduled appointment time for a simple four minute check-up; financially, the check-up billed at 80 rupees and the prescription at 90 rupees, a hefty sum for any low-income family in India especially just for treating a mild illness. It's now much clearer to me how and why a family would pass up receiving medical help from professionals. And sadly, in severe cases, such bypassing of simple help and intervention often leads to preventable long-term health problems and the crippling financial problems.

Finally, through this experience I have literally felt the problem and pain that I will be spending my summer trying to alleviate here in Hubli . Through my two days of suffering, I have developed an even stronger motivation to tackle the problems of poor sanitation and contaminated water which are causing similar illnesses to what I felt. Experiencing the overwhelmingly averse effects of bad health that completely upends life, I've grown a deeper connection to the real value of the impact I hope to make in the next eight weeks.