Mood:  crushed out
Topic: Health
Somehow it will all make sense in the end. The search and the restlessness. I am unwell. Running a fever in a hot country is never funny. Never easy. I have dropped 12 pounds in less than a week. My eyes are surrounded by shadows. My stomach convulses with pain. My back is still aching from the plane ride back. Or is it kidney failure? The hyperchondriac in me thinks it is. Wonders where this will lead. But the realist soldiers on. This is just a passing phases.

The first night. Spicy pepper soup with all kinds of entrails and fish. I think this may have been it. Though it took four days to work through my system. Still after three days in hospital on an IV drip and having sweated all manner of shite out of my system. I feel dreadful.

Tomorrow is the fateful visit to the Doctor. For him to prod and eliminate all likely causes. I doubt that he will find much. I dislke the surgery. The acrid smell of disinfectant and puke. The 1970s decor, that was dated even then. The NHS in its rural wonder.

I have been reading Milan Kundera, whose style I like, which weaves between 3rd person observation and 1st person inclusion, repitition is his theme, a perpetual variation. The novel 'The Book of laughter and forgetting' was published in the year of my birth and is set within the historical context of both post-war, post '68 Czechoslovakia and 70s feminism. It is a book sadness and loss. The exile takes the easy option, and the hardest. Bereft from the events within a country, the exile is even more bitter. The characters change, the stories change, but the theme remains, an endless yearning for what was, and can no longer be.

My head is aching, I must take another malarone. 6 more days to ensure no malaria. I understand the exile's dilemma. To live away is to grow, but also to grow apart, the dreams of the old country are only dreams and the reality of return is too hard to bear.