I woke up in the middle of the night again last night, freaking out about having to go to the hospital. I was with my Mom and we were being forced down a long set of stairs into the ward where people were sent to die. It was horrible because I knew that in the room at the end of the stairs, my Dad was waiting and I had to say goodbye to him again.
Welcome to the last two and a half months of my sleeps.
One of the drugs that I am taking, an anti-malarial called mefloquine (which is also called larium) gives me terrible dreams every night. I just don’t know what to do anymore. Obviously, my days here are great but at nighttime it’s a completely different story. There’s a very unsettling contrast between the two.
Every morning, I awake with a sense that something horrible and irreversible has happened. I have to sit for a minute and think about it, and then slowly I realize that it was just another one of my mefloquine nightmares.
Generally, I’m not prone to having bad dreams – just the odd bad sleep before a big test, quitting a job, or after a particularly bad day. In the end, there was usually something I could link them to and nightmares didn’t happen that often anyway. At first I attributed my consistently bad nightmares to the changes involved with leaving my friends, my job, my apartment and Rusel behind in New York City and moving someplace new. But after I had settled into life in Banda Aceh and I was really enjoying myself I realized that it was something else.
They start out really bad, on Monday nights after I take my weekly dose. They get consistently less frightening as the week goes on but then they start up again once again as soon as the next Monday rolls around. As a self-confessed and well-respected professional sleeper, this is definitely ruining my game.
I guess I could quit taking the mefloquine? Now that I am out of Banda Aceh, I think that I am pretty safe. I think that I was the only ex-pat taking anti-malarials in Aceh anyway. They’re expensive (mine were about $300 for a three-month supply), the side-affects are bad at times, and it’s just a hassle. I almost quit taking the pills then but decided against it when Kate got dengue fever and I realized that these tropical diseases aren’t messing around.
But now I’m in a tourist’s haven, Bali, and the book says that malaria is rare here. I asked the guy who runs the hotel I’m staying at, when he delivered my breakfast this morning (delicious crepes and coffee!) about malaria and he said that it’s not an issue here. The bible, the Lonely Planet, says the same.
I’m torn. I guess I have until next Monday to decide. Mom, I already know what you think…..but I feel like I could really use some nice dreams, for a change. Something with unicorns, endless episodes of Gilmore Girls, bottomless cartons of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream that miraculously don’t make you fat, and Stephen Colbert feeding it to me (sorry, Rusel!).
Hmmm...I think dreaming of Gilmore Girls would be a nightmare! :P
Posted by: Roger | September 12, 2007 at 01:07 PM