As Cameron said tonight, “There might be some truth to it, but…” Every time anyone gets sick here, it gets blamed on the temperature and your awareness and preparedness for it.
Kelsey and I constantly joke around about wearing socks. For instance, after having been seriously sick last week (which was 100% due to dehydration, though Lourdes blamed it on my not having on a sweatshirt that day) I have had a small cold for the last two or three days. I feel perfectly fine, but I’ve just been coughing a lot, and it’s going away now. But I came home to Lourdes’ house yesterday afternoon just in time for it to start raining as I was walking from the Trole station back to the tienda. If it had started raining while I was on the Trole, I would have stood around and waited for the bus, but the bottom dropped when I was almost exactly halfway between the station and the house. No sense turning around, I ran for it, but go drenched anyway. Jose laughed at me a little when I walked in the tienda, but concernedly made sure he told me to go upstairs and change. I did just that, but having taken almost all of my clothes back to the intern apartment in the north in preparation to move back there, I had no socks in the house. I walked out of my room barefoot to fill up my water bottle in the kitchen, and Lourdes came upstairs at just the same time. So of course, I immediately got the “You’re sick because you’re not wearing socks” lecture and went to put on tennis shoes.
The next story won’t seem related at first. Be patient.
I tend to be late for morning meetings because of breakfast. Breakfast with the family is both non-negotiable and a bit of an ordeal. In the US, if I had an 8:30 meeting with an 60-90 minute commute to get there, I might grab a Pop-Tart on the way out the door, or more likely just skip breakfast or hope the meeting was finished before Hardee’s stops serving Cinnamon & Raisin biscuits at 10:30. That’s not an option here because (we don’t have Hardee’s, we don’t have Pop-Tarts, and mostly because) nobody in the house, from abuelita down to the kids, is going to let me leave without sitting down and eating with me. One morning I had to be at Youth World early, so I made myself coffee so I could honestly tell Lourdes I had breakfast already (coffee is always the main component of breakfast and dinner). I should have left the dishes out so there would have been some evidence, but since I washed them, Lourdes asked me all that day and literally all the next if I was sure I had made myself breakfast that morning.
Today I was in the kitchen helping Marta when Miguel (my friend and both Lourdes’ and Marta’s nephew, therefore Adrian’s cousin) started frantically looking around the house for some things. Adrian came out of his room a minute later and I realized he was not feeling good. Miguel told me he was taking Adrian to the hospital. As Miguel was running around the house, Marta started asking him about food. It went something like this (though it was, obviously, in Spanish):
Marta: Have you eaten breakfast yet?
Miguel: No.
Marta: Are you going to?
Miguel: No.
Marta: You have to eat breakfast!
Miguel: Well, not this morning.
Marta: I have the water boiling already. I’m pouring coffee right now.
Miguel: I don’t believe we can right now.
Miguel then proceeded to run downstairs to hop in the car, Adrian stumbling along with him, clutching his side like it was going to explode any minute. Marta scoffed at them under her breath until they were long gone, bemoaning her ridiculous nephews, skipping breakfast.
Tonight, Cameron and I had talked about Adrian, and before she dropped me off at my apartment, Cameron called Lourdes to check on the situation. Turns out Adrian had pneumonia. He’s doing much better, but he’ll have to stay in the hospital for three days due to a torn membrane in his lung, which is what allowed him to get the infection. Lourdes’ theory, however? “He works in a restaurant over a hot stove, and then they go in and out of the freezer all day. Hot, cold, hot, cold.” Again, as Cameron said, maybe there’s some truth to that. Maybe. Some. At least he was wearing his socks.
This post originally published at www.dannypeck.net
