This is the tale of a rickety bunkbed in the mountains of Ecuador, a chiropractor in Capetown, South Africa, and how they touched the life of a bright, beautiful and enterprising young woman. For the purposes of smooth narrative, we must give this paragon a name- I shall call her Irene.
The tale begins at an Ecuadorian wildlife center, where our hero is spending four months building lion enclosures, dodging homicidal kinkajous and giving butchery lessons. The month is August, the year is 2008, and night is trickling down upon the mountaintop. The lovely Irene was relaxing with her fellow volunteers. On an impulse, she scrambled up to her bunk to retrieve an mp3 player. And now we must reveal our hero's fatal flaw, her Achilles Heel, if you will. Irene is, we regret, undeniably and unfailingly clumsy.
As she slid down from her bunk, Irene's hand slipped, and she landed flat, facedown on a hard, tile floor. Her chin rebounded, blood leaped from her lower lip and jaw, and she gave a very manly howl of rage and pain. Having assured herself that it was a howl, not a girly squeal, she found to her relief that teeth and bones were all intact. Her teeth didn't seem to be meeting up exactly the way they used to, but why quibble? She did the only thing she could do:clean up the blood, go to bed, and rise in the morning, stiff-necked, to explain her new beauty marks to the volunteer group.
Our tale skips forward now to October 2009, when the restless wanderer Irene returned to the home of her mother after eleven months in Alaska. Shortly afterwards, as previously documented, a painful sinus infection arose, but Irene, believing herself capable of, to use the colloquial "kicking its microscopic ass back to germy-town," delayed her doctor's visit for almost two months. The doctor prescribed antibiotics, but as each course ended, the pain returned. In the first weeks of January, Irene boarded a plane for South Africa, having just started her third round of antibiotics, believing firmly that no puny microbes could survive this final scourge. Especially since the only thing left to do was see an ear-nose-throat doctor, and the hero has a dislike of doctor's offices.
She was wrong. Yes, I know it's a shock and a rarity from such a lady, but so it was. With the end of the prescription, the persistent pain returned. Iron entered Irene's soul. Her entire four months in Africa included only one sizable gap between programs, right after Drakenstien. Cunning and wise to the last, Irene knew that this time must be used to thwart the infection and restore order to her sinuses.
The owner of Drakenstein's wife worked in medicine, and was able to supply the name and number of a Capetown ENT. Despite being sent to the wrong side of town by tourist information, our hero successfully reached her appointment, and with eloquence she explained her problem. Examinations yielded bewilderingly normal results, and a CT scans was ordered posthaste. When Irene had braved the machine, she gazed in wonder at the glowing image of her own skull. Never had her nose looked less like a ski jump, she mused...
The doctor was dismayed. "Your skull is weird," she proclaimed, "but your sinuses are clear like crystal. The clear kind. Away with you to a chiropractor, then a dentist, and if they can't find a problem, you get more drugs."
Irene was discouraged, and in dread of dentists and further drugs. With little expectation that a chiropractor could help her, she nonetheless dutifully appeared on his doorstep two days later. Having heard her sordid tale, the chiropractor examined the gallant lass. As soon as his fingers touched the base of her spine, he exclaimed in surprise, "Oh my god, how did that happen?"
It didn't seem like a good sign. "What?" squeaked the hero.
"Your skull is sitting a centimeter off-center on your spine. Like someone picked it up and put it back in the wrong place."
Imagine Irene's bafflement. Would she not have remembered which an event? The now-intrigued chiropractor continued his tests, and it was while he was asking whether her teeth fit together correctly that she brilliantly recalled the sensation, right after striking the floor in Ecuador, of her teeth not quite matching up. The story of the fall was recounted immediately, and the mystery of the sourceless pain was solved. Although at the time she had laughed about her visible scars, Irene had thought little of the matter since except as a good story to tell. She had learned to move around her head's new position, all unawares, and for a year and a half the tension had built up. The good chiropractor cracked and stretched our hero's neck a few times, stuck a few needles into the nerve, and assured Irene that her skull was back where it was supposed to be.
I have kept this tale to myself, not wishing to cause anxiety to any of those persons inclined towards worrying from afar. Knowing that our hero was applying the full extent of her mental and social resources to the problem, it seemed counter-productive that anyone else should fret about it.
For myself, while the hero Irene has been bent on her quest to straighten out her head, I have been keeping myself lazy at the hostel. Most often I hang out with Steve, Claire, Marius, and a South African skipper called Bash. After the first three nights, I got tired of waking up hung over, and I scaled back the drinking. Since then, my time has been split between catching up on sleep, walks around the city, and hanging out. The massive sunburn I got at the beach is healing now, another the outline of my suit's tie is still sharply demarkated. Steve calls it Jesus, and I wish Jesus would hurry up and peel his butt off my back. We all had a braai (barbeque) a few nights ago; spent a night sleeping on the balcony at one point, giving birth to a new hostel rule: no sleeping on the balcony; and today is my last day, which makes me surprisingly sad for a place that I've only been a week. It felt like longer. Today I plan on trying to forget that it's happening, and going with Steve and Skipper Bash to see Bash's boat.
Sorry about the pictures I promised you. The computers don't have a cd drive, so uploading them was a no-go. I'll keep trying.
I leave tomorrow morning for a 6:oo flight to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, to stay at a place called Ujamaa Hostel.
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