No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

On the day of the election, we had two new volunteers join us. Tom (from the U.S.) and Caroline (from New Zealand) arrived together after working for a time in an orphanage in Nepal; then traveling in India for a few weeks. Caroline was limping around due to a really horrible road rash incurred during her first (and possibly last) experience with a motor bike. The front of her right lower leg and foot was just one massive, infected boo-boo. I’m not generally squeamish, but it was painful just to look at this injury. As with most volunteers, they are traveling on a shoestring and spent the first couple of nights of their stay upstairs from me, in a room here at 49 Lionel Edirisinghe Mawatha. Watching Caroline hobble down the spiral staircase from above was downright scary. This is not the cheapest place to live in Colombo, so I took pity on them and offered them the extra bedroom until they figured out what they wanted to do. They were thinking of going down south to do some home building and were exploring their options while Caroline’s leg healed. She’s doing very nicely now and hardly limps at all thanks to liberal doses of Neosporin and some oral antibiotics…(available over the counter at pharmacies all over the place). Yep, she’s feeling pretty good now… just in time for Tom to come down with dengue fever. D’oh! Okay, this really stinks. Tom feels like he was used hard and put away dirty and every night breaks out in a fever and sweat for at least three hours. We’ve closed up the apartment to keep the mosquitoes out at all cost and I made Tom swear on his life to kill any of them that bite him. He will be having blood tests every day to test his platelet level or something like that and if it falls below a certain point, they’re going to slap him in a hospital room for a nice long stay. There is no cure for dengue, but with a lot of rest and proper hydration he should be fine in three to four weeks. I shall be very cross if I get dengue fever from one of his cootie ridden mosquitoes!

You've heard of Typhoid Mary, Here's Dengue Tom and his pal, Road-rash Caroline.