I’ve been experiencing a lot of changes lately, disturbances in normal behavior if you will. I couldn’t figure out if some of it was due to the anti-Malaria medicine I was taking, my pre-departure anxiety, or some other unknown cause… if not all of the above.
As I said in my last entry, the Melfoquine I’m taking only lists “may cause dizziness” as a side-effect. The travel clinic I visited where I was given all my pre-departure shots and prescribed this medicine told me that hallucinations may also occur.
Dizziness, check. Extremely gory dreams to the point that I don’t go back to bed if I wake up in the night, check. Hallucinations, not a check—unless if you consider the dreams a manifestation. The other night I had a dream that my mother’s face lit on fire and she lost an entire eye. Each night of this week, in fact, that same feeling of dread has woken me up multiple times a night. I can’t figure out if there is any longer actual content to my dreams, or just a feeling of dread. It is a possibly that I just dream the feeling of dread now.
I’ve also been extremely irritable lately. I got to work on Thursday for a double and practically blew up at the manager and hostess. Granted, yes, I racked up only but a few measly hours of sleep the night before (due to the disturbing dream content). And yes, it didn’t help that I saw a person get wheeled away on a stretcher from a major car accident while sitting at a stoplight on my way to work. And yes, it really didn’t start off my day well when the hostess sat my table before I even walked through the door. Nor did it help that I was the only person on with booths which of course caused me to get triple sat within the first four minutes through the door (and not even on the clock yet, mind you). However, it is usually not in my character to take out my frustration from my personal issues on those around me. The only other time that has ever happened to me that sticks out in my mind is when I was on birth control. Birth control made me so bipolar and sensitive that I felt like a completely different person.
Mostly because of these two changes (feeling of dread and moodiness)—changes that appeared immediately after I started taking Melfoquine—I did some research into other fun side-effects that I may or may not find knocking at my door unexpectedly. One mother noted that her son wept inconsolably, had suicidal thoughts, had three psychotic episodes, and remembered in gross detail every embarrassing moment that has ever happened to him. He, however, probably shouldn’t have been taking this particular type of anti-Malarial medicine to begin with due to his history with depression and psychological disorders (autism). Furthermore, a U.S. Rep (Edward M. Mezvinsky) has filed a lawsuit against those who prescribed him Melfoquine for failure to warn him of severe side-effects… this suit was filed after he attempted to use mefloquine-induced psychosis as a defense to fraud charges.
Melfoquine apparently is known as one of the most effective preventative medications against Malaria; however, many choose forgo it for cheaper (in quality) drugs to avoid the neuropsychiatric side-effects that I’ve mentioned in the anecdotes above. The article where I found this information specifically talks about how patient compliance with Melfoquine is pretty weak because of its side effects. I wonder if I’ll be one more for the books.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Day one of anti-malarial pills
After eating a full meal this morning, I got a pair of scissors and cut open the overly secure packaging that enveloped a button sized anti-malaria pill. Today was the first day of next 20 week period that I would have to take this preventative pill. How’d it go?
Within half an hour I started to feel unusually dizzy which prompted me to look at the label on the bottle, which of course said, “may cause dizziness.” I then got dressed and into the car to drive to work. The dizziness significantly worsened to the point that it felt I had managed to smoke up during the transit from home to Chang’s, leaving me feel high like a kite. Unfortunately, I was driving to a waitressing shift.
The shift went fairly well, I was lucky enough that it was normal Monday business—meaning, slow as hell… perfectly complementary of the speed at which I was moving.
At some point, I know I went to the dentist today. She told me that the problems I’ve been having with my jaw lately can be solved by bedtime prayers and that my wisdom teeth would need to be removed at some point in the next few months. I didn’t question the bedtime prayers suggestion at the time because, well, I was still pretty out of it. As for the problem of being in Senegal when my wisdom teeth needed to come out, she went on to tell me that I’d just have to suck it up until I came home and could get them pulled.
All day I have been extremely sluggish and lethargic, consequently more emotional. If I had more energy in my body, I think I might have had a panic attack over feeling so unprepared for my departure to Senegal in less than one week. The minute school had let out in May, I started working full time waitressing. The weekend I found out I got the internship with SCI, I started working out of dc full time. With that internship, I’ve been to Kansas City and living in dc (as opposed to claiming to live in dc as I usually do, but really commuting around the ‘burbs of Maryland). The last two weeks of the internship, I literally never spent one night at home in Potomac. Finally, now that everything is wrapping up, my next reality is settling in and I don’t have the energy to confront it.
What do I do in response to this realization? I go all nostalgic about all the things I’m going to miss at Grinnell this semester and all the people that I’m going miss both from school and here at home in DC. While I’m re-reading this entry out loud, my jaw grows tense again and all I can think is “shit, I think I have to go say some bedtime prayers now.”
Also, did I mention that hallucinations are a side-effect to be expected during sleep? I look forward to it.
Within half an hour I started to feel unusually dizzy which prompted me to look at the label on the bottle, which of course said, “may cause dizziness.” I then got dressed and into the car to drive to work. The dizziness significantly worsened to the point that it felt I had managed to smoke up during the transit from home to Chang’s, leaving me feel high like a kite. Unfortunately, I was driving to a waitressing shift.
The shift went fairly well, I was lucky enough that it was normal Monday business—meaning, slow as hell… perfectly complementary of the speed at which I was moving.
At some point, I know I went to the dentist today. She told me that the problems I’ve been having with my jaw lately can be solved by bedtime prayers and that my wisdom teeth would need to be removed at some point in the next few months. I didn’t question the bedtime prayers suggestion at the time because, well, I was still pretty out of it. As for the problem of being in Senegal when my wisdom teeth needed to come out, she went on to tell me that I’d just have to suck it up until I came home and could get them pulled.
All day I have been extremely sluggish and lethargic, consequently more emotional. If I had more energy in my body, I think I might have had a panic attack over feeling so unprepared for my departure to Senegal in less than one week. The minute school had let out in May, I started working full time waitressing. The weekend I found out I got the internship with SCI, I started working out of dc full time. With that internship, I’ve been to Kansas City and living in dc (as opposed to claiming to live in dc as I usually do, but really commuting around the ‘burbs of Maryland). The last two weeks of the internship, I literally never spent one night at home in Potomac. Finally, now that everything is wrapping up, my next reality is settling in and I don’t have the energy to confront it.
What do I do in response to this realization? I go all nostalgic about all the things I’m going to miss at Grinnell this semester and all the people that I’m going miss both from school and here at home in DC. While I’m re-reading this entry out loud, my jaw grows tense again and all I can think is “shit, I think I have to go say some bedtime prayers now.”
Also, did I mention that hallucinations are a side-effect to be expected during sleep? I look forward to it.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Meeting Al Jazeera, Meeting Myself
During senior year of high school we had guest speakers come into class for a week to share about their path to success. One day, the principle came in and gave a talk about how running a school is like running a business. She referred to us as numbers, as test scores that needed to add up and together average to something higher than our competition. Her tone, body language, and approach to leadership was detached and cold… focused on nothing more than the type of success that could be seen on paper, willingly leaving quality of education behind so long as SAT scores were all in the top 95 percentile.
I was so brainwashed by this “teaching” method that I didn’t realize that there was any other until I reached college. I was in for a rude awakening, or really, more of an enlightenment, when I got to Grinnell. I remember my first semester there, completely dumbfounded by the fact that there was no competition, no sense of urgency, failure, or superiority to motivate me to do better. In fact, I even considered transferring because it was all “too easy”.
Then for convocation one day, I sat in on a sociological talk by some lady from BU, talking about the difference between quantitative and qualitative learning. She discussed how higher education has become more geared towards promoting research because that earns the institution more grants, and more grants allow it to expand, thus allowing the school the greater prestige needed to attract better students. It all sounded awfully familiar—one could argue, almost parallel to my experience in high school, except instead of research, the quantitative learning back then was preparing for standardized tests. Her overall message was the basic “we need to learn to learn, not learn to perform” spiel, one that has become quite familiar to me now that I’ve spent more time in Grinnell. Crazy thing, ever since then when I started to actually try to learn for the sake of learning and not just for the grade, Grinnell has gotten substantially more challenging and rewarding.
Two Fridays ago, we (the Iraqi exchange program) went to Al Jazeera—a trip that the students were especially excited about. They went with many questions and, arguably, accusations, in mind. The meeting started off like all other visits to the myriad of organizations we had met: we as facilitators of the group awkwardly sign in a group of twenty-six at the front desk, cram as many people in elevators as possible to minimize the number of trips needed to be taken, and constantly shush and remind that, “we’re in an office—people are working. Stop talking!” Sitting in a room with far too few chairs for our visiting group, the guest speaker for the day comes in, hands out cool gift bags, says their spiel, and then asks for questions and comments.
This time, however, hands shot up in the air before the speaker even finished opening the floor to questions. The students fired question after question to the spokesman, leaving no room for a lull in their brutal attack. All were frank and uninhibited in their questions, asking things like how this news company can lie to the public. Others wanted to know the intention behind why Al Jazeera created the divide between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Some gave anecdotes about misreporting—one about how her father was interviewed and then without grounds labeled a Sunni based solely on the sound clip Al Jazeera used from him. The spokesman did his best to answer these accusatory questions, though at best, his responses were flailing.
In the end, the spokesman somehow calmed the wildfire of assaults by concluding that at the end of the day, his job as a reporter is just a job. Al Jazeera is just a business. Most students walked out fairly satisfied with that conclusion, even repeating his statements in our debriefing session. A few other students, mostly the ones who were fairly soft spoken during the q&a session, were unsatisfied with the responses given—much like myself. Unfortunately other than one or two cases, these participants continued to remain quiet and didn’t choose to openly share the logic behind their discontent.
I cannot decide whom I am more upset with: leaders, society, or myself. The leaders of today have stolen our humanity by turning us into statistics and tricking us into believing that it is okay to be this way. But at the same time, this type of “success” sought after by my old principle or by the spokesman at Al Jazeera, is something that society has defined—and hopefully, something they only follow because that seems like the only path for them. Or perhaps we as people are the ones to blame for letting society get to be this way. What is most upsetting, however, is undeniably the fact that I have created these three divisions in my head as if the people, the leaders, and society are not all one and not all equally as responsible.
I was so brainwashed by this “teaching” method that I didn’t realize that there was any other until I reached college. I was in for a rude awakening, or really, more of an enlightenment, when I got to Grinnell. I remember my first semester there, completely dumbfounded by the fact that there was no competition, no sense of urgency, failure, or superiority to motivate me to do better. In fact, I even considered transferring because it was all “too easy”.
Then for convocation one day, I sat in on a sociological talk by some lady from BU, talking about the difference between quantitative and qualitative learning. She discussed how higher education has become more geared towards promoting research because that earns the institution more grants, and more grants allow it to expand, thus allowing the school the greater prestige needed to attract better students. It all sounded awfully familiar—one could argue, almost parallel to my experience in high school, except instead of research, the quantitative learning back then was preparing for standardized tests. Her overall message was the basic “we need to learn to learn, not learn to perform” spiel, one that has become quite familiar to me now that I’ve spent more time in Grinnell. Crazy thing, ever since then when I started to actually try to learn for the sake of learning and not just for the grade, Grinnell has gotten substantially more challenging and rewarding.
Two Fridays ago, we (the Iraqi exchange program) went to Al Jazeera—a trip that the students were especially excited about. They went with many questions and, arguably, accusations, in mind. The meeting started off like all other visits to the myriad of organizations we had met: we as facilitators of the group awkwardly sign in a group of twenty-six at the front desk, cram as many people in elevators as possible to minimize the number of trips needed to be taken, and constantly shush and remind that, “we’re in an office—people are working. Stop talking!” Sitting in a room with far too few chairs for our visiting group, the guest speaker for the day comes in, hands out cool gift bags, says their spiel, and then asks for questions and comments.
This time, however, hands shot up in the air before the speaker even finished opening the floor to questions. The students fired question after question to the spokesman, leaving no room for a lull in their brutal attack. All were frank and uninhibited in their questions, asking things like how this news company can lie to the public. Others wanted to know the intention behind why Al Jazeera created the divide between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Some gave anecdotes about misreporting—one about how her father was interviewed and then without grounds labeled a Sunni based solely on the sound clip Al Jazeera used from him. The spokesman did his best to answer these accusatory questions, though at best, his responses were flailing.
In the end, the spokesman somehow calmed the wildfire of assaults by concluding that at the end of the day, his job as a reporter is just a job. Al Jazeera is just a business. Most students walked out fairly satisfied with that conclusion, even repeating his statements in our debriefing session. A few other students, mostly the ones who were fairly soft spoken during the q&a session, were unsatisfied with the responses given—much like myself. Unfortunately other than one or two cases, these participants continued to remain quiet and didn’t choose to openly share the logic behind their discontent.
I cannot decide whom I am more upset with: leaders, society, or myself. The leaders of today have stolen our humanity by turning us into statistics and tricking us into believing that it is okay to be this way. But at the same time, this type of “success” sought after by my old principle or by the spokesman at Al Jazeera, is something that society has defined—and hopefully, something they only follow because that seems like the only path for them. Or perhaps we as people are the ones to blame for letting society get to be this way. What is most upsetting, however, is undeniably the fact that I have created these three divisions in my head as if the people, the leaders, and society are not all one and not all equally as responsible.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
an introduction to the beginning
Tomorrow is my last day finishing up my internship working for a nonprofit that hosted an exchange program with Iraqi kids. I joined the team to plan for their arrival in June, met them for the first time in July, and said a tearful goodbye at the airport just two days ago this August. Somewhere near the end of the program I got what I guess could be considered a promotion; not to sound trite, but, the increased hours and contact I had with the participants of the exchange far surpassed the monetary sum and upgrade in title offered to me. The qualia gained far trumps the fact that I had to waitress on the side in order to continue to work for this program.
On the topic of waitressing, I have been a server at Pf Chang's for going on three years now. I started second semester in my senior year of high school and have worked each break that I have been at home in the DC area. God knows that I have many tales to tell from this job, and you can trust that they will pop up every now and then. If you read unfathomable patience juxtaposed by outbursts of anger and disbelief into my posts, then I will assign the blame to my experiences in the service industry.
I've created this blog mainly to keep in touch with friends while I'm studying abroad in Senegal the fall of 2008, but I suspect that it will evolve to more than just that. While I'm there, most of my work-- research, studies, writing, etc.-- will be handwritten and then transposed to Word when necessary means are provided. Until then, all my thoughts will be on pen and paper.
On the topic of waitressing, I have been a server at Pf Chang's for going on three years now. I started second semester in my senior year of high school and have worked each break that I have been at home in the DC area. God knows that I have many tales to tell from this job, and you can trust that they will pop up every now and then. If you read unfathomable patience juxtaposed by outbursts of anger and disbelief into my posts, then I will assign the blame to my experiences in the service industry.
I've created this blog mainly to keep in touch with friends while I'm studying abroad in Senegal the fall of 2008, but I suspect that it will evolve to more than just that. While I'm there, most of my work-- research, studies, writing, etc.-- will be handwritten and then transposed to Word when necessary means are provided. Until then, all my thoughts will be on pen and paper.
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