January 15th, 2017 I peed my pants a lot. It sounds really funny now but at that time I thought I was going to drift off into a dusty, Northeast India abyss. I straight up thought I was going to die in my little tent and never be found. I felt like a single rain drop in a giant storm. Over this next week I would do go a number of clinics and be treated for a UTI. They were wrong though, a week later I was hospitalized with Typhoid…
I feel really grateful to be a year removed from this situation and get to belly laugh over some of the things I said and did in this time. I find it hilarious. One time I was struggling to open a water bottle when a sweet friend started laughing and asked if I needed a hand. I thought he was making fun of me so I got up and left the table crying. On another occasion, I couldn’t peel my orange and such a sweet human asked me if I needed help and I screamed in her face, “NO” then got up and left the table. The more tragic of incidents occurred observing soccer. Another sweet human happened to kick and miss the ball. Me being me laughed and said something that probably shouldn’t have been said. To be honest I have no idea what I said but I do remember it not being nice…yikes. Either way he responded with a perfectly okay sarcastic joke. I walked slowly to my tent where I cried, then later had such a tragic conversation. “This is my life now,” I said “you can’t say things like that because this is my life now.” I only made myself more victimized from there.
This my friends is what happens when people feel situations that are about a 7 or 8 at about a 25. This is why emotional intelligence and fellowship is so important because you need people to understand how you dance through pain. I run through pain so fellowship was so important to have a group of people inviting me to sit to feel and then pull me the heck out of there as soon as I started to pitch a tent in pain and live in the victim circle. As soon as it starts to get ridiculous you need to have people to push you into what is uncomfy and towards emotional health. Then how beautiful is it to be able to discern and figure out your own emotional stability.
Something so beautiful about the fall of typhoid, if you will, is it did uproot a lot of circumstantial foundation. It’s something I’ll be learning from for a really long time. I learned so much about the way I walk through suffering, beauty and avoidance. I learned and got to see the depths of people around me; feeling my pain and sitting with me in the mess. I get so much joy thinking about the incredibly ridiculous things I said and did in those moments. I wouldn’t trade it for the world but man am I so thankful to be on the other side of the typhoid struggle.
