Tormenting Treatments.

All covered in sweat and breathing a little bit too heavily, I sit here and type this post with jittery fingers. The musty smell of sweat that has dampen onto my t-shirt's really beginning to annoy me. My throat's tied up and the taste of bitterness at the back of the tounge is so prominent and my lips feels like the Sahara dessert. The smell of a rotting corpse, exposed for days, is no different to the smell of my breath and the oil on my face is similar to the oil covered on a fried egg where you could easily see it stain a tissue paper. I'm light-headed most of the time, walking as if I'm suspended from mid-air and having no sense of direction. The body's weak, extremely weak - I suppose every single muscle and tissue I have in me have shrunk and shrivelled up in agony.

I guess this was supposed to be expected when I fall sick. I came down with a fever on Wednesday night, when I started feeling oddly cold and I suspected that it was quite bad as I couldn't even wake up to blog about it. Though, I did wake up to play some songs but got quite dizzy after attempting to type with the jittery fingers. Pretty weak, I guess. Don't know where this fever came from but I suspect it must've belonged to Edmund as he had a fever the past couple of days before. One thing's for sure, I've not had (solid) food or showered for days! That's probably one of the consequences when you decide to visit the Chinese doctor. It's always the same old crap - no bathing, no air-conditioning, no fried food, no solids and what not. Funny, I didn't even think of trying to take a shower secretly this time. Probably was way too sapless to even think straigt. It's starting to piss me off that there's so many restrictions when it comes to the proverbial Chinese singseh when the medicine he prescribes is already gut-wrenching enough!

Certainly, the old man seems to have taken a little pride upon himself over the years of proficiency in dealing with numerous ailments and diseases. I mean, the guy leaves for lunch breaks without prior notice, leaving a whole crowd of patients waiting outside, fanning themselves vigorously due to the slow spinning age-old fan above them. Technically, he can't switch on the fan to a higher number as most of his medicine are powdered herbs and roots. Another thing is, his shop isn't exactly well equipped with air-conditioning, air refreshener and comfortable leather seats to chill on. It's the four-legged plastic chairs we get during local wedding dinners and the smell of mixed spices (the bitter ones) will always fight their way to your nostrils. It's been decades he's been working in a condition like this and yet, he refuses to change anything for the better! See, I never had anything against this old man until that day when he had me waiting on number 11 when I began to realise how slow this man worked. Due to that, I kind of developed reasons to dislike him.

I came back home shivering and thwarting over the possibility that the old man purposedly put me on hold, knowing that I was the only person who looked extremely unwell. Surpirsed that I still had the energy to frown, I stormed into my bedroom and buried myself under the blankets. I woke up with mom's soft prompting, telling me that I have my medicine to take. I thought it was going to be the usualy powdered crap I get after every visit to the singseh, never once did the thought of brewed herbal tea crossed my mind! If you have that clear, transparent, yellow coloured water which comes from dropping a tea beag into a hot cup of water in mind, you're absolutely wrong!! This... this... thing comes wrapped in brown paper (like the ones we see on traditional Chinese movies where the tai tai clips them uner their armpits) and requires careful brewing to attain the right amount of medicine. I haven't actully seen the contents in this brown paper before - cause mom is always so secretive when one of us has to drink it, whispering in hush vocies to akak - but I can vaguely remember seeing cricket's legs and tree twigs at sedimented at the bottom of the bowl.

The whole thing is jet black in colour and it smells horrible. A taste of it will evoke senses that you will never want to go near in contact again for the rest of your lives. It's really that disgusting. The smell is so strong and it sticks to the insides of your mouth that swallowing and chewing multiple sweets at one go could not make the taste any fainter. I always have my nose clipped with pegs, or else, I would never even make it through the first excruciating gulp. I remembered how Grace puked half her bowl of medicine when she first had to drink it! And the worse thing is, it messes with your stomach, churning the insides. Mom says it's clearing up the toxic in my stomach. I say, that tea has poison and it's making me crap it all out!!

Nothing much really changed after that. I spent Thursday and Friday in bed feeling the change of my body temperature so rapidly that it gets me confused some of the time. One moment, I'm shivering like a dog left in the cold, the other, I'm sweating like I've been running in the open fields in broad daylight! I only wake up for medication (every 4 hours) and for toilet breaks which I will wobble dangerously before regaining my balance from holding onto my cupboard and then drag my feet slowly to the bathroom, grabbing anything I could to maintain balance to only have my pee smelling like the medicine I took hours before. I felt drowsy and my eyes were weary. Not sure if it was the medicine or the fever itself, but either way, it didn't feel good. I tried watching Prison Break but got highly nauseous at the middle of it that I stopped any further attempts of watching anything. The nausea was due to the hunger, I suppose. I kept gagging for no reasons and everytime I gagged, it feels like the whole body was about to turn inside out. Really sick.

Oh well, let bygones be bygones, that's what they say. I'm feeling much more better today. Still on the road to recovery, I'm not thanking the singseh cause his medication has always needed a significant amount of time to take effect. I still prefer the modern day tablets and pills to brewed crickets or cockroaches! I'm definitely going to resume my solid intake and I'm finally getting a shower! Akak's making spaghetti today. It's her first time and I'm relatively excited about it. Now, I'll have to go clean up. Give my teeth some good brushing and my tounge, a good scrubbing to get rid of the smell of leftover medicines.