I’m too tired for the bar, but the night is still too young for sleep. The pool has just closed, and TV is full of cooking shows. What better way of taking advantage of the night than adding a post to this slow-moving blog?
After a ten-hour flight to Bangkok and a three-hour transfer to the center of the country, I’m in Korat for work, which starts tomorrow. Today, I could relax a little. The two days – and especially the nights – before departure were an eerie recap of what I experienced in November when my body shaped up for traveling just hours before my plane took off. My body seems to know something about traveling.
On Wednesday and Thursday, I was alone with the children. Flucha was traveling for work for a change. This didn’t stress me. The children are easy, and Flucha had taken out the clothes they would wear these two days and put them on neat piles for me to find them. On Thursday evening, when we were sitting at the dinner table and everything was essentially over, I was suddenly overcome by an exhaustion as if I had herded sheep in the mountains all day.
Luckily, Flucha returned shortly thereafter and relieved me of my paternal duties. She also diagnosed me with fever. This is not something desirable during chemotherapy. At the beginning, I had been warned to report to the emergency room whenever a certain temperature persisted for a certain amount of time. The details have by now escaped me, but the background is the danger of an infection.
Since I was (and still am) carrying the cold I brought home from Singapore, I didn’t think much of it, dropped a paracetamol and went to sleep. Going to the hospital was not an option with a business trip just two days away. The warm weather in Thailand would do me good, I reasoned. How reasonable it was to ignore the fever with a compromised immune system is now a moot point. I should read up the numbers that call for immediate action.
Never mind. I survived and am better now, though the second night was scary. I nearly drowned in my own sweat, without fever but a body that was wet to the touch. On Saturday, I was better, good enough for a long ride on the trainer, which I had ignored a bit, in the morning and then the ride to the airport in the afternoon.
A few hours ago, before going for dinner, I went for a walk to the mall. It was opposite the mall that we ate when I first visited Korat almost exactly two years ago. The walk was along a relatively quiet street, but a story on road fatalities I had just read in the Economist kept me on my toes. Thailand sits unenviably high in the international rankings. Lucky for me, the only close call was with a stray dog that darted from the bushes.
The restaurant where we had dined two years ago was closed. Back then, it had drawn us in with its lights and garden. The eyes of the proprietors filled with shock when we entered. This was not a place for foreigners. The menu was all in Thai and no one spoke any English. Ordering beers was easy, and for food, we went by the pictures and didn’t regret it. There were smiles when we left.
The walk wasn’t as wholesome as I had hoped. Getting out is good, but the poor air quality does nothing for my nose. The inevitable picture of Thailand as a place of white sandy beaches and blue skies doesn’t apply in the interior. But this is where the synchrotron sits. Tomorrow I will visit to reconnect, and then it’s back to Bangkok for a crystallography course. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be back in Zurich just three hours before my next chemotherapy session is scheduled.
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