Blood blisters. That's the next step in the "it will get worse before it gets better" healing process. My skin on my hands is very tender. Bumping my fingers against something, or accidentally scraping them results in a blood blister. Anywhere else on my body and this isn't an issue, but think about how much hands are almost always being used. I have no choice. No pictures this time, I think you get the point.
This year marked my first ever Thanksgiving outside of New England. The Caribbean isn't a bad replacement. After work on Thursday, the executive director of the organization hosted about thirty people at her house and cooked a genuine Thanksgiving dinner. We all had to write on a card what we were thankful for. Some said family, friends, and Obama as president. Mine said my hands. The food was great. Turkey's good. I really like turkey. I wouldn't have minded providing a certain chicken for dinner to change things up though. Let me explain.
A few posts ago I mentioned (and had video of) the constant noise going on in my neighborhood. The noise pollution is incredibly between people yelling, music, and motorcycles. I've learned to sleep through anything, even the way-too-loud avocado man who's out yelling stuff from his stand just next to my apartment by six in the morning.
Last weekend, just before bed, I noticed a peculiar sound coming from my back window. It sounded like a dying animal of some kind. The noise it made was most like a rooster I guess, but it definitely wasn't the stereotypical and very familiar "cock-a-doodle-doo" that I always hear here. Plus, it was like midnight. That's not the normal time for a rooster to be making noise.
Cue mid-week. The noise was back and obnoxiously loud. I woke up, which I don't do, not from noise, and looked at my clock. 4:30am. What? The sun's not up until almost 7 here. This noise sounded like it was coming from INSIDE my room (I checked, it wasn't).
I started talking about this weird, still unconfirmed animal sound at work. My next door neighbor Adriana confirmed hearing the noise too, and that it was definitely a rooster. Apparently roosters sleep in trees too. I didn't know that. So that puts this rooster's sound trajectory much more in line with our third floor windows (as opposed to being on the ground). This rooster is living in a tree directly behind my apartment building. Thursday morning I was woken up again, so did my neighbor.
We needed a plan. After brainstorming ideas ranging from firing pebbles at the chicken in the hopes that it would up and leave to getting a garbage bag, grabbing the rooster, and giving it to one of our friends with a motorbike so that it can be relocated. My idea was to eat it for "Dominican Thanksgiving."
Okay, let's be honest. I have no idea how to properly kill (although I could use that awkward method used for turkeys in that Sarah Palin interview), de-feather, gut, cook, and serve a real life chicken. Thursday came and went. But Friday morning when I was woken up at the earliest time yet, I grabbed my camera and hit record. So, below is a link to YouTube with the video. Nothing astounding, just to get a sense of how loud this animal was. The best part is that a motorbike drive by at the same time, and it sounds very faint compared to the rooster (and trust me, the noise of those engines are not faint). I like how the rooster noises just get louder and louder as it goes. And no, there's no solution to this problem yet.
Listen here: Rooster
I went swimming for the first time today since October. So yeah, it's nice to be able to do normal things again.
_______________________
As an aside for anyone who hasn't caught up with me outside of this blog. My work here in the Dominican Republic is done in two weeks. I will be traveling around the country for a week before heading home for good a week or so before Christmas, and I will be living and working in the United States come January. I still have a bunch of stories that I haven't told and haven't had time to tell. Hopefully I can put them together over the next few weeks.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
The Healing Process
If you don't want any details, and there aren't too many...skip this post.
When I woke up the air mattress was completely deflated. The gauze around my finger was completely yellow and completely soaked. Tissue fluid. I know all about it from the half dozen or so serious raspberries I've gotten on my legs from playing softball at Seton Hall and the Cape.
Over the course of the next few days, as I changed gauze, it repeatedly would become soaked with tissue fluid escaping the broken blister on my index finger. Meanwhile, my other fingers began to start their healing process. My left index finger blistered a little, my left thumb blistered a lot while fingers on my right hand just remained bright red, which is good, less severe.
The good news is I ended up getting three days off from work. Three extremely boring days of learning to do everything with my ring and pinky fingers on each hand.
By Saturday, still leaking tissue fluid, my dad ordered me to perform minor surgery on my hand. I needed to cut off any dead tissue that could be cut off. I can now say that I've been eaten by ants. As I removed each piece of skin I put it on my counter as I continued, trying to get it all out of the way. By the time I looked down dozens of small ants covered the dead skin on the counter. That was gross. What was underneath the dead skin was much more gross.
Bacitracin and wrap. That was the process.
Traumatized, I went to the beach for the first time in a while just to sit. The next thing I knew I was participating in happy hour at one of the bars. After going home to eat dinner, I decided it was best if I just went out and tried to act normal again. Cold drinks would certainly feel good on my hand.
One of the hole in the wall places here in Cabarete is called Blue Bar, well because it's blue. It's not on the beach, but it about a minute walk off the beach and across the street. Very few people know of it/how cheap its drinks are. Now Blue Bar also happens to have a "challenge." Drink 8 of their cuba libres (rum and cokes) in one night and you get your name on the wall. Now these are not your average American drinks. Think a good sized styrofoam cup, then 4/5 rum, the rest coke. Now that's a challenge. I decided to try it.
Last Monday was a national holiday. No school. Sweet. So the organization took us to a German owned Thai restaurant with a pool and a dog named Ganja (yeah, no one could keep a straight face when the Arnold Schwarzenneger sounding guy told us). So I got to be the boring non-swimmer while everyone else had a blast. Great timing. At least the food was amazing (see that mom? I'll even eat Thai food now).
The rest of the week went like this:
Tuesday - everyone had questions about my hands
Wednesday - I stopped leaking tissue fluid
Thursday - the blister on my thumb broke...during class...while I was writing on the board
Friday - The rest of my bad bad right index finger looks like the finger of a dead person. Pale, pale, pale, and becoming very loose. As it starts to come off in the shower, I peel the rest off. I now have a bright red finger that looks worse than anything before it, but is actually much better off. It will, like my other fingers, start to lighten in color and become my skin.
For now it's still incredibly disgusting and raw.
***Obligatory picture warning***
The progression of one of my burns...with a few other pictures thrown in.
This is the beginning of my new finger.
And yeah, I completed it.
When I woke up the air mattress was completely deflated. The gauze around my finger was completely yellow and completely soaked. Tissue fluid. I know all about it from the half dozen or so serious raspberries I've gotten on my legs from playing softball at Seton Hall and the Cape.
Over the course of the next few days, as I changed gauze, it repeatedly would become soaked with tissue fluid escaping the broken blister on my index finger. Meanwhile, my other fingers began to start their healing process. My left index finger blistered a little, my left thumb blistered a lot while fingers on my right hand just remained bright red, which is good, less severe.
The good news is I ended up getting three days off from work. Three extremely boring days of learning to do everything with my ring and pinky fingers on each hand.
By Saturday, still leaking tissue fluid, my dad ordered me to perform minor surgery on my hand. I needed to cut off any dead tissue that could be cut off. I can now say that I've been eaten by ants. As I removed each piece of skin I put it on my counter as I continued, trying to get it all out of the way. By the time I looked down dozens of small ants covered the dead skin on the counter. That was gross. What was underneath the dead skin was much more gross.
Bacitracin and wrap. That was the process.
Traumatized, I went to the beach for the first time in a while just to sit. The next thing I knew I was participating in happy hour at one of the bars. After going home to eat dinner, I decided it was best if I just went out and tried to act normal again. Cold drinks would certainly feel good on my hand.
One of the hole in the wall places here in Cabarete is called Blue Bar, well because it's blue. It's not on the beach, but it about a minute walk off the beach and across the street. Very few people know of it/how cheap its drinks are. Now Blue Bar also happens to have a "challenge." Drink 8 of their cuba libres (rum and cokes) in one night and you get your name on the wall. Now these are not your average American drinks. Think a good sized styrofoam cup, then 4/5 rum, the rest coke. Now that's a challenge. I decided to try it.
Last Monday was a national holiday. No school. Sweet. So the organization took us to a German owned Thai restaurant with a pool and a dog named Ganja (yeah, no one could keep a straight face when the Arnold Schwarzenneger sounding guy told us). So I got to be the boring non-swimmer while everyone else had a blast. Great timing. At least the food was amazing (see that mom? I'll even eat Thai food now).
The rest of the week went like this:
Tuesday - everyone had questions about my hands
Wednesday - I stopped leaking tissue fluid
Thursday - the blister on my thumb broke...during class...while I was writing on the board
Friday - The rest of my bad bad right index finger looks like the finger of a dead person. Pale, pale, pale, and becoming very loose. As it starts to come off in the shower, I peel the rest off. I now have a bright red finger that looks worse than anything before it, but is actually much better off. It will, like my other fingers, start to lighten in color and become my skin.
For now it's still incredibly disgusting and raw.
***Obligatory picture warning***
The progression of one of my burns...with a few other pictures thrown in.
This is the beginning of my new finger.
And yeah, I completed it.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Full Finger Functionality
I almost have it. My right index finger is still maybe a week away from being totally useful, and my left thumb still has a patch of raw skin, making me hit the spacebar with a different finger.
The weekend before election night I was hanging laundry on my balcony when a frog casually leaped into my apartment and hid behind some furniture. I couldn’t find it. The next day I came home and found it dead on my bedroom floor. Poor frog asphyxiated itself on the dust under my bed.
I swept it into a dustpan, into a plastic bag, and out into the trash. I joked that I hoped I wouldn’t get any warts on my hands from nearly handling it. A few days later my hands had disgusting, liquid filled bubbles on it. And no, the warts never came.
Election night was a pretty memorable night for a lot of people. Americans turned out in huge numbers and made history by electing the first mixed race president. Some people held watch parties, thousands went to Grant Park in Chicago in anticipation of Obama’s victory speech. It was a momentous and memorable night for a lot of people. It was a memorable night for me too, only, from what I remember, I don’t remember a heck of a lot about the presidential election.
Just before seven that Tuesday evening a half dozen or so volunteers descended on the air conditioned/cabled TVed/guaranteed electricitied apartment of one of the organization’s staff members. We all made different food, or in my case were planning to there. I have become a sort of expert in making tostones. Tostones are plaintains, cut, fried in oil, squished into a patty, and then fried again. How could I not love something that’s fried twice? It’s a finger food and I eat them with ketchup, so I guess they’re a little like french fries. With nine plaintains in tow, I went to work making dozens of tostones. I had basically finished just as the first results were coming in from Indiana (remember we’re an hour ahead now).
I turned off the stove, grabbed a few tostones and checked out what was happening on CNN. I remember it was something like 51% McCain, 48% Obama with few precincts reporting. That was probably the only percentage I saw until Wednesday morning. These few minutes with the stove off may have saved me from something much worse, or it may have really made no difference, who knows.
The room became a little smoky as the fan above the stove did little to suck up smoke coming from the pan of oil still sitting on the stove. Weird, I remember thinking to myself, it never smoked like that the almost two dozen times I’d made tostones before. I decided to move the pan to the back burner, directly underneath the fan. I grabbed a towel for my hand and went to grab the pan.
This is where stuff gets weird. Against the direction that I was moving it, the pan somehow became unbalanced and came crashing down towards me off the front of the stove.
What’s your instinctual reaction anytime you see something falling? Exactly. Terrible idea.
“Oh sh-t.” That was the only thing I said out loud, quietly to myself, as the hot oil came cascading down over my hands. “My hands are going to be messed up for the rest of my life” was my first inward thought.
Bang!
The pan hit the floor and caught the attention of everyone in the room. In a blurred instant I reacted by putting my hands under the cold water of the faucet. Three people were immediately by my side to check on me. I stood there, hands under the water, quietly wondering how bad the damage was going to be. After a few minutes I tried inching part of my hands out from under the water. An excruciating sensation that is comparable to…well nothing, overtook me. The hand went right back under the water.
I stood longer, this time wondering to myself what other weird accidents could happen to me. At the end of September a broken glass (like glass of water) that I used as a candleholder sliced open my wrist, almost directly above that main artery where you take your pulse, and in the same direction of the artery. I had never been so scared in my life, bleeding profusely, I eventually got it to stop, and it turns out it wasn’t that deep. But I do have an inch long scar on my wrist. Great.
I knew this accident wouldn’t kill me, but what would it do to me. One of the volunteers who lived in southeastern Utah for the last few years told, and is a certified wilderness first responder or something like that (and I feel like anyone living there would be by default) me that blisters are bad, we don’t want blisters to form. Ten minutes under the faucet and I saw none. Maybe it’s not so bad. Then I went to bend my right index finger again and I saw it. A blister, around my whole finger, but not too too big.
It would grow. And later on it would be joined by some blister friends.
I was ready to remove my hands from the water. I did. It hurt. I walked home, pale, light headed, shaking my hands constantly as though I were shaking off water after washing them. Anything to take my mind off the pain. I got to my sister’s apartment. Ohio was called for Obama. I knew for sure he’d win.
I talked to my dad on the phone. He told me the medical steps to take from that point on. I am lucky enough to never have been to a hospital for a medical reason in my life. I wanted to, and did, keep that streak going. We took pictures of my hands and e-mailed them to him. By now the blister on my index finger was huge, my finger looked like a pig in a blanket. 1,000 mg of ibuprofen later I was asleep on an air mattress in front of my sister’s TV.
Wild cheering. I woke up. I felt pretty good, that ibuprofen stuff works. Obama won, they showed crowds going wild all over the country. I check a clock. Midnight.
McCain gives his concession speech. I’m really glad that he turned back into a human. I really like him when he’s human and not the awkward robot he was on the campaign trail.
I pass out again.
I wake up. Something is trickling down my face. What the heck is that? I turn on a light and go by the sink. Part of the blanket of the pig in a blanket broke. I look back at my pillow. There’s a huge stain is on it. There’s still plenty of fluid inside too. I wrap my finger. I look at my other fingers. Hey they don't look bad at all. Well, that assumption turned out to be wrong too. I catch a re-run of Obama’s speech on CNN (it’s 4am), and pass out. The healing process has just begun.
Considering this entry just took forever to type: To be continued.
************Warning************
Over the next few entries I will be posting pictures of my hands to coincide with the entry. Some might think they look wimpy, some might not mind, and some might lose their lunch. Just be warned. If you don't want to see it, don't scroll down.
The weekend before election night I was hanging laundry on my balcony when a frog casually leaped into my apartment and hid behind some furniture. I couldn’t find it. The next day I came home and found it dead on my bedroom floor. Poor frog asphyxiated itself on the dust under my bed.
I swept it into a dustpan, into a plastic bag, and out into the trash. I joked that I hoped I wouldn’t get any warts on my hands from nearly handling it. A few days later my hands had disgusting, liquid filled bubbles on it. And no, the warts never came.
Election night was a pretty memorable night for a lot of people. Americans turned out in huge numbers and made history by electing the first mixed race president. Some people held watch parties, thousands went to Grant Park in Chicago in anticipation of Obama’s victory speech. It was a momentous and memorable night for a lot of people. It was a memorable night for me too, only, from what I remember, I don’t remember a heck of a lot about the presidential election.
Just before seven that Tuesday evening a half dozen or so volunteers descended on the air conditioned/cabled TVed/guaranteed electricitied apartment of one of the organization’s staff members. We all made different food, or in my case were planning to there. I have become a sort of expert in making tostones. Tostones are plaintains, cut, fried in oil, squished into a patty, and then fried again. How could I not love something that’s fried twice? It’s a finger food and I eat them with ketchup, so I guess they’re a little like french fries. With nine plaintains in tow, I went to work making dozens of tostones. I had basically finished just as the first results were coming in from Indiana (remember we’re an hour ahead now).
I turned off the stove, grabbed a few tostones and checked out what was happening on CNN. I remember it was something like 51% McCain, 48% Obama with few precincts reporting. That was probably the only percentage I saw until Wednesday morning. These few minutes with the stove off may have saved me from something much worse, or it may have really made no difference, who knows.
The room became a little smoky as the fan above the stove did little to suck up smoke coming from the pan of oil still sitting on the stove. Weird, I remember thinking to myself, it never smoked like that the almost two dozen times I’d made tostones before. I decided to move the pan to the back burner, directly underneath the fan. I grabbed a towel for my hand and went to grab the pan.
This is where stuff gets weird. Against the direction that I was moving it, the pan somehow became unbalanced and came crashing down towards me off the front of the stove.
What’s your instinctual reaction anytime you see something falling? Exactly. Terrible idea.
“Oh sh-t.” That was the only thing I said out loud, quietly to myself, as the hot oil came cascading down over my hands. “My hands are going to be messed up for the rest of my life” was my first inward thought.
Bang!
The pan hit the floor and caught the attention of everyone in the room. In a blurred instant I reacted by putting my hands under the cold water of the faucet. Three people were immediately by my side to check on me. I stood there, hands under the water, quietly wondering how bad the damage was going to be. After a few minutes I tried inching part of my hands out from under the water. An excruciating sensation that is comparable to…well nothing, overtook me. The hand went right back under the water.
I stood longer, this time wondering to myself what other weird accidents could happen to me. At the end of September a broken glass (like glass of water) that I used as a candleholder sliced open my wrist, almost directly above that main artery where you take your pulse, and in the same direction of the artery. I had never been so scared in my life, bleeding profusely, I eventually got it to stop, and it turns out it wasn’t that deep. But I do have an inch long scar on my wrist. Great.
I knew this accident wouldn’t kill me, but what would it do to me. One of the volunteers who lived in southeastern Utah for the last few years told, and is a certified wilderness first responder or something like that (and I feel like anyone living there would be by default) me that blisters are bad, we don’t want blisters to form. Ten minutes under the faucet and I saw none. Maybe it’s not so bad. Then I went to bend my right index finger again and I saw it. A blister, around my whole finger, but not too too big.
It would grow. And later on it would be joined by some blister friends.
I was ready to remove my hands from the water. I did. It hurt. I walked home, pale, light headed, shaking my hands constantly as though I were shaking off water after washing them. Anything to take my mind off the pain. I got to my sister’s apartment. Ohio was called for Obama. I knew for sure he’d win.
I talked to my dad on the phone. He told me the medical steps to take from that point on. I am lucky enough to never have been to a hospital for a medical reason in my life. I wanted to, and did, keep that streak going. We took pictures of my hands and e-mailed them to him. By now the blister on my index finger was huge, my finger looked like a pig in a blanket. 1,000 mg of ibuprofen later I was asleep on an air mattress in front of my sister’s TV.
Wild cheering. I woke up. I felt pretty good, that ibuprofen stuff works. Obama won, they showed crowds going wild all over the country. I check a clock. Midnight.
McCain gives his concession speech. I’m really glad that he turned back into a human. I really like him when he’s human and not the awkward robot he was on the campaign trail.
I pass out again.
I wake up. Something is trickling down my face. What the heck is that? I turn on a light and go by the sink. Part of the blanket of the pig in a blanket broke. I look back at my pillow. There’s a huge stain is on it. There’s still plenty of fluid inside too. I wrap my finger. I look at my other fingers. Hey they don't look bad at all. Well, that assumption turned out to be wrong too. I catch a re-run of Obama’s speech on CNN (it’s 4am), and pass out. The healing process has just begun.
Considering this entry just took forever to type: To be continued.
************Warning************
Over the next few entries I will be posting pictures of my hands to coincide with the entry. Some might think they look wimpy, some might not mind, and some might lose their lunch. Just be warned. If you don't want to see it, don't scroll down.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Little News and Some Notes
Work has been keeping me busy, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to check in with everyone. On Wednesday afternoon it became nearly impossible to conduct classes in my classroom. A road was being built right outside (meaning they were laying down rocks over the already existing dirt, and then flattening it to the best of their ability). Huge Catepillar and JCB equipment went back and forth over about a 50 yard span all afternoon, about 20 yards of which were directly outside the windows of my classroom. While this was by far the most difficult-to -deal-with distraction that has taken place directly outside the classroom (to the point where it's louder than normal human talking), it reminded me of the many that occur on a day-to-day basis, including:
Donkeys braying (this is by far the most common and the most funny. By the way, donkey in Spanish, as many of you already know, is a burro. Keeping in mind that in Spanish "ito" is added to names to indicate that someone is small (e.g. Pablito, Juanito), I have therefore declared that baby donkeys are called burritos. Keep that in mind the next time you're at Taco Bell).
Horses neighing.
Roosters doing whatever they do.
Sidenote: If anyone has ever played the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I'm fairly sure that they came to my neighborhood here to record the animal sounds for that game.
Haitian street fights.
Motorbikes.
Montessori pre-school students (we have one upstairs in the school) inexplicably being allowed to play drums outside.
High intensity games of Dominoes (Dominoes here is more hardcore than hockey in Canada and David Hasselhoff in Germany combined).
I'm sure there's more, I just can't think of them.
Other than that there are few changes in my life over the last few weeks. I am now teaching a writing class. I am also working on a census that will blow the census done by the organization in August out of the water. We've basically mapped every single house in the entire town, and can attribute each set of data to each house specifically. Plus we changed the questions so stuff that are more applicable to our organizational goals. I'll have plenty of interesting numbers to crunch over the next few weeks or so before I come out with my report. That's my daily job in the morning before teaching in the afternoon. I'll have to compile a post about the census with a few interesting stories.
Tuesday night we plan to go to a staff member's house who has a TV and constant electricity to watch the election results come in. I'm thinking about bringing a camera for some video documentation, but I still haven't decided yet. It will be a pretty partisan crowd; we're all twenty-something volunteers from the Northeast, Illinois, and California (who actually care about stuff like this: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/). I'm sure we'll (read: the two guys) make the night into some kind of drinking game, probably involving the word "electoral."
Other than that, I hope everyone is doing well. By the way, I am now an hour ahead of all of you on the east coast. I guess the Dominican Republic already has enough sunshine that they don't need to save daylight over the summer.
Donkeys braying (this is by far the most common and the most funny. By the way, donkey in Spanish, as many of you already know, is a burro. Keeping in mind that in Spanish "ito" is added to names to indicate that someone is small (e.g. Pablito, Juanito), I have therefore declared that baby donkeys are called burritos. Keep that in mind the next time you're at Taco Bell).
Horses neighing.
Roosters doing whatever they do.
Sidenote: If anyone has ever played the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I'm fairly sure that they came to my neighborhood here to record the animal sounds for that game.
Haitian street fights.
Motorbikes.
Montessori pre-school students (we have one upstairs in the school) inexplicably being allowed to play drums outside.
High intensity games of Dominoes (Dominoes here is more hardcore than hockey in Canada and David Hasselhoff in Germany combined).
I'm sure there's more, I just can't think of them.
Other than that there are few changes in my life over the last few weeks. I am now teaching a writing class. I am also working on a census that will blow the census done by the organization in August out of the water. We've basically mapped every single house in the entire town, and can attribute each set of data to each house specifically. Plus we changed the questions so stuff that are more applicable to our organizational goals. I'll have plenty of interesting numbers to crunch over the next few weeks or so before I come out with my report. That's my daily job in the morning before teaching in the afternoon. I'll have to compile a post about the census with a few interesting stories.
Tuesday night we plan to go to a staff member's house who has a TV and constant electricity to watch the election results come in. I'm thinking about bringing a camera for some video documentation, but I still haven't decided yet. It will be a pretty partisan crowd; we're all twenty-something volunteers from the Northeast, Illinois, and California (who actually care about stuff like this: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/). I'm sure we'll (read: the two guys) make the night into some kind of drinking game, probably involving the word "electoral."
Other than that, I hope everyone is doing well. By the way, I am now an hour ahead of all of you on the east coast. I guess the Dominican Republic already has enough sunshine that they don't need to save daylight over the summer.
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