Dengue & Me

I might not ever know for sure if I had dengue fever, but what I do know is that after I returned from Baja Sur, I fell ill in a whole new way. I was wracked by fever that set my blood or my nerves (I could never be certain which) humming with agitation. The constant sensation of tremor that didn’t subside even when the fever did was disconcerting and frightening. Thirst was constant and yet water often tasted metallic or sometimes like flowers or putrid like sewage. Cottonmouth was a constant. My entire digestive system was rumbling, not with hunger but with tiny waves of peristalses that made me feel constantly sea-sick nauseous. Meanwhile, the headache behind my eyes made me yearn for darkness. I couldn’t look at a screen for more than a few minutes. On the worst day, I could barely text a three letter response to my daughter who was monitoring me from her home while Cindy was attending an event where I was supposed to be. A tiny bloody nose started a sore in my nose that caused me to sneeze again and again for days. My lips were chapped and my upper lip felt swollen with herpes that never actually appeared. I shuffled from the recliner to the couch in my office to the bed, trying to change my recumbent position to ease the constant ache in my back. Every step made my head pound and my eyes blur. Tinnitus rang in my ears.
On day 3, the fever subsided. On Day 5, I woke in the night with such severe nausea that I decided to go to the ER for monitoring. It was the right thing to do in terms of getting blood work and easing my mind about symptoms that might have indicated I’d moved into DHF—Dengue Hemorraghic Fever—the more severe version, the onset of which is 4 to 7 days into the illness, but the experience left me beyond sad about the absence of my long term family doctor, Warren Borgquist, not to mention wasted from being out in the cold in the middle of the night. By the middle of Day 6, I sensed a shift. The tremor was quieting, not so noisy in my body and maybe even absent for minutes at a time. That was the day that Cindy and I teamed up to make chicken soup. She was sick with a cold, and we knew we needed to nourish ourselves if we wanted to recover. We cooked an organic chicken and sat at the counter to cut vegetables and strip the chicken off the bones. Then I took a long nap and when I got up, I was able to eat a few bites, the first food I’d been able to eat other than mashed potatoes since getting ill. Over the next few days that soup was hugely nourishing. Soon, I was munching on raisins and eating applesauce in between larger and larger bowls of soup. On day 9, I had my first cup of tea, ate a boiled egg and tomato sandwich, and rode with Cindy to town to get a movie from Redbox and veggies for spinach salad. She took one of her scenic routes (read geographically challenged in Sonora) and I didn’t even care. I just looked out the window and enjoyed the fall colors.

This morning, I’m sitting in front of a screen writing a blog with a cup of tea on my end table. I’m five pounds lighter, my lips are cracked and peeling, and the face that looked back at me from the mirror this morning is tinged with gray BUT I’m on the other side of my strange tropical illness. This morning I added a book to my wish list: “Almost an Island: Travels in Baja.” Not shying away from that exotic, intriguing place, though I will be sure to pack mosquito repellent for my next visit there or anywhere such insects fly.

    Ever since I first heard about NaNoWriMo  in the late 90s from a friend whose nephew was doing it, I wanted to give it a try. It seemed like an incredible undertaking, and for a while I didn’t think I was writer enough to do it. But finally, I decided to go for it. Even though I never considered myself a fiction writer, I fancied I could write a mystery. I succeed in writing 50,00 words of pure junk that year, and though it was terrible stuff, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment.

The next year, I decided to try it again. Only this time, I was going to make it more practical. I was working on a non-fiction book about women inventors, and I had a lot of interview material. I decided I’d use the month to shape the material. It wasn’t the same as generating 1600 words a day, but figured that if I could enter and edit that many words a day, I was in sync with the intent. Again, I finished the month with 50,000 words logged, but didn’t have the same sense of accomplishment. even though I had a nice early draft that book. After that, decided to be a bystander in November, watching and cheering for friends who were doing NaNo. It simply didn’t fit my style of crafting a piece of writing.

In early October of this year, I was getting ready for a trip in Todos Santos, Mexico, where I would housesit for my brother and spend two weeks working on shaping my third book. I had collected mountains of interview transcriptions, and I wanted to begin to organize the material. I’d purchased Scrivener and taken an online class from Gwen Hernandez, the author of Scrivener for Dummies. I was anxious to start using what I’d learned while depositing material into a Scrivener Project I’d set up for the book. Somewhere along the line while I was getting stuff together, I came across a site developed by Nina Amir, called Write Non-Fiction In November.

I was excited. This was more in keeping with what I needed than NaNoWroMi. I signed up for Nina’s newsletter and registered for WNFIN. As soon as I got to Mexico, I logged into the forum and introduced myself and my project and explained that I needed a few days to decide on what my goals would be for the month. Then I got busy playing around with my material and Scrivener.

The first few days were not fun. It felt chaotic and I had no idea how I was going to manage the girth of material I had collected. But I paid attention to the advice from one of Nina’s email messages.  She recommended visualizing myself succeeding, so I developed a mantra: “I’m making progress on the Borgquist project!” and I repeated it all day long, especially when I got discouraged. Pretty soon a plan emerged.

I discovered that I could open a transcription file and as I read through it, I could copy/paste segments into documents I’d set up in Scrivener that were loosely based on my subject’s lifeline. With this discovery, I established my first goal for WNFIN: I would spend a minimum of 2 hours a day doing this activity. Of course, as I worked. I started to discover holes in the material, so I was keeping a running list of people to call and questions that needed answering. That shaped my second goal: Spend 4-6 hours a week in research mode, calling people, doing interviews or locating facts. My third goal was the real carrot. At least once a week, I would spend up to 4 hours actually writing, that is actually shaping it into a narrative.  Since this is the fun part of the project for me, it made sense to give some time to it to keep my spirits high.

I thrilled to be joining folks around the world who have dedicated significant time in November to their writing projects, be it NaNo or WNFIN. And I’m especially thrilled to have found a community of writers who are working on non-fiction writing like me.

Not sure what motivates others to dive into and make progress in a project, but I love to sign-up and measure my progress toward a writing goal in association with HUGE online community.What about you?

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  • My Blog

    TwilightTwilightme.

  • My Books

    My books

    Non-fiction books.