Slow climb

March 16, 2015 – Today was a more normal day. Not entirely normal, but getting there. Well, until the late afternoon, when I went to see the crushingly sad movie "Still Alice," and then came out to see the news that my colleague who is battling Ebola in Bethesda has now been moved to “critical” condition. There is no detail about what this means – did he go onto dialysis? Did they have to start breathing for him? - so it is impossible for me to make any sort of judgment about his course. But it is just dispiritingly sad.

What made it a more normal day was that I didn’t have a recurrence of the problem I’ve had for the last four days running, a bizarre little “storm” that would really have worried me if it weren’t that none of it in any way resembled Ebola. Between around noon and around 3:00 every day, I would get extremely anxious. Nervous, a little trembly, a sense of being close to tears, a sense of it all being too much, and some difficulty being around other people. Now, I am someone in whom any derangement of my physiology – going quickly to high altitude; not getting enough sleep; but also, getting sick – tends to produce hopeless, depressive thoughts – so you can bet that each time this happened, I took my temperature. Nothing! And my appetite was excellent (note that these bouts were happening right around lunchtime), my digestion fine, my energy level good. I just felt like an anxious wreck.

I still have no idea what was going on. Sure, all the sadness and stress I’ve spoken about, clearly, but why the periodicity? Malaria can give you periodic fevers, but – I didn’t have a fever. About all I can imagine is that I’ve been drinking too much coffee (the coffee here is much stronger than in Sierra Leone, too), that 12:00-3:00 is the “caffeine crash” time, and that that, combined with the sadness, combined with the worry, combined with the antimalarials, just pushed me over the edge. I did have a cup of coffee this morning, too – but not till 11:30, and that probably means I was already in the movie, feeling sad for other reasons, by the time the crash came.

Up until the movie, though, I had a nice day, taking the time to do something I almost always forget to take the time for. I saw off my colleague (who has finished his 21 days and is heading back to the States), then went to the Bains de Paquis and spent the day reading. The Bains is one of those things you just can’t not love about Geneva. Essentially it is a wide jetty extending about halfway across the lake (and right in the middle of town), where you can swim in summer, where they have saunas and Turkish baths in the winter, and where there is this wonderful, inexpensive bistro all year round. (This time of year, the evening meal, served around roaring wood stoves, is fondue – I’ll be going for that in the next couple of days!) This is the sort of place that can, I think, only exist in a SMALL city (or maybe a small part of a large city). That is to say – the glory and the curse of New York is its anonymity. When you go out to eat, you can be pretty sure no one is going to recognize you. On the other hand, you probably won’t feel much community with the people around you, either. The Bains de Paquis, like so many places in Geneva – I think of the theater bars, in particular – give you the sense of being run by your friends, even if you don’t know them. They pick out food the way you probably would (high-quality, organic); they cook it the way you probably would (delicious and zestful, but not fancy), and you feel somehow like everyone knows everyone else and you’re all in it together. It’s public but cozy, homey without being at home. I ate my pork tenderloin with mushroom sauce and fresh baguette, buckwheat, butternut squash, and cardamom-flavored spinach; I drank my (many glasses) of their “ginger drink” (basically hot ginger and lemon); and I read through many of the magazines I’ve been lugging around and not getting to for the better part of two months. Then I took one of the little yellow boats (“mouettes” - “seagulls” - part of the public-transportation system) across the lake. All very nice, until I spent two hours imagining losing my mind along with Julianne Moore, and then came out to hear about my colleague.

But I will say that I do feel more like myself today. And the sense that something dangerous that I don’t understand might be happening (or, more simply, that I might be in danger of getting sick) – that is not so strong.