After the workshop, the next day four of us hung around Maseru for our mid-service medical appointments. They drove Rob, Jordan, Riley and me to Dr. Peerbhai, an Indian dentist near the PC office. He was super fast. He cleaned our teeth with a drill, polished them, bam boom done in ten minutes. Then I had my medical appointment with Dr. Olga and Dr. Carolyn, a temp doctor from DC. We discussed my year in health, which basically consisted of me saying that sometimes my foot still hurts from when I screwed it up when I fell hiking many moons ago. Then, not wanting to stay any longer in Maseru, I promptly zipped off to Mohale’s Hoek. Little did I know that I would be soon zipping right back to Maseru. Stay tuned, loyal readers.
I made it to the Mohale’s Hoek hotel where I found Aline, who told me that Jen had taken Lea to the hospital next door. And here is the story of how Lea lost his marbles. This is an account taken from several people’s perspectives, including Lea’s quite unreliable one, as you’ll soon see why.
He had stayed the night before at our friend Katie’s house and walked back Monday morning. It takes about 3 hours to walk to town. It was really hot and he said his water tasted weird, so he kept spitting it out instead of drinking it.
He got to town, ate a chicken basket, and went to the hotel to work out/shower
“30 seconds into a 1 minute Insanity workout,” as he told Aline, he started feeling really weird, super tired, disoriented, etc. so he laid down in the gym.
This not being his normal, energetic, exercising self, the hotel staff saw him and became concerned, so they got Jen from the VRC and told her to bring him to the hospital next door.
Jen had a hard time getting him to go to the hospital because he was very confused. He thought she was trying to get him to come to the hotel bar. He was even having trouble putting on his shirt, then when he did get it on, he forgot they were going somewhere and took it off again. So it took a while to get him physically moved next door.
They made it to the hospital, but Lea didn’t understand why they were there. By this time, Jen called Dr. Olga, and she was on her way. Lea thought somehow that they were coming for Jen and he didn’t want to wait around. He kept saying that he needed to get a taxi and get home before dark (it was only like 3pm by this time, well before dark in the summer). They had gotten him into a room and he had an IV in his hand. He became a little bit aggressive, ripped the IV out, and pushed Jen and the doctor aside. Dripping blood all over his shorts and feet, he walked out of the hospital.
It was about this time that I showed up at the hospital, after texting Jen trying to figure out where they were. I met Jen in the outside courtyard area and asked her where Lea was. She said that he just left- went into town trying to get home.
Dr. Olga and the driver arrived and said they found him stuck in between some barbed wire in a fence. He was later bragging that he almost made it to Aline’s house, then he would have made it to the main road to go home.
They put him back in a room I the hospital, “this creepy 3rd world hospital,” as Jen called it. Jen and I were waiting in the PC car to go back to Maseru, as Dr. Olga asked us to accompany Lea and we were more than willing to do that to help him out. We got tired of waiting and wandered back into the hospital as Dr. Olga and the Mohale’s Hoek doctor are taking his blood and urine samples. He didn’t know why they’ve trapped him there in the hospital. He thought the blood drawing was some more PC vaccinations or something. He was saying really disjointed things, telling the doctor that, don’t worry, you’ll make it to Madagascar one day. He thought we were still at the workshop, asking what time they were serving lunch and what sessions we had today. I was so confused as to what was happening, I checked him out for a concussion and a stroke- no go. Jen saw the doctor give him an anti-psychotic pill at one point, I guess to make sure he didn’t try to escape again.
Dr. Olga, the PC driver, Jen, Lea, and I all got in the car. Lea was sitting in the middle back seat with Jen and me on either side I guess so he wouldn’t try to jump out of the car or anything, which he never did. He was very calm on the ride, just confused why we were going to Maseru. Jen and I wrote down a bunch of the crazy stuff he said:
Lea's crazy ramblings
Obviously his brain was upside down for the time being.
So I had come back to Maseru within just a few hours of leaving it. Lea went into the medical office and did some more tests or something, while Jen and I went into the VRC to pick out some books for him to read while he stayed at Willie’s Hospital in Maseru. But he came in and put the books back because he couldn’t read them anyway. Whatever was happening to his brain made his eyesight too blurry to read.
Then Jen and I rode to a guesthouse called Haven of Peace, which should have been renamed Haven of Fleas. There was a little, sweet old lady who prayed with us in our room (I was trying my hardest not to burst out laughing), and strangely the bathroom was through a door built into the closet. The next day, Jen and I went to get Chinese food and brought Lea some non-sucky food to take a bread from the hospital food. He seemed totally normal by that time, and he just said he was feeling a little light headed.
They got his bloodwork back, and since he had a slightly high white blood cell count (even though he had said multiple times he felt a sore throat coming on), they thought he must have an infection, and since it was in his blood and not his urine, it must have been a brain/spine infection. They ruled out drugs and drinking too much (they had suspected this, as they know how many PCVs like to drink, but Lea is definitely not one of those types), and later for some reason even ruled out the #1 suspect that Katie (wilderness medical certified) suspected: heat exhaustion. I still think that’s what it was.
PC finally decided to send him to the US for a psychological evaluation and other brain testing. It’s just so ridiculous because in an American situation, they would have talked to us, our friends who had been hanging out with him before and during his craziness, and tried to decipher what may have triggered such a weird episode. And they blatantly ignored the fact that he was completely back to normal the next day, with nothing even remotely similar happening to him ever in his life. I’m still gonna say it’s heat exhaustion, because all the signs point to it. His brain was simply overheated and made him delirious and basically lose his short term memory.
Man, what a weird day. Strangest thing that’s happened in a very long time. What I think is gonna happen is that they’re gonna send him home, run a few tests, and send him right back because there’s nothing lasting.
The first thing he does after going back is promptly send me this photo after he has dyed his beard blue. And he is trying to convince these people he's not crazy? You do you, brother.
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