Jeff and I have a glorious tradition called "Birthday Week," in which during the week prior to your birthday, you get spoiled rotten, with lots of little treats and lots of doing nothing while the other person takes care of you. I think it's a marvelous institution that we'll hopefully be able to keep going indefinitely.
However, last week was a terrible aberration from the trend we had been starting (Jeff's birthday was November 13). For starters, we were both working extremely long hours in preparation for a very intense phase of our project. In short, we had over 200 people in four districts in Bihar observing polling stations during Phase 5 of the elections (on November 8th and 9th, and then again during Phase 6 on November 19th and 20th). To keep track of where the poll observers were and what they were doing, we set up a call center with a dozen people in our office. And we put this together on a very short timeline, so life was barely managed chaos for a while.
Jeff started feeling ill around Diwali, and it continued to grow worse, until we finally dragged him to the doctor, who told us that he probably had malaria. It shouldn't have been much of a surprise, given the flocks of mosquitoes that live in our apartment (despite Jeff's nightly battle with them).
Unfortunately, he was almost completely bedridden for the week leading right up to his birthday, with a high fever and severe nausea, while our project was running at full steam. Being Jeff, he continued to work from bed when he wasn't sleeping, despite my efforts to get him to actually take a break. This meant that not only did he not get the birthday spoiling that he was due, his fever reached 103.5 before I was finally kicked out of the office by our colleagues and sent home to take care of him and force him to rest. And then when he started to recover I went away for half a day to celebrate Chhath with one of our PAs (see "Festivals Part 3"). Bad fiancée!
Thankfully, once the anti-malarial medicines were in him, his fever dropped and his nausea lessened. Unfortunately, we also discovered that he's allergic to one of the medicines he was given, because he had uncontrollable itching in his hands and feet that kept us both up all night, trying different remedies - regular lotion, caladryl lotion, benadryl, ice - all to no avail. It went away once the drugs were out of his system, but it was really just adding insult to injury.
Although he was dragged through all kinds of hell, he was well enough on his birthday that we did get to have a small celebration with friends. Shruti and Rashmi (our PAs) taught me how to make aloo ka paratha* (आलू का पराठा), a flatbread stuffed with potatoes and spices - super yummy!
Rashmi, Shruti (and kind of me) making aloo ka paratha!
And we made kheer (खीर), a sweet rice pudding, and an approximation of carrot cake - you can't get cream cheese in Patna, so I made it with vanilla-coconut frosting instead. Then Rashmi and Shruti gave him their gift, a green kurta made just for him! My gift was a bunch of framed photos of us, friends, and family to hang on the walls - but because we've been so busy, we haven't gotten a chance to put them up yet.
So basically, Jeff was robbed of his Birthday Week, and I'm hoping that this week of vacation in Nepal will begin to make up for it! He's feeling totally fine now, no remaining symptoms, we're now both very diligent about taking our anti-malarials, and we're in the process of acquiring a bed-net.
On the plus side, this experience definitely ups his badass level, having acquired and vanquished a disease like malaria. Not that I'd recommend the experience.
*There is no equivalent in Hindi to the "th" sound (as in "think"). When you see "th," that means that you need to blow out a little air when you make the "t" sound (you need to aspirate). It's the difference between the "t" in "talk" (aspirated) and the "t" in "tiger" (unaspirated). Just fyi. And the particular kind of "th" in "paratha" is actually also retroflex, which means you bend your tongue back in a funny way. Freaking Hindi.
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