A Picture of Health, Part 1

I am a healthy man. I don’t mean in regard to lifestyle in particular, although as far as that goes, I’m reasonably healthy, notwithstanding a general failure to meet minimum established standards of physical activity (although, given that the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office now considers “Washing and waxing a car for 45-60 minutes” and “Gardening for 30-45 minutes” to be "moderate amounts of physical activity" sufficient to meet minimum human requirements, I may very well consider myself in the bloom of physical fitness through regular adherence to a regimen of “Blogging for 120 minutes” and “Food preparation for 45 minutes”). When I say that I am a healthy man, I mean that my immune system is a formidable force of nature; it deals swiftly and savagely with all manner of hostile interlopers. I really don’t get sick. I’ve never, to the best of my memory, missed a day of work in life due to illness (some of my bosses may demur on this, but that is simply due to their enduring, and much appreciated, belief in my unstinting honesty). I don’t even really get colds; I receive their overtures—a tenderness in the throat, a thickening in the sinuses, maybe the intimation of a cough—and my immune system gives them the bum’s rush.

It’s also been a little more than ten years since I’ve come down with anything resembling the flu. In fact, if it weren’t for the occasional night of improvident drinking, and a single incident, while a freshman in college, of a large dinner followed a little too closely by baseball conditioning, I would have a vomit streak rivaling Jerry Seinfeld’s before he met his match in the black-and-white cookie—I haven’t vomited due to any pathological stimulus since, I think, December of 1991, when I was twelve (please family and friends, if you can cite evidence to the contrary, please do—I’m going entirely from personal memory here and not trying to exaggerate the facts). I managed three months in Côte d’Ivoire without so much as a clenching of the bowels and two months in Kenya with only a single mild case of diarrhea to show for it—more of an inconvenience than anything else.

India is a world leader in many things: IT, Hindus, moustaches, consumption of fireworks, public urination—and also, germs. It’s almost unfair to foreign tourists who come here—their bodies and immune systems, so cosseted in their sanitary, salubrious Western habitats, can’t be expected to bear up under the weight of the giant bacterial culture that is the Indian nation. Lonely Planet offers that 30-70% of tourists fall ill with “traveller’s diarrhoea” within the first two weeks of their visit (a range that I think somehow doesn’t satisfy the standards of peer-reviewed statistical analysis). I can tell you that five of the seven visitors I have hosted (that’s 71.4% for the stat geeks) contracted traveler’s diarrhea or worse during their visits (all of two weeks or less); among foreign volunteers at Seva Mandir, I would suggest that around half or slightly less have been similarly afflicted during the given timeframe. Maybe if it weren’t for the regular influx of visitors to India, the populations of bacteria and parasites and viruses here would plummet—we’re like the aged and infirm of the herd, easy prey—we get them through the lean times.

The country, then, should have a doubled over white person on its flag—and yet in more than seven months I’ve entirely avoided even the suggestion of illness. My immune system, I tell you, is a marvel; my stomach, too, I revere for its puissance—I eat whatever I want, wherever I want, and, like a proper Southern Baptist bride, it never breathes a word of opposition or complaint. I chalk it up to an inborn digestive stolidity and years of regular yogurt consumption—I’ve got enough good bacteria residing in my alimentary canal to…do a lot of whatever good bacteria does. Sometimes I imagine that the natural limitations of digestive performance simply don’t apply to me, that superhero-like, I’m capable of transcending the normal bounds of human physical functioning. I’m not suggesting that I imagine I’m one of those Guinness Book popinjays who, piece by piece, consume bicycles or other ridiculously inorganic matter; no, I mean to say that on occasion I fancy I can tuck into a bowl of potato salad that has been warming in the sun for three days, or chug a quart of badly expired milk, and yet feel nary an ill effect. I tell you I am a healthy man—I’ve never even had a cavity.

Have I gone on enough? You know what’s coming next, right? Last Saturday, after spending more than seven months in the gastroenteritis capital of the world, with only three weeks and change left in country no less, I took ill. It began innocently enough: a mild headache in the morning, hardly worth mentioning; then a noticeably loose—ahem—movement in the early afternoon; then a growing feeling of malaise that led me to leave work around 3:30. By the time I reached home I was already in the throes of a fever—the sun has never felt as near as it did on that walk (granted the temperature was hovering around 100 degrees); it quite literally felt as if its light were burning my skin upon contact, as if I were being broasted in my tracks.