Sick in India

Have you ever been sick and not been home while being sick? This has happened to me many times. But being sick in India thousands of miles away from home was probably the worst for me. I actually do sit back and laugh at how the event took place. I was working with the organization Youth With A Mission (YWAM) at the time. I was on staff with the discipleship training school (DTS) and co-lead a group of young people to India. We were staying in a house in Chennai for the first month and then the second month we would head to Dehli and stay there. The night before we were to leave Chennai I got really sick. It didn't hit me until about 2am and for the next two hours I ended up walking and at times crawling from my bed to another room where the bathroom was and not having a good time! I will spare you all the details... if you want to know more specifics just email me and I can fill you in. In my wonderful independent state I chose not to tell any of the girls on my team what was going on for two hours! Yep, no one knew I was sick for that long. I truly didn't realize how sick I was until I could no longer walk from my bed to the bathroom in the other room. I finally chose to tell one of the girls so if they woke up and couldn't find me in my bed they wouldn't freak out. I ended up waking up Amanda who freaked out anyway because I had not woken her up earlier. Yep, I didn't want anyone to see me sick and thought I could handle it myself. I figured it would go away.
OH how I was wrong!
(I asserted my independence at the wrong time.)

The next morning my co-leader Ryan and Amos who was leading the whole DTS (and just happened to be visiting our team) were told what was going on. When they came into the room I was laying down in I looked like a rag doll that had been tossed around for years. I could barely move. I am sure I looked absolutely stunning to them! ;) I think they were both surprised at how sick I was. Remember I said earlier in the post that we had to leave that day for Dehli? Well, most of my stuff wasn't packed and that evening when we did leave I had a 36 hour train ride to look forward to! The girls on my team got my bag packed. Thankfully I learned how to travel with just a hiking pack and a backpack! One of the guys working with our team decided to take pictures of me in the van on the way to the train station and then decided to send out an email with those pictures to our families. I think you can tell where this part is going... my mom got the pictures and knew right away that I was sick! The guy told everyone how I had gotten sick right before we left and of course my mom was VERY worried! I was able to contact her when we got to Dehli to tell her not to worry, that I was fine. Little did I know then that what made me sick was a parasite and that it would affect me the rest of my life!
I still laugh about this story because it is something that would happen to me while traveling. I love traveling but getting sick thousands of miles away from home is not fun!
AH India... that time changed my life forever! :D