baptism by fire

It was the third day of my twenty-eighth year, the 229th day of our suburban exodus, the twenty-sixth day of the lunar cycle, the sixth day of my fast, and the fourth day of my vow of silence. I was feeling strong, in tune with myself, clear-headed, and inspired. The life direction I had set out to discern was almost palpable. I felt intuitively its plain presence just around the corner, awaiting my imminent attention, which was approaching with a slow, transcendental certitude. Worries and anxieties about life and its “decisions” were an impassable distance from the tranquility of my mind. My soul seemed at peace with the invisible and inevitable unfolding of my life in that moment; I was living in the inert and infinite instant of a destiny seized, wherein the singular moment holds all others in its flow, and simply being is both possible and sufficient.

So it wasn’t entirely unnatural for me to interpret the unconquerable burning sensation all over my body as a spiritual baptism by a fire from the heavens—a sort of initiative experience to culminate my concentrated sojourn into the soul. Or perhaps it was a final grand test for the overcoming of my insatiable senses—because this fire was beginning to really hurt. I mean, to call it blistering would only begin to describe the appearance of my skin. The wool blanket with which I was covering felt like needles, and the immense swelling was starting to make movement quite difficult. I cracked and cheated a little, taking some ibuprofen, and tried to trance my way through the rest of the night in a modified and alternating fetal position. Two tedious hours passed along with two more ibuprofen and two aloe branches, all to no avail. My stomach was beginning to pang in a way that led me waddling as fast as possible on my heels to the bathroom. My knees and ankles were so red and swollen that I had to trust-fall back onto the toilet seat (thank God it was sturdy). I continued to hobble out a cycle of bathroom, aloe, water, bed, until the vomiting began and at last I felt forced to concede that my severe dehydration was bound to impair this attempt to triumph over the senses. The universe may indeed be mental, but only a fool traverses it without the realization of its relativity.
Determined to stay within the bounds of my silence, I quickly scribbled out an explanatory note and started my stumbling and confused descent from the mountaintop at three in the morning. My fatigue and haste made the essence of the note abrupt and I suppose rather alarming, such was my once tranquil state of mind. It read: “I am in horrible pain and dangerously dehydrated. Please help,” at which point I intended to lift up my shirt and display the amphibious-like mess of blistering red flesh. The plan was to make my way down the mountain and up the valley in the dark to the home of a local nurse, Cindy, bang on her gate and plead for her assistance in my own silent way. Owing to a false sense of courage and a genuine pride, I did not want to go to Courtney, as I felt this might arouse the tragic sense of fear and pity in her. My subconscious had different designs, however, as my route to Cindy’s took me directly by the house where Courtney and Althea were staying. As I approached, I came to terms with my feeble condition, physically and mentally, and proceeded to knock on the backlit door.

Oddly enough, Courtney was stirring. She had just finished an herbal bath with ruda (rue in English), and was making some tea as she sat to read. The knock was probably half as startling as my presence in the doorway. I handed her the note, bared my gruesome chest, and collapsed into the nearest chair. The following hours were filled with scribbled notes, homemade electrolytes, and continued applications of aloe. Courtney called Cindy, who suggested that I might want to call the ambulance and get to the nearest hospital, an hour away in Sololá. It wasn’t until dawn arrived, with the tripling in size of my blisters (some of which now resembled grapefruits), that we finally called the ambulance.

When the ambulance arrived in town, my blisters were too big to put clothing over, so my grand exit shamble up the stone path in underwear was to the fanfare of dramatic stares and gasps from the indigenous Maya in the midst of San Marcos “rush-hour.” The confounded looks I received from the medics were soon confirmed by hap-hazard movements to and fro: the fumbling out of a WWI relic of a gurney, the dealing of gauze across my body like a hand of poker, the crazed search for the antidote—a half drank bottle of agua pura under the driver’s seat—and the deft sprinkling of these remedial waters from what I assured myself was a highly sanitized hand. Fortunately we brought our own supply in a Nalgene bottle, as it was soon called upon. The drive up through the mountains was long and arduous, filled with flooded roads, detours, and two stops—one for a phone card and the other for one of the medics to alleviate her car-sickness on the side of the road. The intolerable bumping and turning, coupled with the occasional fall of a medic on top of me, forced me to resign myself to speak and break my vow of silence, and not in the most sanctimonious of fashions.
Arrival at the public hospital in Sololá was uneventful, as was my short stay there. After several attempts, they finally secured an IV, and told me I had bad burns that would take several days to heal. I could go home or be admitted to the hospital. Seeing as I wasn’t about to get back in that ambulance, I asked to be admitted. Upon discovering that I would be in an all-male corridor where Courtney would not be allowed, we were advised that we would probably be more comfortable in the private hospital. So I quickly found myself hobbling outside yet again in my underwear, but now with an IV bag, making my way over to the doctor’s Nissan Maxima in which he kindly offered to drive us to the private hospital himself. I left a small stain in the back seat where one of my large blisters burst.

The private hospital resembled a convent with nuns and the rest. The doctor there was rotund and jolly, and he told me he wanted to put me in surgery that night. The anesthesia was rapturous, but on its heels came a confusing and excruciating pain in my stomach, chest and neck area. The blisters and burns on my legs remained untouched, but my torso looked and felt as though I had been scrubbed with SOS pads. I was also terribly cold, and since they did not want blankets to touch my skin, they jerry-rigged a cage for me out of walkers, and placed blankets over the cage. Fortunately my moaning was as frightening as I felt frightened, and it was addressed with an onslaught of Demoral that kept me in a perpetual fog for the next 24 hours. It was during this time that I acquiesced to slowly break my fast of six days.
The unbearable pain, the interminable cold, the cage-cum-coffin, the difficulty of locating the nurses, and the threat of infection in this honorable effort at a hospital all inexorably led us to one conclusion: I had to get to a hospital in Guatemala City. Fortunately a divine prescience had graced my dad the night before and placed him en route to Sololá from Washington, DC. An ambulance could take me to Guatemala City, but not until the next morning. After much deliberation, we determined it most prudent to travel in the security, comfort and speed of an ambulance, as opposed to engineering some form of emergency transport with the SUV my dad had rented in Guatemala.

We had to wait until 11:00 am the next day for the ambulance to arrive. The three medics had no ideas about how to keep me warm during the trip. All they had to offer was a small “solar” blanket, which was merely a piece of silver plastic that quickly stuck to my skin upon contact. They had no ideas about how to secure some measure of warmth for me, so they told us to ask the hospital if we could borrow one of the walkers and a sheet. Then they told Courtney to go buy some rope from a tienda so they could secure the walker to the gurney. After an hour or so, we were on our way. Aside from flying objects from overhead cabinets landing on my blisters, the trip was uneventful, though full of stops. When I needed a drink, they stopped at a roadside stand to get straws; when I needed an injection to kill the pain, they stopped to steady the needle; when I had to pee, they stopped to keep it from spilling (which was comically ineffective). My dad and Althea traveled separately in the SUV, and when the ambulance sped up to the hospital with the lights and sirens blaring, they were already sitting in the parking lot, waiting for us.

Fast-forward three days and two surgical procedures later: I’m lying and writhing in the ICU, struggling to discern “reality” from the multifarious benign hallucinations, incoherently babbling Spanish and French phrases to Courtney and nurses who’ll listen, my entire body armored in bandages the national colors of Brazil. One nurse was fond of calling me “todo semaforo,” because the yellow and green combined with the red of my visible skin resembled something of a stop light to her. Most startling to me, however, was the appearance of someone else’s hips and thighs in the place where I used to find my own. When I looked down at the one unbandaged area of my body, no longer could I find the slender hips and semi-athletic thighs to which I was accustomed. In their place was a plump and pudgy mass of flesh that hung out and over my bandages with frightening effect. In the haze of anesthesia and pain, I had somehow become a true to form fat ass. Courtney had to stifle her laughter as she observed that I now had two asses: the one that hung low and the one that hung wide. And my arms, too, had been affected with lunch-lady syndrome. I could fan my body with a lithe sway of my arms. I dimly recalled the doctor saying I needed a high-protein, high-calorie diet—that I needed to eat as much as I possibly could. I also have the faint recollection of my appetite eventually rebounding from the fast with an avarice equal to the hefty portions I was served thrice daily (and two snacks). And the food was surprisingly good. It was quickly becoming the highlight of all of our days—i.e., me, Courtney, Althea, my dad, and Heidi, my Dutch compañera from the course in San Marcos who was also suffering from severe burns. Most alarming, however, was the discovery of strange and sizeable swellings in my so-called “private” parts. I say so-called because over the past several days I had been given sponge baths by at least ten different nurses.

When the nurses came to weigh me, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that I had gained 30 pounds. Dr. Búcaro kindly informed me that this was normal, that it was mostly water I was retaining, and the solution was a simple daily diuretic injection that ensured I would pee the weight out all day long—and a jock strap, provided by the hospital. This, of course, came after the catheter was removed. I had tried so hard to avoid catheterization at first, spending an entire post-anesthetized morning trying to pee with all my might. Courtney and a male orderly were my assistants in this failed endeavor, attempting to stimulate my flow with a variety of truly ingenious replications of the familiar water-on-water sound. They tried to use warm water on various parts of my body, they tried mental imaging, and they fed me cup after cup of water in an effort to affect the flow by sheer force of pressure (this last attempt ended with voluminous vomiting into one of those way-too-small kidney-shaped pans). Finally I left the bathroom for good and acquiesced to the doctor with the frown of defeat on my face, unable to avoid this unnatural and bone-chilling invasion into my manhood. And once this thing was removed and I began my diuretic treatment, strangely enough, as I filled my seventh pitcher of pee for the day, I felt the ever so faint twinge of nostalgia for the effortlessness of the dreaded plastic tube and bag.

So here I sit now, going on two weeks in the hospital, finally out of the ICU and in a double bedroom where I can at least share meals with Courtney. The bandages have been removed from my torso and most of my right leg, I have a nice new layer of sensitive pink skin across my now shorn chest (“baby skeen,” Dr. Búcaro calls it), I am completely off pain medications, and I am dealing better with the depression of being bed-ridden. Althea is back in the States with Pop and Suzi, and we’re starting to think about making a trip north ourselves. My left leg and both of my feet are still all wrapped up, with the only questionable area being a strip of badly burned skin along my left foot, which I am sure is going to heal well, I can feel it. Hopefully I will get discharged from the hospital later this week after my bandages are removed. But what, you may ask, was the cause of all this suffering and craziness? Is it just bad karma? Perhaps. Is it a case of Josh being careless, absent-minded, or just plain stupid? No, I don’t think so.

The official medical explanation is that I suffered a severe chemical burn from an herb called ruda or rue (yes, the same herb Courtney had bathed with when I first showed up at the door). I was in a month-long course at San Marcos, and during the last week, the participants take a retreat with silence and fasting. Each day of the retreat includes a tamazcal (a Mayan sauna), followed by an herbal bath. On the second day, I took a bath with ruda, then went and swam in the lake and sat in the sun for about 30 minutes total. Ruda is a very strong and some say magical herb—this I knew—that apparently has the effect of making your skin highly photosensitive—this I didn’t know. So both myself and another girl in the course, Heidi, bathed with the ruda and ended up in the hospital. The place where we took the course has used ruda like this every month for the past 15 years, and this is the first occurrence of its kind. This was also the first time, however, that the ruda was bought in a market, rather than taken from the local medicinal garden. The ruda normally used is harvested while still young and relatively weak, whereas the ruda bought in the market was mature with flowers and much stronger. This is the theory, at least.
So perhaps my present suffering will prevent someone else’s future suffering. Perhaps this trauma has fallen into our lives to put us in places where we need to be, such as in Guatemala City, or visiting the States in the weeks to come. With events like this, often it’s best not to press too hard for reasons and explanations. But I can’t avoid the subtle yet persistent feeling that this whole ordeal has been part and parcel of the inner-quest that began overtly about a month ago and somewhat more cryptically back in January. Somehow, this seems to me to be part of a preparation or grounding for a new phase in our lives. The day before the ruda bath, I turned 28, and on that day, as I sat in silence and hunger, I pondered a medical maxim. They say that every seven years, all of your body’s cells completely regenerate, so that you are an entirely new person every seven years. That would mean that I am beginning life in my fourth new body. A rather strange thought, when you let it sink in. I had no idea then how new my body was about to become, after my “baptism by fire.” There is so much cellular regeneration going on in my body right now that I can hardly keep up with the caloric requirements (by the way, I’ve lost the extra 30 pounds).
How has this newness, this regeneration or rebirth, affected me? Well, I’m not entirely sure. But I can feel something different, something unusual, something vague yet poignant that was nascent before. When I try to talk about it, it starts to sound trite, so I try not to use words much. But for the sake of illustration, I could say that I’m learning a more profound and enduring sense of gratitude. Gratitude for my relative health, for the fact that I didn’t sunbathe naked, for instance; gratitude for family and friends, especially my wife who stayed unwavering by my side through the dark hours of the night, emptying my pee bucket and looking after my every need; gratitude for the experiences I’ve had and the places I’ve been in the past year. I even feel a new appreciation for every plate of food that comes before me, not to mention all the other romantic stuff like sunsets and breaths of fresh air. And when this grateful feeling starts to subside, I begin to experience the onset of a deep humility. This humility, when it contextualizes itself in your specific locality, has an unsettling and transformative effect, especially for a headstrong person like myself. And perhaps it is because of this strong and determined will of mine that it takes acute physical trauma to shake me up and help me to truly listen, with greater concentration. So I’m listening now, just listening, and I’m hearing the same strange and charming clamor that points without words or gestures to the infinite newness of our one undying moment.