The first morning I woke up in Nicaraguan soil, my back hurt terribly. I figured it must have been my sleeping pad, since it was my first time using it since Training Camp in October. I was confused though, since I had loved my sleeping pad back then and had had very good sleep on it for that whole week in Tennessee.
A squadmate gave me a back massage and the pain subsided during the day, so I forgot about it. The next morning, however, the pain had come back. This happened for a week. I would go to bed feeling fine, and wake up in the morning with terrible pain on the right side of my lower back. I tried sleeping in different positions, I tried putting my pillow at different heights, I tried doing yoga poses every morning, and I tried inflating my sleeping pad to different degrees. Nothing helped.
We are also surrounded by spiders in our living quarters (more than I’ve seen in my life), and I would wake up multiple times every night gasping, out of breath, frightened, having vivid nightmares that there were hundreds of spiders inside my tent. I would wake up in shock even if my hair brushed against my face in my sleep, I would grab my glasses and my headlamp, and frantically search my tent in the middle of the night. Every time, I would find nothing. I was not only waking up multiple times a night in a panic, I was also waking up every morning with a cramping back pain that would paralyze me in “bed” for about half an hour after my eyes opened.
I decided the pain had to be coming from my sleeping pad, so our ministry hosts brought me a real mattress. I took everything out of my tent, shook the tent out, examined everything before placing it back inside, and then squeezed in the mattress. I was excited to finally get a good night’s rest.
Wednesday morning, at 2:00am, my back woke me up. Cramping, piercing, strenuous pain. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, but this was too much. For an hour-and-a-half I whined and stretched and twisted and turned and curled up in a ball, and I even let some tears out. I didn’t know what to do, and I started getting paranoid that maybe my kidney was causing the pain. At 3:30am, I finally decided it was time to take Ibuprofen, which helped me sleep a few more hours until my alarm went off. That morning, I decided I had to go to the doctor.
Erica and I waited in the front porch of the doctor’s house. On the wall hung his university diploma, a portrait of a woman, two outdated Christmas decorations, and a picture of a rooster. We could see the inside of his house; a living room with a bare mattress laid out in the middle as a sofa, and a small bedroom with blankets and bedsheets tossed on a twin size bed. Erica jokingly mentioned that that bedroom was probably the examination room.
A few minutes later, the doctor’s wife ushered us inside. She pointed to a door and told us the doctor was inside. We thought we were walking into an office, but we walked into the doctor’s bedroom. The doctor was in his underwear, sitting on his bed on a colorful patterned comforter, with the stethoscope strung around his neck. A bedside table pulled up against him, and a plastic chair ready for me to sit on. I was trying really hard not to laugh, and I completely avoided eye contact with Erica at this point, because I knew that I was close to loosing it and bursting into uncontrollable laughter. As I sat down and introduced myself to the doctor, I saw he was missing half of his leg.
He ruled out a kidney infection because I lacked any symptoms other than pain. He suggested it was probably a strained muscle that gets aggravated at night when I lay in the same position for a certain number of hours. He prescribed a muscle relaxant as well as a soothing lotion, and told me to take Ibuprofen if needed. Erica and I walked out a few minutes later, and could not hold our laughter in as we walked down the block. The doctor was in his underwear.
We stopped by the pharmacy on our way home, but it was closed for no apparent reason. This is small town life in Central America.
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