Mandatory Merriment

... And thats an order!

I left our readers hanging at the end of my last post. We had just become fully aware that we were suffering a drug-induced deppression from the medication we´re taking to prevent Malaria. I didn´t know what we´d do, or not do, about it. And truthfully we still don´t.

Malaria is one of the worlds deadliest diseases, about 400 million people get it every year,and about 4 million die from it. And although most of those suffering catch it in Sub-Saharan Africa it hits pretty hard around here too. The French, for example, had to give up digging the Panama Canal because they lost so many people to it. And although some cases are readily cured, others stick around for a lifetime.

Our symptoms could come out of a psychological textbook for minor depression. We´re finding our selves a little listless with low energy and not totally appreciative of things we used to enjoy. We find ourselves eating more, yet more hungry. Neither of us are used to sleeping much, but now we sleep a lot. Tyler used to open his store at 4am and I´m a lifelong insomniac, but now we´ve found ourselves averaging over eight hours a day of sleep. It´s not that things are bad, they aren´t and we´re having a lot of fun. It´s just that I don´t feel quite like myself sometimes and thats quite disconcerting.

So we have been, and will continue to, look into alternatives (Does anyone out there have any suggestions?) but our latest plan is to tackle it with Good Ol´Fashioned MacAllen Stubborness.

If our symptoms of those a normal psychological depression, could the solution be to treat it as if it was? Since we´ve identified what was happening it has gotten a lot better. When something I normally enjoy comes up, but I just don´t have the energy to do it...I force myself to do it anyway because I won´t be beaten by medication. And then I invariably end up enjoying it just as much as I´m used to. And we´ve both started putting a little excercise back into our daily routine and feel better for it. We´re trying to eat and sleep regularly and slowly I´m feeling myself come back into it.

The true test comes tomorrow, when we are due to take another one of our weekly pills. Thats when we hit our bloodstream with the heaviest dose, therafter it gets weaker and weaker and we naturally feel better and better.

So, in other words, tomorrow morning we´re both waging an internal war with a pharmaceutical. Can living deliberately defeat the malaise of Chloroquin?