small price

I wasn't sure I wanted today to come. It's been hanging over my head for the last few weeks, ever since my routine skin test for tuberculosis came up positive. After a clear chest x-ray, it was determined that I've been exposed somewhere over the course of the last couple years here, but that the disease is currently in it's latent form. Which means I'm not a risk to anyone else, I'm not sick, but I have to start treatment to prevent it from switching to the active form someday down the road. Like, say, if I were to get pregnant. Which, while not in the immediate plans, is something I'd very much like to do someday. (Ever since about a week after the HoJ and I started dating and he turned to me up on Deck Seven and said, You know, hypothetically speaking? Our kids would be beautiful.)

I've been wandering around and cracking jokes and basically making light of it all, but somewhere deep down I've been angry at the whole situation. As if it wasn't enough that I got hepatitis, that the hepatitis went away, inexplicably came back and then went away again, a series of events that has left me completely unable to relax my guard when it comes to my health. But now, the fact that I live here in Africa (albeit behind the hull of a big, steel ship) means that I've been handed this, too.

And it's not like it's a huge deal. Yes, it's going to be annoying to remember to take my medication every day for the next nine months. Yes, I'm going to miss having a beer with my dad when I go home at Christmas. Yes, it's scary to realize that if I do get pregnant before my treatment is finished, there are huge risks to me and the baby. But at the end of the day, I'm talking about two little pills each night before bed. Pills that I can afford, given to me by a doctor I can visit if I have any questions. I'm so much better off than the vast majority of the world when it comes to my health.

Which is why I hadn't told anyone that I was scared. That I've been lying awake at night worrying about a future hypothetical baby. That I feel like I can't trust my own body anymore. The practical side of me tells myself to suck it up. To stop whining and take the pills and everything will be fine.

The other side, the side that doesn't let me sleep at night? That's the one that starts to wonder what life would have been like if I hadn't quit my job and come to live on a ship off the coast of West Africa. I think about 2008 and how I wouldn't have felt sick the entire time. I think of the money spent on expensive lab tests that would have been covered by insurance if I still had a job with benefits. And sometimes I find myself wondering if it would have been better if I'd never come.

That thought lasts no more than a fraction of a second before I think of a hundred stories that I would never have lived had I never come. I think of Aissa and Wasti and Maomai and Baby Greg and Baby Hubie and a thousand more. I've borne witness to the depths of suffering and the extremes of joy, and I've done it, more often than not, with a little brown baby strapped to my back with a length of cloth.

If hepatitis and tuberculosis are the only price I've had to pay to be a part of all that, it's a small sacrifice indeed.

Now just tell that to the side of me that keeps the other side awake at night.


(The first photo was taken by Liz Cantu, the second by Grace Berry.)