My arm hurts. Also, my underarm hurts, and it’s slightly swollen (though less than yesterday). Unless I had really bad form in my squat/push presses Sunday, I can only assume it’s an effect of the yellow fever vaccination we had Friday. That’s odd, because the lists of side effects do mention sore arms but don’t say anything about swollen lymph nodes. Mefloquine, the malarial prophylactic drug we started taking yesterday, has an even more fun list of possible side effects, including insomnia, headache, paranoia, and vivid dreams. I’d wonder if I had some of those Sunday night, but waking up in the middle of the night and taking a while to go back to sleep isn’t uncommon for me, and if I’m up at 2AM and anything hurts, I have such a strong tendency to decide it’s probably cancer / tuberculosis leprosy / flesh-eating alien diseases that I’ve learned to push the worry off until morning (when it generally turns out that what I have is a minor bruise or a slight cold).
Still hurts, though, and I’ve felt slightly feverish, queasy, or achy on and off all weekend – all common side effects of either the vaccine or the mefloquine. Actually, I was feeling a bit off all week – the reason I suggested going out Friday was that I felt up to it for once. On Saturday, we ended up coming home early from a wedding (“early” being about 8 courses into a 10-course banquet). Still, over the weekend I managed to erg, lift, establish that the local mall doesn’t have any of the things I wanted to buy before our trip, buy a cheap duffle bag, go food-shopping, and make a big batch of jambalaya so I guess it counts as productive. Hopefully this comng weekend before we fly out, I’ll be up to getting a sturdier duffle bag and a smaller camera bag. (If not, we have Plan B: the cheap duffle we got yesterday and an enormous bag we took to Antarctica – both are big enough to fit the camera bags we have, but might be a bit large for a small charter plane.)
All that said, though, the week started out well: some good news yesterday and some more this morning, and the knowledge that it’s my last work week before vacation! Then it’s back here for a week, to the Netherlands for house-hunting, back here for two weeks, and off for good. (Where “good” means “until my first business trip back to Taiwan”.)