How I Realized It.

So Christmas was over. And I realized it FAST. Once it was done, it was absolutely done.

I had a boost of energy and happiness during that whole week, but once Christmas was done it was done. And I went back into seasonal depression again. I was trying to eat more, anything I could get my hands on I would eat. But I didn’t get out much, and I ate no more than two meals a day. And two meals a day with a stomach as small as mine had gotten was really not much. So as I said two posts ago, I thought I was eating a lot. A lot is very relative…especially when you can’t remember exactly how much you used to be able to eat for a meal.

I've seen better days...but I also made myself look a little nicer for this photo...so normally those days I looked a ton worse. :(

So as I mentioned before I didn’t realize I was malnourished and dehydrated. But I realized it before long on the last day of my classes.

I had been hanging on by a thread and I didn’t know it until that last day, when I was giving final examinations to my class. For their final exams, each person had to do a 5 minute oral interview with me outside the classroom, while the rest of the class watched a movie while waiting to be called next. I had already done half of the class the week before and was doing the rest of them today. If you remember the pictures I posted about the Ligong campus, you’ll remember that the buildings are not finished being built yet…and honestly even if they were, they’d still have no heat. So I was giving interviews for an hour and a half (that’s how long the classes are), OUTSIDE the classroom, standing up, and basically it was like standing outside in the winter cold for an hour and a half.

When I got to maybe the third or fourth student I was interviewing that day, I started feel a little tingling in my head. I knew that feeling all too well, and I knew what could possibly be coming. However, I continued interviewing my student. Then I started to not be able to hear my student, I was looking at her but was unable to concentrate on what she was saying. I was thinking, “Keep it in, keep it together.” But I knew that what was to come was beyond my control if I kept standing. And very soon after that my vision started to fail and things were starting to go black. So I told her one second and slid to the ground, taking a knee…pretty dignified-like. She went and got me a chair and I continued my interviews no problem.

I think I handled that pretty well. Fortunately, I knew what you have to do in order to prevent a fainting spell. You take a seat and put your knees up. If I hadn’t known that, it would’ve been a REALLY embarrassing experience…and they might’ve put me in a Chinese hospital, AND YOU KNOW I’LL NOT BE GOING TO ANY OF THOSE UNLESS I WAS ACTUALLY DYING.

So I managed to finish my final interviews that day with a mixture of sitting down and standing up, but it was a sign that I was doing very very badly. I tried to eat more that same day and have some bigger meals so I would get better, I even drank a lot more too. I don’t know if it was what I ate or how much I ate, or just the fact that I was in terrible shape (I think it was the latter, and I don't mean fitness shape), but that night I had a BAD case of throwing up. I spent New Year's Eve and Day just recovering. SMH. Not good. I was falling a part. I was hanging by a thread. I needed to get out of there.

I could hardly even fake the happy face anymore. In public, I was doing a lot more staring into space than anything. All I knew was that at the end of the week, I was hopping on a train with three fellow teachers and getting out of the city, getting south. I didn’t know if that was a wise choice, to travel in the condition I was in, but honestly I knew that if I didn’t get some place that would boost my morale I wasn’t going to get even an inch better.

I felt horrible, inside and out. Even when I was completely by myself I wasn’t relaxed at all…I was just cold. I finished my grades and turned them in, spent one more day hanging out with Xixi, had a goodbye dinner with my other teachers, and packed my bags and got ready to leave. Even that was hard for me…as I was straightening my hair to get ready for the trip, I had to keep sitting down because I felt that familiar tingle in my head again and soon after things started to get black. But I kept packing and getting everything ready because I knew getting out of there to somewhere warm where the food was filling and delicious and the environment was open and welcoming was the only thing that was going to make me better. There was only one place in China that could do this for me.

And so the Saturday of January the 4^th, me, Kyle, Malcolm, and Melissa (four foreign teachers at Hubei University of Arts and Science) grabbed our bags and hopped a train, returning once more to Kunming, the Spring City.