Campus queen bee
I have emetophobia! For those of you who were reading Mills and Boons instead of the thesaurus to impress boys, that means the fear of getting sick. Initially I just used to say that because it made me sound fancy but confession became fact. I have this sick feeling that if I don’t die at the hands of a boda it will be some horrid disease that no one has discovered yet.
My face has been itchy for a while but I thought it was the unbearable heat and I panicked one day when my face had broken into a rash. I looked like something from a horror movie. I had spots all over and the constant rubbing had turned them into an ugly shade of red. I called in sick at work (this is becoming a habit I need to break), asked Sharon to copy for me any notes I may need and called my parents in a tone my mother would later describe as crying wolf.
Covered in extreme Islam style, I was taken to the family physician and after many tests and procedures I found useless, the doctor pronounced that I had an allergy but was in no position to tell me to what. I don’t know if it was the fact that he couldn’t help but I started shaking fervently and I was asked to lie down. I felt faint and my mouth was dry. This could in my mind be anything from malaria to cancer.
I even for a moment suspected that Muzeyi from the office cafeteria in his hysteria had poisoned my meal but I immediately dismissed it. He claimed that he loved me and poisoning isn’t something people in love do. I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything I had eaten in the last couple of days that could have brought such a drastic change to my skin.
I had a test coming up but it seemed trivial in light of my pending death. See, I was convinced that I was about to see that light that everyone speaks about. One evening I was napping and suddenly I felt a strong light although my eyes were shut. I screamed out of my sleep only to find that Sharon had come back from somewhere and switched on the hostel light. If I didn’t die from the unknown disease, she would kill me of stress.
I told her as much and although she just rolled her eyes, she has been really supportive during my break down. I was taking the medication my doctor had prescribed but there was no change. That isn’t hard to believe since he didn’t know what had caused the allergy and the medication had been more to soothe my irritation than to get rid of the quickly spreading rash.
By the third day I was about to lose my mind. I tried to Google diseases that start with a rash and this only helped to fuel my fear. I now had over 20 possible diseases and the more I read the more symptoms I got. I was nauseated, had lost my appetite, my vision was blurred (although I could have just been imagining this) and I had uncontrollable tremors. The last one may have been a symptom of the fear that was gnawing at my conscience.
Yesterday I told everyone in my life that I loved them, made my will (who would take what clothes) and sent a long prayer heavenwards hoping that the good Lord would intervene. I didn’t think I would make it through one more night even if Eugene came to spend the night and slept on the carpet. I cried myself to sleep. This morning I woke up and my face had cleared. If this was just a way to get me to pray, I figure that God should have gone around it in a different way.