Les said, the better II

Yay, another allergic rash! I get to back to the Hôpital again!

Somebody, for the love of god, tell me an anglophone doctor I can talk to who knows about normal treatments for lyme disease. I think I may have already taken enough (13 days of 100 mg of doxycycline 2x/day). Post phone numbers for any country in comments.
How many antibiotics am I allergic to? What do I take when I get an infection, if I’m allergic to everything? Is it something in my house that I don’t know about? So far, not as bad as yesterday. meh
[Edit: 6:24 pm: bah. “For early-stage Lyme arthritis, oral doxycycline or amoxicillin is usually given for 4 to 6 weeks.” http://health.yahoo.com/ency/healthwise/hw74158]
Tags: Lyme Disease, Celesteh

Went back to the doctor. She acted disbelieving when I told her I had an allergy. And disbelieving when I told her I had lyme disease. (“What did the blood test say?” it doesn’t fucking matter, I have all the symptoms, give me drugs!) Then finally, she gave me 150 mg of Roxithromycine (english: Roxithromycin) twice a day for 3 more weeks.

Three more weeks??!!?
Nicole has read that some doctors only give doxycyline for 10 days for early stage lyme. Maybe I’m already cured. Except the muscle above my bite still hurts off and on and really, I don’t want to take any chances with this thing.
Let the count down to allergy begin. I blame the dermatologist my mother dragged me to in high school. Dear Upper middle class kids and parents, Teenagers are supposed to have zits. Giving young teens low doses of antibiotics every day for years is not good for them and may have repercussions in later life.
I went to the same pharmacy to buy the pills. The pharmacist said, “oh the allergy came back?” Yes, it came back! (I know, I know. But it’s close to my house and I’m not again asking for advice.) I have very little confidence in either the drug, the doctor or the pharmacist right now. It’s just like home.
Tags: Lyme Disease, Celesteh

Yeah, if your antibiotic gives you a rash, you STOP TAKING IT. You do not just take allergy medecine and keep swallowing the anitbiotic. Why? Because the reaction gets much worse every time. To the point where you could still be taking allergy medecine AND have an itchy red rash and a phlegmy throat and there’s nothing else you can take for the itchy burning what’s-wrong-with-my-throat.

I have lost faith in my pharmacist(s). I appreciated him because he gave me advice about my tick bite. I was annoyed when the advice turned out to be wrong (“wait until monday” meant arthritis on Tuesday. meh.) I loved her when she sold me something to make my stomach feel less terrible. I fell head over heels (well, not really) when she gave me something for the rash, the first time. Except that she told me to keep taking the antibiotic. I showed up at the pharmacy early in the day, that time. I could have gone to the Hôpital right then, even on a Saturday. The Zirban-ish French drug would have controlled the rash. But no, she lead me wrong and now I am itchy and alarmed and will have to get up early in the morning and go to the Hôpital and the lyme disease thingees might regroup during the night and launch a counter-offensive.
I am now looking for a new pharmacy.
The American Hospital of Paris gives telephone advice to inhabitants of the Ile-de-France. Their number is 01 46 41 2525. A bilingual person answers the phone. I had to call back twice because of phone glitches, however, I ended up speaking with an American doctor, I think possibly in America, because she knew my allergy medecine by it’s American brand name. She told me that if I can’t breath or pass out that I need to go to a hospital and that the peak allergic reaction usually lasts an hour and a half, so I’ve got maybe 40 minutes of itching and dry-throat paranoia to go. (my god it feels dry and weird, hopefully it won’t close up.)
Pharmacists here are so willing to dispense medical advice that I just assumed they must be qualified to do so. When you make an ASSUMPTION, you make an ASS out of U and MPTION.
Tags: Paris, Allergies, Celesteh

It’s like a sine wave, that’s heading towards heathy. Which is to say, up and down, but headed up. I still have some pain off and on in the leg that got bit, occasional muscle soreness, and the rash varies from invisible to alarmingly red. I’m still more tired than normal, but in the last 3 days, my outdoor ventures have not left me feeling anything other than happy. Good timing, as Brother Bob arrived today.

Most of my problems now are from the antibiotic. Most people who take it have stomach problems, myself included. My pharmacist sold me strange pink pills which treat stomach cramps and “spasms of the uterus.” ooo-kay. She also sold me biphidous, which is some bacteria which is supposed to live in your body and which antibiotics tend to murder.
I have just been taking the biphidous and the antibiotic because yesterday I got an allergy to something. The pharmacist thinks it’s the antibiotic, but I’ve been taking it for 2 weeks and the pink pills for only 2 days and I just bought new soap. So she sold me allergy medicine. 3 pills to treat the side effects of the one pill. If I don’t turn pink and itchy tomorrow, then it’s the pink stuff or the soap. If I do, I’m allergic to the two major kinds of antibiotics. Only one more week of it. I can’t wait. It really makes me feel sick. At least it’s only twice a day. I do most of my eating right before I have to take it again. I am alarmingly thin.
In other news, I lost my nose ring in the shower today. I’ve been having very mixed luck. Everything is going screwy in France, but my California persona, who maybe lives there without me, has been offered gigs and kind words about my work.
[Edit 20:28: Augh, my front torso, neck and face are red and itchy!! I know God isn’t testing my faith, because I don’t have any. I already took an allergy pill. It’s Sunday night. So I take another doxycycline and wait till morning to find somebody to whine to?]
Tag: Celesteh

Here, I will present information that I used to prepare for my trip and things I wish I had done / known. This is Chapter 1.

Advance Preparations

Call up the Cité Internationale des Arts and ask about housing. Do this as soon as you know that you are coming. If you are two late to apply for the start of your stay, apply to get housing for the second half. This housing is probably cheaper than what you would otherwise find and it gives you access to the art scene, including a performance space. It is really hard to get gigs in Paris and very few people have heard of CCMIX. Being in the Cité des Internationale Arts will help you out.
Learn as much French as you can. Take French classes at your school, at Alliance Française or in summer school. The 2-semesters-at-once summer class at UC Berkeley is the cheapest option for a Californian. Also, the teacher and TA will help you with your paperwork for a visa.
Get a visa. The school tells you not to worry about visas. None of their students have been deported ever. The anti-immigration hysteria is not about Americans. However, getting a visa may be worthwhile for a few reasons: 1. If you are age 26 or under, the French government will give you money. 2. If you ever want to return, you won’t be faced with the choice of lying or admitting you’ve been in the country illegally. 3. The paperwork will help you buy a cell phone and open a bank account and things like that. You must go to the consulate in person to get a visa. Call them for more info. In the morning. It may be that you only need to appear in person once.
Tell everyone you know that you are coming to Paris for the year and then ask them if they know anybody there. Get phone numbers and email addresses. Call those people as soon as you arrive and arrange to have a drink with them or something. Meeting people in Paris is difficult and making friends takes a long time. Get started quickly.
If you want an apartment to yourself, Craig’s List Paris can be a good place to find one, as can FUSAC. Having a housemate, however, will help you meet people and will be cheaper. If I were coming by myself and I didn’t get a spot in the cité, I would stay in the CCMIX apartments and look for a housemate once I arrived.
If you like to read about things before doing them, French or Foe has good advice about cultural differences. The philosophy seems to be right, but unfortunately many of the specifics are outdated. The author is right when she says not to bring wine to a dinner party, but (probably) wrong when she says not to go to the bathroom at somebody else’s house. I say “probably,” assuming you’re not going to be dining with any high government officials or anybody’s formal grandmother.
This list is not exhaustive. Obviously, you must also do things like gather paperwork. If you think I left anything out, please leave it in the comments. More advice about other aspects is coming in later posts!Tags: Paris, CCMIX, Celesteh

Anti-Algerian bias has been in the news recently, what with the world cup scandal. In case you don’t follow football, what happened is this: during the world cup final, the captain of the French team, Zidane, headbutted Materazzi, an Italian player, during overtime and got thrown out of the match. Allegations have come up that Materazzi called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore.” Zidane’s mother is an Algerian immigrant to France who was sick in the hospital at the time of the match. Italy went on to win the match in penalty shootouts. Zidane has never missed a penalty kick and so some suspect that France might have won had he stayed in the match.

Allegations that Italy won through racism must be going down very poorly at home, right? Well, not exactly. According to the NYT:

Swastikas spray painted in Rome’s ancient Jewish ghetto sullied Italy’s joy after its World Cup victory on Sunday, as did racial comments made by a former government minister about the French team.

The former minister in question is Roberto Calderoli, the guy who was forced to resign after appearing publicly wearing a T-shit with one of the Mohammed cartoons on it.

After the Cup victory he said that the Italians had vanquished a French team that was comprised of “Negroes, communists and Moslems.” Italian soccer is no stranger to extremist politics. Italian football matches are often used as a platform for far-right fans to express racist sentiments.

Well, at the very least, in the enlightened and noble United states, anti-Algerian sentiments are, well, foreign, right? Let’s ask the San Francisco Chronicle.

No one should ever take Zidane for a peaceful man. The son of Algerian immigrants, he comes from the hard streets of Marseilles, a truly rough-and-tumble background.

He’s not peaceful because . . . he’s the son of Algerian immigrants? Oh, and he’s from Marseilles.
In other news, I read a web comic called Shooting War. The comic is kind of fucked, but it takes place in the Not Too Distant Future (one of my favorite time periods), in Iraq. and then I read this panel. The plot at this point is that the main characters have just been attacked by insurgents carrying forged Iranian passports. The female character notes that the ring leader looks as if he is North African and is wearing a T shirt from the banlieues of Paris. I won’t quote all the dialog for you (it’s in the image I linked to and you can’t cut and paste from images), but I will pull it apart for your benefit.
She did not live in the northern suburbs when she was a university student. Teachers live in the burbs. Students live in the left bank. It’s important for students to be near university life and they get something called the CAF from the government to pay their living expenses. All students get this, foreign or not. This system is extremely unlikely to change in the near future.
This travel agency thing she speaks of does not exist. There are French soldiers in Afghanistan. Given the timing of the comic, she would be in university now. Would the French happily send extremists off to kill their own troops? No they would not. Happiness about extremism does not exist.
Burning precious Pugeots! Oooh, somebody read a newspaper in November! But not very carefully, because only like 5 cars were burned in Paris, the rest were in the burbs. The cars burned in Paris were around the Place de la Republique. One may have been on my street. That’s an immigrant neighborhood. They weren’t burning cars out in the 16th. Also, the word “Peugeot” sounds effeminate, right? Because all French men are pansies, not like us tough Americans who go fight imperialist wars in Iraq. Maybe the writer couldn’t think of any other French car brands. Maybe, in the future, there are no more Renaults.
Pissed off suburban youth are angry about economic issues, not religious issues. It may be the case that in the future, that changes. But right now, they’re angry about job discrimination more than anything else. France has an extremely secular society. These kids are French. They were born in France. They went to French schools. Even the “native” French see them as French. The kind of changes this future envisions might happen, but I don’t see it as likely. Especially not a toleration for terrorist travel agencies.
This poorly-written dialog, of course, comes from the same place as the stuff Materazzi allegedly said to Zidane. This stereotyping about Algerian terrorists is everywhere in the media. If you kept hearing that over and over again, this hate speech, it becomes like a physical attack. Zidane told reporters he would rather take a blow to the face than hear what Materazzi said to him. Hate speech is violent. “Sticks and stones” is bullshit, and everybody knows it. This has got to stop.
Tags: Football, Celesteh

According to the Washington Post, the US has decided to apply the Geneva Conventions to all detainees. File this under “it’s about damn time.” Even CIA black sites and secret gulags will have to follow the Geneva Conventions, and I’m sure that everyone will be properly informed and they will act in full accordance with the law, because if there’s one thing the CIA has a reputation for, it’s legality and more importantly, transparency, so that interested parties can verify that they are indeed following the law.

(Speaking of proper information, guys in the field in Afghanistan, when asking how to treat detainees, were given rescinded torture-ahoy! memos intended for Guantanamo Bay. So decisions on the top only matter as far as they get out to people actually handling detainees. Link 1, Link 2)
The Bush administration continues to insist that torturing people into giving false confessions makes voters feel hopeful about the war on terror, but the Supreme Court apparently remembers that we have laws and treaty obligations and stuff.
The WaPo article does not mention extraordinary rendition, a practice in which we turn over wrongly grabbed innocent suspects to other allied countries known to use torture after the very solemnly promise (wink) not to torture these particular suspects. Then they share all the false, i’ll-say-whatever-you-want,-just-stop-it information with our intelligence agencies, who use it to grab more innocent people who were randomly named as the last guy sought desperately to make it stop suspects. One thinks the Geneva Conventions and Jesus would disallow such a thing, but since the Supreme Court didn’t rule on it (and how could they since it’s secret?) and nobody is talking about it now, it will probably continue.
This is a small step. Very positive. But too small by itself.
Tag: Celesteh

The day after I went to see the movie, I woke up early the next morning to call the Netherlands consulate in Paris to ask about immigration procedure. Apparently, if you’re American and want to move to the the Netherlands, you just show up with paperwork and ask for a residency permit. Then convince somebody to giv e you a job and show up with some paperwork around that and they give you work papers. Maybe, probably if they like you.

lyme disease update

And the, the over-exertion of walking around Paris and then waking up early had me feeling miserable in bed for two days. At some point, taking 1 gram of fizzy tylenol at a time started doing me harm. And so I stopped and began to feel better. Yesterday I felt fine, except for getting tired really fast. Only occasionally tiny amount of burning and the bite hurts from time to time, but not so much that I would probably even notice it if it weren’t so suddenly important in my life. The red spot around it shrank and faded and got really dry and then I stopped putting the antiseptic on it because it was so dry. The doctor gave me something that smells like pool water. I think it’s chlorine. And last night, I noticed it looked the same as it did a week ago. ack. So I bleached it and this morning, it’s light again.

I’m up early because I was worrying about the implications of the rash not going away and had plans to call an anglophone advice line. What if I have antibiotic resistant lyme disease? But commenters on Live Journal have said they had the rash for two weeks. So I’ll wait a few more days before seeking advice. I don’t want to spend another four hours at the hospital waiting to talk to a dermatologist unless I actually have to. What did we do before the internets?
I want to be travelling right now, but if I get completely exhausted after just riding my bike downtown, then it is not in the cards for me. I’m really tired of not feeling well. I want this to go away. Hence my worry about the rash. “Why isn’t this gone yet??” I whined to myself. My problems are minor compared to many folks, but they’re mine and that gives them a certain gravity in my mind.
Tags: Lyme, Lyme Disease, Celesteh

Aside from sleeping and whining and whatnot, I’ve been leaving the house once a day.
Tuesday, I was feeling not so sick, so I decided to go to the cheese shop. This was not actually a good idea. The cheese people are the friendliest people in Paris. One of them had worked out that I was an American and was asking why I was in France. He’s a nice guy, but I could barely answer. The time was not right to venture out.

Wednesday, France won it’s semi-final match in the World Cup. Huzzah for France! I watched on TV. Afterwards, I could hear people setting off fireworks and celebrating in the streets. So, I limped out to watch. The thing to do when you win a football victory is to head directly to the closest car and drive it around with people all over it, waving flags. A bunch of people were doing so around Place de la Republique. If you don’t have a car, the best thing to do is go to some place where there are a lot of cars and climb on them as they’re stopped at red lights. A bunch of people were doing so around Place de la Republique. It was an amusing spectacle. They climbed on a public works car. The public works people lit road flares as sparklers and waved them around, failing to note that they set something on fire. For a while, a largish garbage fire burned next to a tree but then somebody noticed and stamped it out. People yelled and cheered and jumped up and down. I limped home.
And when I say “limped,” I mean that I have arthritis. It will go away soon, but in the mean time, I walk as if I am arthritic.
Yesterday, I thought I felt well enough to see a movie, so Nicole and I went to see the Road to Guantanamo. The metro ride in itself was more than enough adventure for me, but seeing a movie involves sitting and political documentaries are ok, right? This movie is actually a dramatization of what happened to those three british guys that ended up in Gitmo. On a lark, they thought they would go be aid workers in Afghanistan. It was incredibly stupid, but would have been a hell of a vacation if they’d all survived and the survivors hadn’t gone to Gitmo.
You know Nazi movies, where they have the incredibly evil camp guards who are also fairly incompetent and they have that Hollywood Nazi look of a happy predator about to bite some tasty Art Spiegelman mouse? Now replace that expression with that broad ugly grin that male, american assholes get when they’re enjoying seeing somebody hurt. That, wide cocky, cruel American grin. It’s the new Nazi expression, because my god, we’re acting like Nazis.
Being in the US Armed Forces used to imply some sort of honor. Behaving honorably does not include lying about what country you are an officer of, nor does it involve beating prisoners. Nor violating the rights of prisoners. Nor disregarding the Geneva conventions.
Yeah, I love my country. I love the land. And I love the music. And I love the brave leaders like Mother Jones and MLK and Cesar Chavez, but I do not love the military industrial complex and I don’t love the police state. I hate what’s going on right now. There are still hundreds of prisoners in Gitmo. They’re still being tortured. George Bush is still president. He got reelected. Yeah, I love my land, but the people? Maybe half. All Republicans can fuck off and die. I hope you get the police state that you so desperately want and I hope I’m far away from it. Something is profoundly wrong in the US and I can’t think of a way to fix it.
Tag: Celesteh

This is now the journal of tick bites. I should learn to bear misery more silently. I need some character. However, maybe somebody else out in the world also got the same diagnoses yesterday and wonders if it’s “normal” that her skin is full of pricks of burning like little jabs of something tiny and hot or the scurrying of little heated legs like the wiggling legs of the tick before I dropped it to die in the drain. Like little bursts of 4th of July sparklers.

Yes, it is.
I called Sarah Dotie to ask if this was cause for alarm. She called around and wrote email back to say that what I feel is spyrothetes dying. These are the little creatures that invaded my blood stream. Lyme disease is a parasite. As each of them dies, I feel a burning stab of it’s death, in my arms, in my legs, in my scalp.
I find that keeping things from touching my skin seems to help. And the tylenol that the doctor prescribed turns down the amplitude a bit. Keeping my skin bare is not always an option, for reasons of modesty and because my antibiotics cause extreme sunburn sensitivity.
If you are in America and you find a tick, you pull it out with tweezers or your fingers, making sure that there are no visible bits of tick left behind. Wash your hands and the bite afterwards and use antiseptic on the bite. If you are in Germany, you go to a doctor and ask her to pick the tick out for you, for which she will use some sort of pointy device. If you are in France, you go to the pharmacy and ask for some stuff which you put on the tick, the tick goes limp and lets go.
I am going to be sporting long pants and sleeves next time I’m in the woods, but ankles, neck, scalp, etc may still be uncovered and will be checked for ticks. Check for them right after you hike. Then check again at night and in the morning. Apparently, there are no documented cases of Lyme when the tick was attached for less than 12 hours. Yeah, it’s treatable and I’ll feel fine soon, but the meantime is disconcerting and alarming.
I didn’t celebrate the American Holiday, alas (unless you count exploding parasites). I left the house once only and it was overly exhausting.
Tags: Ticks, Lyme, Lyme Disease, Celesteh