Last year, I had the most awful experience of my life. I thought my life was in danger.
It was about two months before my mid-year exams. I was picked by the class teacher to take part in the cross-country race even though I wasn’t interested. But the teacher wouldn’t budge on her decision because I had been a cross-country runner the year before when I was in Pre-U one.
Since I had to run, I decided I had better do it right, so a few friends and I agreed to meet regularly for practice runs. Our run was supposed to be through the MacRitchie Reserve.
I was there, early in the morning the following Saturday. It wasn’t quite bright yet but a couple of the girls were already there, warming up. We decided to embark on our run first, without waiting for the other three girls who were supposed to turn up. We were going to race each other because we were all reasonably fit already and so only had to work on our technique.
A quick last stretch and we were off!
It took only a few hundred metres before I realised that the other girls were far more fit than I. They were racing ahead like hares. Soon, I was left behind and trotting along alone, cursing my teacher, cursing the jungle around me, cursing my luck for having been chosen for what seemed to me like an awful chore.
As I ran, I could hear the monkeys calling to each other. The sunlight did not penetrate fully into the dense part of the jungle where I was now. And it did strike me as a full-grown jungle, no matter what others may say about MacRitchie being a “tame” garden.
I was looking around at the trees, trying to spot a monkey if I could when I suddenly felt a stinging brush against my left cheek, as if I had run into some low-hanging branch. But when I looked around, there was no such branch hanging over the path. I told myself it must have been some insect bite.
I continued the run without any further incident and met up with my friends in the canteen on the hill, from where we could have a cup of coffee and look over the whole reservoir.
One of the first things that happened was one of my friends pointed to my face and said, “Hey, what happened? You look like you have a cut on your left cheek.”
“Is it bad?” I asked, concerned now, for my looks more than anything else.
“Not very bad, but still a bit obvious,” another friend said.
“Probably an insect bite,” I said, and the others agreed.
Later that day, I applied some ointment on my cheek and settled down to study. My mother noticed the mark too and commented on it, but I told her it was just an insect bite.
“But it looks quite bad, dear,” she said.
I went to look in the mirror and yes, it did look more obvious than before, almost a welt under my eye. But it didn’t hurt or anything, so I thought I would just wait to see if the ointment worked.
I have a habit of studying late at night, until about 12.30, especially on Saturdays. I was quite serious about my work this year because I didn’t do so well last year.
At around 11 pm or so, my cheek started hurting where I had been “stung”. At about midnight, the pain was almost unbearable. It was so bad I wanted to cry out loud! But it was so late at night, there was nothing to be done.
All the clinics were closed anyway, and at the time I never thought of admitting myself to the A&E of a hospital, like someone suggested I should have when I told him this story months later. Anyway, I thought the best thing to do was to go to sleep and see the doctor in the morning.
It wasn’t easy to sleep at first, but as suddenly as the pain had started, it went away. I felt so relieved that I fell asleep right away.
The next morning, I went to the mirror and had a shock. My family too was shocked. The welt had swelled into something awful, my cheek was really puffy. But there was no pain, none at all.
I had a quick breakfast and my mother rushed me to the doctor. At first, the doctor also said it was probably just an allergic reaction to some insect bite and he applied some ointment, saying the swelling would go away in a couple of days.
That night, at exactly 11 pm, my cheek started hurting again at exactly the same place. I was beginning to get suspicious. Why did my cheek hurt only at night? And the ointment didn’t seem to be working either. Again, later in the night, the pain disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
The next morning my cheek was even more swollen. It was so puffy that it was affecting my ability to open my left eye. But strangely, there was no pain. Now, we were really worried. My mother told me not to go to school and that we would go to the doctor’s instead. I was glad my classmates were not going to see me like this.
At the doctor’s, I was quite mad to hear the doctor say he didn’t know what the problem was. Surely he could do something, I thought. But he just said, give the ointment more time and come again tomorrow for another check-up.
Luckily my mother was too upset to take the doctor’s advice. She called up an auntie of mine and told her the problem.
The auntie very kindly came over to my house to have a look. Her first reaction was, “We better do something about this quick!”
My auntie took my mother and me to a medicine man she knew. The medicine man looked hard at me, listened to my story, did some chanting and all his mumbo-jumbo and then told us what the problem was.
“Your daughter is quite lucky,” he began, “some playful spirit has just pinched her face. If she had been slapped properly, she could have died. This, however, we can fix.”
He did some chanting over me, gave me an ointment and told me to lay off certain foods. No chili food, he said, substitute things like pepper instead. And no burgers and such things.
Fortunately, this medicine man’s treatment worked. In a few days the swelling went down. But more importantly the pain that would come only in the night stopped from the day after we saw him.
I still go for my cross-country runs through MacRitchie even though my mother doesn’t like me to do that, but now I always run together with friends.
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