Lima, Peru is the clog in the toilet of the western hemisphere.  It is the colon cancer in the darkest depths of the continental American anus.  It is the breeding ground for the most putrid bugs known to the western world.  Lima eats syphilis and e. coli for dinner… and then passes them on to you.  You don’t get ‘traveler’s diarrhea’ in Lima—you get ‘traveler’s painful disembowlment’.  Lima will gut you.  It is no place for a man with a weak immune system.

Welcome Part II of the three part series on my poor health.  This is the story of how Lima, Peru ruined 5 years of my precious youth, my innocence and my faith in modern medicine.

It was November of 1997 and I was a precious 19 years old.  I had just finished my first year of glorious arts and science education (more art than science) at the University of Calgary.  I was a junior member of the National Shooting Team.  Because guns are far less prevalent in Canadian society than they should be, I’ve already confused and alarmed most you, so let’s deal with your ignorance now.  Yes—Canada has a national shooting team.  There are many legitimate and enjoyable shooting sports in which many of your fellow citizens participate regularly.  They are not murderers or bad people.  You might be surprised to learn that many of these disciplines are, indeed, Olympic sports—and they were in the Olympics long before curling, sledgehockey and Tiddlywinks.  No—I’m not “one of those guys that does that thing… with skiing… with the things… they shoot”.  It’s called biathalon and it’s a winter sport that is primarily about skiing.  Biathalon is for shitty skiers who are too slow for real races and weak shooters who can’t handle a real gun—I am not a biathalete.  Yes—I do kill things, but that is has nothing to do with this story or my sport.  Look… we’re getting way off track here, so do both of us a favour and just look up “trap shooting” on Wikipedia.  Olympic Trap—that’s my sport.  Back to the story…

So I had spent the summer training for a World Cup in Lima, Peru, to be followed by the Championship of the Americas in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I was pursuing all the glory, fame and riches that flow from being a junior Canadian shooting champ (do you revere me yet?).  I was excited, as I had never been to South America and I was aware of Peru’s rich cultural heritage—Machu Pichu, Lake Titicaca and all that.  What I didn’t know was that the city of Lima is a vapid wasteland of underdevelopment, Volkswagon exhaust, decaying Spanish legacies and glass Fanta bottles (in case you were wondering where all those Fanta bottles from 1982 ended-up).   It’s not awesome.  It stinks of human shit and urine.  It’s full of poor people, who are mostly short and slightly rotund.  It never rains.  I tried to go for a run one afternoon, but it made me extremely nauseous within minutes.  And apparently it’s dangerous.  We had armed police escorts wherever we went and the night was often rittled with AK-47 and handgun fire.  I got to hear the ‘police’ execute a fleeing suspect in an alley.  Contrary to what I learned from Miami Vice, it was not glorious.

I had been told by other shooters that “everyone gets sick in Lima”.  So I expected a little ‘travler’s diarrhea’ as a matter of course.  But I started to get a little nervous when the U.S. team doctor became quite ill—when the healthcare providers start going down, you become unsettled.  And then the Mexicans got sick.  That’s right—the Mexican shooters from Mexico City, one of the most polluted environments on earth—got sick in Lima! I had not fully grasped the of the phrase “everyone gets sick in Lima”.  I knew then it was only a matter of time before I would succumb to the local microbes—and I did.  It was not glorious.

My body reacted to the beastly Peruvian invader as if I’d pounded a litre of Drain-o.  It liquefied my innards.  And nothing would quell the full-on assault of my digestive track.  Taking Pepto-Bismal or Immodium was like putting a fucking penny on the railroad tracks and expecting it to stop the train.  There was no relenting by the invading bacteria.  By the third day of illness, all of the Canadian team was gone except another young guy from Outlook, SK who was also going to Argentina.  I called the Canadian Embassy to find out where to seek medical assistance.  The woman recommended the Clinica Anglo-America—naturally.  Oddly, no one at the Clinica Anglo-America spoke much English and my Spanish was junk.  They ended-up hydrating me with IV.  Then some Peruvian doctor told me to take some bismuth syrup (tried that jackass), charged me $80 USD and sent me away.  Fuck you Peruvian doctor.  If you’d actually tried to kill the beast in me, I might not have suffered for the next 5 years!

I flew out to Buenos Aires immediately because I knew Argentina was a little more metropolitan and less fucking terrible than Lima.  What I didn’t know was that the Argentine peso was on the verge of a serious collapse, which got me kicked out of a cab in downtown Buenos Aires with my gun and ammo because I refused to pay the jackass with U.S. dollars instead of his own currency—but that’s another story.  I didn’t get better in Argentina—I got worse.  I couldn’t compete.  And the Canadian shooters were a little concerned:  they had never seen ‘traveler’s diarrhea’ of the caliber I had.  And although I was eating some things, which were immediately expelled by my intestines—notoriously awesome Argentine steak is less awesome when you know it’s not staying with you—I was experiencing visible weight loss.  I flew back to Regina, SK where my brother picked-me up… and took me to Alien 3: The Resurrection (seriously)—not an appropriate film for a young man with the Peruvian Devil in his stomach.  My mother fetched me the next day and took me home to Rosetown.

Marcel (my angry father) had circumnavigated the globe in the late 60’s with his college buddies and saw a lot of nice countryside in the Middle East and Asia, and he’d traveled a lot since as a shooter, including many trips to Mexico City—perennial runner-up to Lima for The Place Where You’ll Most Regret Breathing.  So he’s experienced some twisted travel-induced illness in his day—he was worried when he saw me.  I went straight into isolation in the Rosetown Union Hospital, the very place where I was once admitted as a 7-year-old for a swollen testicle (see My Junk is Junk infra).  The medical staff were not terribly surprised to see me.  My family doctor told me that I must have inherited Marcel’s immune system, which, apparently was junk—he’d spent time in that isolation room on return from the planet’s far corners.  They began collecting the liquid which flowed from me to determine what was living in me.  For three days I was permitted nothing by mouth, including water.  And they found nothing—no parasites, no unusual bacteria, no viruses.  Yet, my guts clearly liquidated anything entering the system.

About 5 days after checking-in, the local doctors gave-up and sent me home… apparently to die quietly of starvation.  Miraculously, my body began to turn-around and I started to contain some of the things I consumed.  At that point, it had been about three weeks since the initial onset of the illness.  Dear Opah:  20 days of dysentery is, perhaps, the most effective weight loss program ever invented.  I was a fucking coat rack.  I had lost about 20-25 pounds, which reduced my six-foot frame to less than 160 lbs.  As I recovered slowly in my parent’s house, the pathogen that tried to kill me remained a mystery.  They ran me through a colonoscopy for good measure and took snip of my colon walls just in case—it was special.  I got to watch through an auxiliary eyepiece with the company of a female medical intern.  It was not glorious.

So I slowly recovered over the course of a couple weeks, although my digestive track was far from functioning normally.  One morning, my right foot, for no particular reason, began to hurt.  It felt as though I’d sprained something in the front of my ankle, but I couldn’t recall how.  By the evening, the top of my foot around the ankle was visibly swollen, and it was starting to hurt a fair measure.  Because there was no apparent explanation, I decided to go to the doctor again.  He wasn’t sure what it was.  He gave me a mild anti-inflamatory and sent me home.  My foot became larger and rapidly more painful as the evening progressed.  At around midnight Marcel took me back to the hospital.  It felt like home.  They x-rayed the foot and found nothing.  The doctor wasn’t sure what to do at that stage (surprise, surprise).  He phoned the on-call infectious disease specialist in Saskatoon.  He described what was happening with my foot over the—the doctor developed a look of concern.

You see, the family doctor was a religious man—quite religious, of the evangelical variety.  In fact, he was religious enough that one time, Marcel got into an ‘elevated oral disagreement’ with this geezer when the doc made some off-hand remark about the ridiculousness of evolution—Marcel couldn’t let it go, despite that the doc was in the midst of removing a large cyst from Marcel’s lower back under local anesthetic.  Anyway, the infectious disease specialist had inquired about my sexual activity.  The doctor looked at me painfully for a moment and hauled Marcel out of the room.  While the doc hid around the corner outside, Marcel came back in and asked if I had ‘visited any girls’ in Peru.  It was nice that someone assumed I had the capacity to get laid, but it was awkward.  What was I to say?  “Yes Marcel—I did a lot of straight ramming on some Peruvian tang.  Please inform my evangelical, non-science-believing physician.”  Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.  I wouldn’t eat a fucking salad in Peru—and frankly, have you seen the women?  The average female measurements are 4ft x 4ft x 4ft—they are small and cubic.  Sorry—I’m a bit of an asshole, but cubic women just aren’t my thing.  Anyway, if it would have produced a cure, I’d have said anything at that point, but the truth was that I hadn’t visited any girls—the story of my sad life continued.

They assumed it was a massive infection akin to ‘flesh eating’—which was a relief to my doctor, because it wasn’t something from dirty sex.  Better to die pure than to live sinfully.  I was isolated (again) and jammed full of IV antibiotics.  Yet, for the next 12 hours, my foot continued to swell and hurt like searing hell.  I thought the Peruvian Devil himself was trying to emerge from my ankle with a bottle of Fanta, Alien 3-style.  At that point, I would have sold the farm for a foot amputation—I had no idea there were that many nerves inside my foot.

My brilliant family physician was exasperated at this point and rightfully pumped me full of Demerol and Graval (my favourite medical cocktail) and sent me to University Hospital in Saskatoon.  Marcel drove—quickly.  He had our 1992 Grand Marquis wound-up like Viper on nitrous and every minor bump in our pristine Saskatchewan highways sent a searing wave of pain up my leg.  It was not glorious.  Eventually, I was wheeled into an examination room at the University Hospital where I was met by an infectious disease specialist and a rheumatologist.  Finally—some medical competence.

It was only a matter of maybe10 minutes of talking and examination before the two agreed that it was likely Reiter’s Syndrome, which resulted from my severe dysentery.  It’s a condition that generally affects young men and is normally an adverse immune system reaction to a severe bacterial infection.  Now, if you look up ‘Reiter’s Syndrome’ you’ll probably find that it’s normally caused by a bacterial STD, but seriously people—I’m clean.  The rheumatologist said it could just as easily be caused by dysentery, which I clearly had.  They scheduled me for a bone scan, some x-rays and a genetic test.  However, the swollen foot was still causing me searing pain.  So to confirm the diagnosis and deal with the foot, they gave me a huge swack of anti-inflammatories up the back side.  To this day I’m not sure why the suppository was necessary, but it worked.  The swelling began to subside and the pain lessened.

The genetic testing later confirmed that I do have a gene called HLA-B27 (along with about 6% of the population) that is associated with auto-immune problems like Lupus, ALS, Multiple-Sclerosis, Reiter’s, etc. (yey!).  The beauty of these auto-immune problems is that the medical community doesn’t really understand how they work—they simply diagnose a collection of symptoms and a genetic marker.  And, of course, when you don’t know how the disease works, you can’t fix it.  I asked if I would get better and they simply stated ‘it’s tough to say’.  Because I had the HLA-B27 marker, I learned it was more likely that I’d be chronically crippled by inflamed joints, and if it ever disappeared, they’d simply say it was ‘in remission’.  It was not awesome.

They wheeled me out on a wheelchair and Marcel took me home to begin the most miserable five years of my life.  Lima—I hate you.  You are not at all glorious.

*Ed Note:  Come back soon for Part III:  What Doesn’t Kill You will Severely Fuckin’ Cripple You:  How To Fight a Peruvian Death Bug.