JUL-B-7
SLEEP ALL DAY;
AWAKE ALL NIGHT
HARDLY A RHYTHM
FOR ACCOMPLISHING MUCH:
MY ONLY PATIENTS
TREATED THSU FAR, ARE THE STUDENTS
WHO RETURN QUITE
BLUE FROM KARDUNGLA
July 22, 2002
Rarely has it been this bad. I cannot seem to shake the circadian rhythm of the Western world, after several days of being transported here. It seems that much the same has afflicted at least several of the students, and this may partly be because we have started with the pause here at Leh with the intent to reduce the effects of the altitude shift, which has allowed a drowsy accommodation of the day/night switch. The dogs and muezzin have not helped either. We are certainly not “making hay while the sun shies in this alpine desert.
Several of the students returned from their long drive for a ten-minute stop in the Kardungla Pass blue, cold and out of it. I snapped the pulse oximeter on Ali when she returned as groggy and ill as she could be with her pasty skin and blue lips, and the first readings were 76% and 110, settling after bed rest at Leh altitude to 90% and 90 pulse, but still unable to eat or do much. Ironically, she I s the one who had best shifted time zones, having awakened at 8:00 AM this morning, a time by which her roommate Olga and I had been running for two hours already.
And, today, we take off for the Tangste clinics and the start of our medical mission on a drive through the diesel smoke and dust (about which were the primary complaints from the students on the Kardungla drive) that will be three times longer and through Chungla Pass which is only thirty meters short of the Kardungla’s “highest motorable pass in the world.”