The Desert, Part 5: An anxious tension

     If Deborah's seizure seemed to last an eternity, the half-hour spent afterwards felt almost just as long.  A hospital could be found in a nearby town along our route, but sharp curves on steep cliffs slowed our travel.  Once the decision was made to go there, few people spoke but in hushed voices, in anxious tension that another seizure might occur. 

     Still Deborah and Martina were obstinate in that we shouldn't visit a doctor.  Deborah's parents were called and they confirmed their daughter's assertion that a doctor not be seen, and that she certainly not be treated by one.  Around the bus, quiet conversations persisted about whether it was the right thing to do.

     Her parents said we shouldn't go, and we should respect that, some said.

     Taking only her vital signs couldn't her hurt, other said.

     Maybe the doctor would find something worse than we knew, and could do something about it, still others said.

     Along the way, Deborah requested that we stop so she could use the bathroom.   All we could find was a should on the side of the road with a big gravel mound separating the road from an open field.  It was all we could find and it had to do.  Later, an abandoned gas station would have to fulfill the same purpose.

     The hospital was a small building off the main road in a fairly uninteresting town, but the doctor was waiting outside and approached the vehicle as we arrived.  He was immediately ushered to away to a safe distance by someone from our group, but from the back I couldn't tell how much or even if he got close enough to take vitals.  When I spoke to him myself after about 20 minutes, he told me her situation was serious and he didn't seem altogether pleased with the lack of contact he'd been allowed to have.  

     We left without much resolution to either the cause of Deborah's seizure, her current condition, or the prospect of an impending attack.  But we left anyway--with at least the consolation that she had refused treatment--and started what we hoped would only be a 4 hour trek back to Fez.  

     As planned, we stopped briefly for lunch along the way and continued home.  In some of the best luck we'd had that weekend, the rain had stopped and roads were dry, leaving only the terrain and distance as obstacles to our arrival.  We finally rounded a corner on a fairly steep cliff and saw the lights in Fez.  

     We slugged off the bus--tired, but relieved--some of us joking, many of us complaining, but all of us with a deeper recognition not only of the dangers present in the travel itself, but also of the fragility of good circumstances.  Consciousness of that fragility is something that wore off, at least for me, a couple weeks after my arrival in Fez.

     After setting a few bags down Sunday evening, a friend and I took a short walk to McDonalds--if for nothing else than to restore a little normalcy to an otherwise extraordinary weekend.