The Delirium Chronicles

Less than 48 hours after I took the bar exam, I was hunched over a steaming bowl of ramen in a back-alley noodle shop in Tokyo. 

Possibly the best thing about suffering through three years of law school -- followed by the most horrifyingly intense ten weeks of your life, ten weeks of cramming arcana from every conceivable area of law into your head in the hopes of getting maybe thirty percent of the questions right on a two-day, twelve-hour ordeal of an exam -- is the excuse to take a blowout trip once it's all over, before you commit yourself to working for the rest of your life in a potentially unfulfilling, grindingly stressful job.

In my case, I traveled with a group of friends for a couple of months around Southeast Asia.  We went to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, with a brief stop in Tokyo on the way over, hitting everything from cities overrun with motorbikes to hill towns of stilt houses to sleepy fishing villages on white crescents of sand.  I kept a (paper) travel journal, which I recently unearthed, but scrolling through Nothing But Bonfires' accounts of her recent sojourn has brought up even more memories than I committed to paper; she visited so many of the places we did, and her beautiful writing captures the clamoring excitement of exploring new and wildly different parts of the world for the first time. 

My post-bar trip happened in a rare pocket of life when I had absolutely no responsibilities -- a time that only comes when you're in between things, floating in that space where nothing requires your attention or nags at the recesses of your mind.  A time when you can concentrate only on what lies before your eyes, on the new experiences you're having and the people you're meeting and the food you're eating.  Or at least, that's how it should have been. 

Before we left, I went to the campus health services and got all sorts of shots to ward off exotic diseases like Japanese encephalitis and typhoid (can you believe people still get typhoid?  it seems so...medieval).  Since we were going to lots of rural and beachy areas, the doctor also prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, one that is specially made for the ultra-evolved, extra-potent mosquitos of the Mekong Delta and the Gulf of Thailand.  The doctor kept calling it a "prophylaxis" (hee) and as he was scrawling out the prescription, he asked me if I had a history of psychosis or any family members who suffered from schizophrenia or severe depression.  I said I didn't. 

A few days before we left, I started taking the pills, as the medicine was to build up in my system for a while before we went off into the wilds of Indochina.  I packed the little orange vial along with our heavy-duty anti-diarrheal meds and my 50-gallon drum of sunscreen, and we were off. 

Tokyo and Hong Kong were a blur, a blur of jumbled technicolor neon and steamy hot humidity and bullet trains and a horrific encounter with a chicken foot, and then we got to Hanoi, which is easily -- aside from my couch and a perfect circle of Cyprus trees I once found in a vineyard in Tuscany -- my favorite place on earth.  The lakes and the temples and the yellowed French colonial architecture -- all of it.  And the food, oh GOD.  The food. 

At some point in that first week of the trip, I started having these insanely vivid dreams, more vivid than fever dreams, involving furious riots of color and intense, life-threatening situations or wrenching interpersonal struggles.  I knew that malaria medicine could cause wild dreams, so I didn't think much of it.  I was also still jet-lagged and felt tired and a bit off in general, so when I started getting unusually cranky, I figured it was fatigue-related (I get cross very easily when tired).  Don't get me wrong -- I was still having fun.  It was just that, every day or so, a flicker of yawning hopelessness or a breeze of paranoia would pass through my mind. 

Then, on a thirteen-hour overnight bus ride to Saigon, I had my first hallucination.  I was sitting sideways in a double seat, my head bouncing against the window. I'd somehow managed to sleep for a while in spite of the growing discomfort of being cramped and thirsty and/or having to pee for more than ten hours.  Through the window across from me, I saw layers of red and pink and orange expanding over the charcoal sky, illuminating puffy morning clouds and outlining distant limestone crags and casting a glow over the silently shifting rice paddies.  And then I blinked, and it was dark again.  The bus was rumbling through the blackness.  Dawn was still hours away.

Then the phantom motion started.  You know how, after you've been on a boat for a while, you get back on land and still feel all...drifty?  Around nine o'clock every night, from Saigon on through Bangkok to Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Tao, I would get this sort of dizziness/vertigo/rocking sensation that made me feel as if I were constantly walking on an unmoored pier over a storm-tossed sea.  Just as our group would be kicking back with a couple of beers after dinner, it would start, and I'd stagger unsteadily back to the room, wracked with nausea, leaving my friends to their revelry as I curled up on the bed and spun into sleep.

As time went on, I got increasingly moody -- paranoid about my boyfriend and our relationship; depressed about where my life seemed to be headed; worried that I wasn't as much fun as I should be, that I was bringing everyone else down.  I had crying jags and obsessed over how I always managed to ruin everything.  The dreams got worse, and I started waking up crying or calling out or sweating through the sheets.  The hallucinations continued; I saw the design on a shower curtain come to life one night, and things took on an aura of light or color in otherwise dark spaces.

Even so, there were still moments of transcendance -- one afternoon, a bunch of us were riding on a longtail boat from a secluded beach in Thailand back to where we were staying, when the sky opened up into a soul-soaking rainstorm.  A white gull soared overhead toward the lush green peaks of the island as the gray clouds seemed to envelop us and the raindrops pocked the surface of the sea.  As our boat puttered through the turquoise water in the downpour, we all looked at each other, huddled under sarongs as the water ran down our faces, and laughed til our stomachs hurt.

Months after we got back and scattered to our law firm jobs and my horrid symptoms subsided as the medicine left my system, one of my traveling companions emailed me a link to an article about Lariam.  It was about a class action suit being brought by people who had suffered debilitating and distressing side effects from the drug -- from paranoia to vertigo to dizziness to hallucinations.  I read it, slack-jawed.  It described my experience exactly (although I had it comparatively easy; people have actually committed suicide as a result of the horrific psychological side effects).  Somehow, on the trip, I'd never made the connection between everything I was feeling and the Lariam.  I guess I'd thought that, since I didn't have a history of mental illness, the drug couldn't cause those things.  But no.  It can.  And it did. 

Thankfully, the next time I went to Vietnam, I knew to avoid Lariam at all costs, and to bring the right guy the second time around.  And that made all the difference.

Comments

[jonniker]

Holy hell! That's unbelievable, seriously. Were you the only one of your companions who took it, or were you the only one who got those symptoms?

Incidentally, the dude I'm writing about now got malignant malaria in Bouganville, and it was no joke. I get why prophylaxis is needed, surely, but seriously, that is scary as hell.

[Heather B.]

Oh. My. Hell.

[jes]

Your trip sounds exotically beautiful and mentally disturbing at the same time.

I'm caught up in it, as I have been with NBB's travelogue, and now I find myself sitting here, shuffling paperwork, wishing for a chance to break free and travel more.

[-R-]

My clerkship started TWO WEEKS after I took the bar exam. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Of course, boo to delirious side effects of malaria medicine as well. Scary! I am glad you are ok and figured out what caused everything.

[Vicki]

sounds ALMOST like the time I took too much cough medication! Or maybe like the time I was on PhenPhen. Ohhh that drug was great. I was thin, yea so my hear was at risk BUT I WAS THIN!

I'd love to go to Vietnam. Do you have pictures to share?

[Vicki]

awww dang it!

"I was thin, yea so my HEART was at risk BUT I WAS THIN!"

not my hearing.. my heart.

I hate when that happens

[Jurgen Nation]

Oh MYDOG. That's terrible and I don't know how you survived that. Holy poop!

And to Vicki, that's exactly how I feel about Hydroxycut. Not nearly as dangerous as PhenPhen (!!), but still. Oh, what we will risk to be thin.

Hey. That's a post. Thanks!!

[guinness girl]

YIKES. Damn, that sounds scary.

[Sarah]

Wow. Have you ever read Anthony Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour"? His description of Vietnam was somewhat similar.

[orangepeacock]

I noticed the tag for this entry was "An Unquiet Mind"...have you read it? I actually got to hear Kay Redfield Jamison speak a couple of weeks ago and then talk to her a bit later in the evening. Quite a treat.

[Laura B.]

What a horrific experience! How fabulous, though, that you got to travel so much after the bar exam.

[lawyerish]

Jonna - I was the only one, although some of my friends were taking different meds; but the others on Lariam had no problems. I actually had a colleague who had spent a lot of time in the tropics and had had malaria several times. It doesn't sound too fun, but neither was this stupid drug.

Heather B. - Hey there! And, yeah. I know.

Jes - Oh, I hear you. Whenever I think about my Asia trips, I get some serious wanderlust. Stupid adulthood and responsibilities and having to, you know, work.

R - Two weeks?! NO. That is so uncool.

Vicki - PhenPhen. Yikes! Bad news. And I do have boatloads of photos of Vietnam, but they are all film pictures. If I ever get seriously motivated, I will scan some, because they are actually suuuuuper awesome and will make everyone pack their bags and head for Hanoi.

JN - Hydroxycut! You ladies and these slimming drugs! Just say no!

GG - It was scary, and I can't believe I didn't piece it together and just quit taking the damn stuff.

Sarah - No, I haven't, but I will have to pick that up! I've heard about it and I know he ate some of the rather less appetizing stuff in VN (i.e., snake hearts and the like). Fortunately, there is much more to Vietnamese cuisine!

OP - I haven't read that either; it's somewhere on my list, too -- I just seem to take forever to read books these days. I need a good long trip to get some reading done.

Laura - No post-bar trip for you?? Yeah, I do feel very fortunate to have been able to do that. That first trip was definitely on the cheap, but it was still amazing.

[Leah]

I get jacked up when I take half a Dramamine. I'll be passing on the malaria meds, thanks.