How much can you handle?

This past Sunday/Monday were my two worst days on the island so far.  I was fighting a very bad sinus infection that not only gave me a 100 degree fever, but also resulted in such bad sinus pressure that my eyes and teeth were hurting too.  Since I had been spending time during the week studying and doing various other activities, I was out of groceries and was almost out of electricity.  This was a very bad combination.  I went to the IGA and realized they didn't have any normal food (only pigs feet, smoked fish, various canned goods, etc) and they had somehow ran out of electricity.  So Sunday night needless to say I was not in a very good mood (thank goodness I had my roomies to video chat with or I would have been even more stressed out).

I finally gave in and started the antibiotics (which I definitely should have started early. I was just being stubborn).  So after a really bad night of constantly waking up (I was worried that my electricity had shut off in the middle of the night and therefore my alarm was not going to go off), I head to class.  This is when the infamous centipede-crawling on me episode occurred.  Clearly this made me even more happy (please note the sarcasm).  I finally went to the store after class, get restocked on electricity and bought some groceries.  Also the antibiotics started doing their job so I could finally breathe again.  At one point during this awful series of events, I was about ready to throw in the towel.  Thankfully I took some deep breaths, realized that this was just life in Dominica, and settled back into studying.

What I realized from this instance was that if you just keep trudging along, you can get through pretty much anything.  If I can survive being really sick, having disgusting bugs crawling on me, and scrounging for groceries, all the while studying, then I can survive pretty much anything!  The saying "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" definitely applied to the beginning of my week.   But now, here I am, on Friday night, feeling much better and now have a wonderful, entertaining story to tell everyone.  So I learned I can handle a whole lot and still get through it.