I woke up in the middle of the night two nights ago feeling like a giant had his pinky pressed against the inside of my throat. With the irrationality that comes from jerking out of an unsettling dream with something odd and inexplicable going on inside your body, I burst out of the mosquito net, tripped over the wooden slats of our bedframe to the wall, and flicked on the light, whisper-shouting 'Nick! Nick! Wake up! I think I have bird flu!'

The sheer terror of it caused my whole body to start spasming (another symptom of bird flu, I now know, though the sensation of a giant with his pinky in your throat is not, in fact, a symptom in the first place) which made me even more positive that I was going to die within the next half hour, maybe hour if it would be particularly painful and drawn out. My chest burned a little. I made Nick run around the house with a blue bucket and some hot water, not quite sure the path my death would take. We don't have a telephone, and the only one in the house with a cell phone was asleep, and I wasn't certain enough that I was going to die to make a big embarrassing scene by waking him up and calling the hospital, not that, once called, I could communicate with the doctors anyway.

Eventually I calmed myself down by convincing myself that I had swallowed my malaria pill the wrong way and it had dissolved in my throat instead of in my stomach, when, even in the stomach, it often causes vomiting and nausea as a side effect (in other people, not in me). So in the throat it must produce severe burning... right? RIGHT?

Two days later, it still burns badly to swallow or breathe deeply, but the pain has moved to my chest. Feels like chronic severe heartburn, the kind that never goes away for even one minute. Any ideas? It's (probably) not bird flu - bird flu hasn't been found in Jayapura or anywhere near Jayapura, and chest pain isn't a symptom. Heart attacks don't begin in your throat. Acid reflux doesn't just start in the middle of the night. Sorry for the roiling mundanity, but I need some input.