As my blog is now getting several hits a day regarding former internet celebrity Arafat Kazi, and I presume this is related to his health, I’m going to post a little update as to what I presently know.

I just got off the phone with Arafat. He is currently in the ICU of a Boston area hospital, where he has been for at least a night, and I guess will remain. He’s been running a kind of malaria fever on-and-off for over a year and seems to have been particularly plagued over the weekend, leading to an E.R. walk-in with a 104 degree fever, a return visit, having shot to 105, and, finally, hospital admittance.

Actually getting an overnight admittance to a hospital under the current American health care system is one of the twelve modern tasks of Heracles, so it’s safe to assume that Arafat’s present condition is exceedingly serious. Frankly, he sounded awful. He was too weak to talk longer than a few minutes.

From what I gather, and I do remind people that this is filtered through Arafat’s understanding of science, which is somewhere between piss-poor and shit-awful, our man seems to have a malaria-like infection that is residing outside of his liver. The doctors have told him that it’s treatable but that they’ve never seen anything like it and can’t figure it out.

That’s what I know.