It Sucks to be Sick in a Foreign County

This past week has been relatively quiet, and that has been nice. During the day, while I was working at the museum, the girls went out and about to visit a bunch of churches. Our iPhoto is just full of pictures of stained glass and statues of either martyred saviors or their mothers. I will leave it to them to tell you about their adventures. For me, the most out of the ordinary occurrence was getting a terrible head cold, a rhume as they call it here.

I guess by out of the ordinary, I mean that it has been a memorable part of this part week. Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that I almost always get a bad cold when I am traveling. In Zambia last year I was up all night honking my nose on a bandana after I had used up all my Kleenex, and then I spent the following day doped-up on Benadryl. In Australia in 2006 I was so congested I couldn’t snorkel, but I still got in the water to collect mussels. In Berlin, same deal, as well as the last time that I was in Paris. I remember coming home from London once with my sinuses stuffed and stabbing pain behind my eyes as we landed and took off. I don’t know what it is, but a “travel cold” is just par for the course for me.

One difference between trying to get cold remedies in the socialized world vs. in the USA is that there are few consumer marketed pharmaceuticals. Just about anything that could be called medicine needs to be obtained from a pharmacy, whether a prescription is needed or not. In Sydney, I went to Woolworths looking for something equivalent to Nyquil. I found lots of items packaged that way, but when I looked at the ingredients, they were just made with hippy, herbal crap. I seem to remember that the active compound in the night-time cold “medicine” was blueberry extract! Because actual medicines aren’t marketed to consumers over here, there is no competition for customers driving innovation, and there is no such thing as a “coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever so you can rest medicine.” Instead, there is one pill for each symptom. And thanks to the meth-heads back home with their hillbilly heroine, we can’t even get real Nyquil in the States anymore either.

So this week, while I was down in the freezing dungeon of the zootheque, I was producing copious amounts of snot and sneezing while I made great progress on sorting through the freshwater mussel specimens. There is barely any work space down where the specimens are, so I have had to make liberal use of the floor.