Bitter Pillow

“It’s a bitter pillow to swallow.”  (This quote brought to you by one of my students in his essay.)

Yes, the very thing we expect to cushion us during our journey of sleep is what chokes us with bitterness.  I think I like this new phrase.

I’m thinking about this now because I have just swallowed pills after being sick for days from the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had. I hate being sick. Well, who doesn’t? But being sick in one of the least developed countries in the world is a bit more frightening than being sick elsewhere. I am lucky, though, that I know doctors here. In fact, the morning after being up all night sick, I called a doctor friend who listened patiently to my symptoms, asked a few questions, then told me what medicine to get and advised me to drink Coke (and then actually hand-delivered three bottles of the soda himself).

 
The good news is that I finally swallowed the right antibiotics, albeit with my last Coke.

I went to get the antibiotics today. Driving here is crazy enough when I’m highly alert, but it gets completely maddening when I’m sick. It was as if I suddenly realized just how risky it is not only to be a pedestrian here but also a driver, a passenger, a bicyclist, a baby on the back of her mother, a chicken or a cow. At one point today (and I was only driving for ten minutes, tops), a woman walked directly into the road -- in the path of my car -- without looking. I honked the horn and slammed on my brakes. She turned and stood in front of my car, in the middle of the lane, and just stared at me, and smiled. (Now, the reality of living in a very poor country is that sometimes slow reaction time or lack of awareness can be due to lack of nutrition or literal starvation. But this woman looked neither malnourished nor starved. Instead, she looked like she was on her way to or from her office job.)

Her smile was puzzling. Was she smiling because she realized that she had been an idiot for a second and didn’t look before crossing the street? (We all know this ‘look both ways’ thing is one of the first rules of Mom as she sends us out into the world as kids.) Or was she smiling because she had almost gotten hit by a white woman who, at that moment, looked quite pissed, shaking her head and swearing. (By the way, I don’t do the swearing bit when I have passengers. And, most of you probably know that I almost never swear ever.  I just release it all when I’m alone in the car, apparently.) I kept swearing but waved her across the street and drove on, wary of what was to befall me on the road next.

But let’s leave the rest of my traffic trials for the moment and move on to the pharmacy where I went to get the needed antibiotic. Now, for the record, I’ve been to this same pharmacy several times, although usually to buy vitamins. However, I also got doxycycline there once (I take doxy as a malaria prophylaxis while I’m here), with no hassle given to me. Today, however, the pharmacist working must have seen me as an opportunity.

I ask for the antibiotic that my doctor friend told me to get. The pharmacist asks me for my prescription. At this point, it should be noted that you don’t need a prescription here for antibiotics. Knowing this (and possibly emboldened by having lived through the past two days of feeling like I was going to die), I laugh at his suggestion. Being even cheekier, I hold my cell phone at him and say, “I’ll call my doctor right now. Do you want to talk to him?” He disappears in the back, comes back with the antibiotics I’d asked for, and hands them to me without saying another word. I’m still wondering if he was looking for me to give him money on the side, to allow me to get the drugs without the ‘necessary’ prescription.

But I don't really care. Because now I’ve got my pills and my pillow, the special one that softens my journey into sleep with its feathers and scent of lavender. And there's absolutely nothing bitter about that.