"Proceeded on down the hall gettin more injections, inspections,
detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin' to me
at the thing there" --Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
Yeah...I'm not being drafted, but the amount of injections, inspections, detections, and neglections a person has to go through just to leave the country is both daunting and uncomfortable.
Take, for instance, vaccines: fantastic miracles of modern science, preventing the seeing from blindness, the walking from polio. They allow the developed world to walk untouched and unmarred by the bad microbes that trouble the developing world. But in order to receive the special protection the friendly microbes, certain rituals must be observed…
I had the pleasure of undergoing several of these rituals in preparation for my trip to Buenos Aires. Although the city is safe from most of the germs that could make me sick, in order to explore the rainforest and the remoter parts of that magnificent country, I needed to get typhoid and yellow fever inoculations. I went to my local travel shaman, known widely as a “nurse practitioner,” who kindly initiated me into the that elect order of the Immunity. She poked a needle into the bare skin of my arm, after muttering the magic words to lessen the pain: “There will be a small sting—“
For protection from typhoid, I had to collect the special pills from the apothecary’s store. The pretty priestess in the white robe peered at me from behind the counter and told me I could only take the pills every other day with tepid water and that I had to keep them chilled and not take them with alcohol or cold water otherwise the magic wouldn’t work. If I did everything right, I would be protected for 5 years from the bad bugs, but if I messed up a single step, the evil eye could fall on me, and my journey would be dominated by trips to the baños. It might as well be magic for all I understood it.
--Nicole
Thank God for modern science.
No comments:
Post a Comment