Passing of the Peace (Tumultuous Day Numero 2)

Currently, if I express emotion using the right eyebrow I experience a momentary headache. Which is actually kind of amusing because it will then go away immediately. How can this be?

It has to do with a small, now-hilarious (thankfully), head incident which occurred this morning.

The three musketeers (that's Lady Elise, her friend Affable Laura, and myself) set out into the old city of Cartagena for our complimentary Yellow Fever shots yesterday morning. Colombia provides free yellow fever vaccines for anyone entering the country, which is quite gracious in my opinion.

Now, I've had many, many vaccines in my life with little drama (even a series of three "labies" vaccines in Thailand, of all places).

We musketeers have relived the following events, each from our different perspectives, and our simultaneous experiences make this story.

My experience: standing up successfully post-needle and padding out into the warm waiting room of the clinic. A little light-headedness came upon me so I wisely sat down--this will pass soon--but the sitting wasn't sufficient so I put my head between my legs and that wasn't sufficient so I did the very adult activity of fiddling with my toes to distract myself. And then: decades later I was somehow returning from very far away and my vision was distorted and my view aspect was wrongly towards the ceiling and I was 8 years old for a moment too (the first time this happened) and there was much Spanish.... and oh, darnit, oops, so sorry everyone. 

I was splayed on the (extraordinarily filthy) clinic floor.

But what better place to pass out than surrounded by doctors and nurses? Even if they spoke no English. Immediately there was a generous flurry of language-less activity. Two lifted me up and carried me to a spare room with a bed; another brought me ice for my head; yet another returned rapido with a small coconut cookie wrapped in a bit of parchment. "Azucar!"  I felt decidedly wretched for about 45 minutes, but eventually will-powered mind over matter and stood up and walked out through the wobbly ickiness and out into the bright world with my musketeers. But the old city was filled with sweets and I replenished my blood sugar and found myself distracted with shipping and angled metal earrings and HOW WONDERFUL it is to see yourself returning to normal. It was a two-earrings day, for the shopping: a panacea of sorts if there ever can be one.

Lady Elise's version: Ok, so I know Sandra, she's prone to strange stretching poses at arbitrary times, she's stretching her back, that's cool. Wait...her toes?, now THAT'S a little weird, Oh Nooooo there she goes. And Elise looks at the Colombian woman sitting on Sandra's other side, and in that wordless communication surfacing above all languages, they both reach for their respective Sandra arms and try to stem the slow-motion splat towards the floor.

And then Elise had to answer about 40 people questioning her if Sandra had eaten breakfast, "si si, huevos y vegetales!"  And, no, she's not prone to convulsions. All white and narrow, Sandra must've looked half-dead even when she walked in. But Elise is steadfast and solid calm and took someone's blue binder of medical records and began fanning Sandra and wiping the filthy floor tattoos off her.

Laura's experience: go find more sugar!, rapido!, Laura was bid. She set off into the pulsing unlabeled streets and crowds, navigating this world alone on A Quest. One might expect buying some fruit juice would be straightforward, but nothing normally straightforward ever is when you're in a place like Colombia. Without good language skills, either, one cannot quickly ask for directions. So Laura, with serendipity and intuition found herself in a large market. She isolated the mango juice and brought it to the vendor, presenting Senorita Vendor with the only money she happened to be carrying, a single $50,000 note (about $15 USD), which in Colombia is massive. Mrs. Vendor gave her the stink-eye (standard here if you pay for anything with a huge bill like that) but then realized Laura was determined to have this mango juice. So Mrs. Vendor flapped around in her money drawer but lacked enough small bills, so she beckoned the people behind Laura in line to pay her for their purchases, until she could finally break Laura's $50,000. 

What an orchestration! What an unsavory experience! But I am now carrying some sugary snacks wherever I might go. (Not that I'm getting anymore shots here.) But I was well-taken care of and so grateful for that. Once again learning to take nothing for granted.

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