These events, which occured one on the heels of the other, deserve their own space. Never a dull moment! Alas, there are no related pictures.
One Sunday in mid-April, I saw an email from AirFrance telling me that my departing flight in June had been changed. I would now depart Libreville at 11 a.m. on June 24th, a change of 24 hours. OK, fine, that works. On closer inspection, however, I found that my connecting flight in Paris had not changed, and I was still scheduled to fly out of France at 10:35 a.m. on June 24th. Given my lack of ability to bilocate, this was not going to work.
I spent Monday afternoon attempting to fix it online while borrowing data off one of the candidate's phones (and subsequently using it all up, I think). After a while, it became clear that I would have to call them, and that it wouldn't work with WhatsApp. A good deal of time went into searching for a "no wifi calling app" with no luck; I finally sent them an email and called it a day.
The next day, I tried borrowing Maman Noëline's phone to call AirFrance, but who knows what went wrong and once I did start talking to someone, the service dropped as soon as I finished explaining the problem. I then asked Canon Fragelli if I could borrow his phone, which finally worked and I was able to get it strightened out. Alas, months later the same sort of issue would recur, but for now it was settled.
Two days later, I began to feel that I had viral conjunctivitis. I had had it a couple years before and knew the difference in viral vs bacterial, though it took me a while to admit that anything was wrong. Once I did admit that, I thought maybe it wasn't that obvious and no one would notice. I went to the kitchen to help with lunch and Maman Noëline asked if a bug had gotten in my eye, then at the table, Dieu-Vivant asked why my eye was red. So much for the "not obvious" idea.
I went to the dispensary later to talk to the doctor, and while I was standing in the doorway, someone eight feet away asked what was wrong with my eye (OK, I give up; it's obvious). The nurse asked if it was caused by an insect (does that happen a lot here??); I saw the doctor who looked at my eye and gave me a prescription for rifamycin eye drops, Celestine (pills) and albendazole. The last one was an anti-parasitic which I talked him out of giving me (I was on Malarone as malaria prophlaxis; I don't know that it's technically an anti-parasitic but I thought it was at the time). Angelique had already left the pharmacy for the day, so I figured I would pick up the other medications in the morning.
That evening, Angelique asked if I had gotten medication for my eye. I started to ask about the rifamycin and she asked to see the prescription (where I often didn't know what was going on, people often had no idea what I was trying to say). She finally said that the rifamycin was not an antibiotic (someone was confused, because it is; maybe we weren't talking about the same drug..?), and to pick up that and the Celestine pills the next morning.
I went to the pharmacy after French class to do as I was told. Once Angelique recalled why I was there, she said "demandez du chanoine", "Ask Canon", as they did not have the drugs at the dispensary and Jimmy had gone into town to get them -- or something! I gave up at that point and decided I wouldn't ask; if I got the drugs, great, but this would clear up on its own if it had to.
At lunch, Faith handed me two medications: eye drops and Celestine (betamethasone). The eye drops were neomycine/dextamethasone (NemodexSol)-- not what I had been prescribed. A look at the package insert refreshed my memory on betamethasone-- a steroid. I really didn't want to take a systemic steroid I didn't need, and the eye drops were antibiotic, which I also didn't think I needed as this was not bacterial conjunctivitis. The whole thing seemed excessively complicated.
That evening before dinner, Angelique asked if I had gotten the eye drops. I showed her what I had and she told me to use the eye drops but not to take the pills-- "C'est la même chose", "It's the same thing", preseumably the steroid. I tried to ask about using an antibiotic when I didn't have a bacterial infection; my journal says, "she just looked at me". As my mom is apt to say, it's best to trust African doctors with African diseases. So I used the eye drops and the whole thing cleared up in a few days, after spreading to the other eye as well.
That insanity was over, but there was plenty more to come!
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