Backlash

Last week our writer found herself in dire straits. She imagined herself flying home for Xmas or some other break and never coming back. It didn’t matter that the house was rented out and she didn’t have anywhere to stay. She even said these things aloud…to people. It was the truth you see. The painful truth of how miserable it had been. Oh yea, that’s me, dammit. This person sounds like a loser. I mean if she’s going to give up the first time it gets a little scary and she has to go to a hospital that everyone here says is really nice.


The chemo drugs that were given for infectious diarrhea worked didn’t they? Oh yea, baby they worked so well my body backlashed against them. My hunt for Monistat began at the local Chemist Shaheen.

“What’s it for?”

“A yeast infection,” I said.

Long hard stare with black eyes that do not blink.

“We don’t have.”

“Do you know who does?”

“No.”

Next chemist, Watson… go fish

“Hey, do you have Monistat?”

“We have another brand.”

“Show me.”

“You want oral or cream?”

“I’m going for the cream.”

“It will take 10 days.”

Are you kidding me? I’m thinking, it should take 3 days. The commercial says 3 days! “How much?” leaves my lips….so desperate.

“200 rupees.” $2.50 more or less

“Okay, sold”

I hope this works.

Really, I hope it does. Its just a yeast infection. No I pray that it is. I don’t want to even think about it. It can’t get any more humiliating then this right?

I google the cream. Its called GynoTravogen and I read over the results on Wikipedia.

Pseudodoctoring on myself is scary, but I’m desperate and they can fix anything in the states if I really hurt myself right? Please tell me they can fix it! How on earth am I going to explain that I thought gyno-travogen made absolute sense to me ? Maybe, I should ask the chemist for some morphine too. Hmmm. Doesn't this sound like a fabulous Sunday night?

The work week began with a chocolate bar on my desk and a nice card saying sorry from my technician. Whatever happened with my tech last week had cleared. I hold my breath waiting for the follow-up infection, but there isn’t one.

So now my main worry becomes the papers on my desk. They are supposed to be and put into something called Edline or Gradequick. These pesky people called students keep asking me about their grades. Seriously? You want me to grade these, but I’m so grouchy.

"Miss, you have a rubric!" they whine

"You think there’s a rubric in life? Let me tell you about the rubric of life. Let's discuss this in my office."

"No, that’s okay, don’t worry about our papers this very minute."

The good part about reaching your limit is that the word no emerges. Heck the word hell no is going to emerge if I’m not careful. The good part is that I’m real careful. 

Crappin

We are at the hospital. Rilee has been sick for a week on and off maybe longer. I've had a nasty bout with a stomach ailment. Nothing but water comes out if anything at all. My intestines are in knots that crease and tighten on top of each other. Cramps, nightsweats, a passing chill and nausea are my constant companions. Did I say nothing but water is excreted from my body?

At one point, I told myself that food sickness & diarrhea were going to be a realistic evil. I thought we'd suffer a few times going into this adventure. Now it's every single day and the minute I decide to pretend it doesn't exist, to operate in spite of it, has only made what was bad worse. Eat whatever the hell you want has been my Bourdain like motto. It has been a recipe for disaster.

Sibte the financial advisor sat me down and said I need to inspect the nails yes, fingernails of my staff. I'm thinking over all the meals I've eaten. I may never ever eat again.

Elaine the nurse listens with a sympathetic ear. Her lovely British accent has a calming effect on me. She has now decided to send us to the hospital. She hands me a lime green sticky in the shape of an apple with a name and a time. She speaks with facilities so that a driver can take us.

Leaving school in Pakistan to go to the doctor is an exercise. It's not like we want to go to Disneyland. Just to the doctor. We don't want to excrete water from our behinds. Auub has the misfortune of being our caretakers. He parks outside of Shifa hospital. Rilee and I try to maintain our composure, but just going there, meaning the car ride makes us both queasy.
Following behind a seven foot man in light blue pajama pants and a free flowing shirt is tedious in the repressive heat & humidity. We walked half a block and I want to collapse.
We stay behind Auub like two baby ducklings. Rilee and I hold hands. He protects us from oncoming traffic and we do our best to stay with him. He's probably 50 years old, but daddy long legs strides once or twice and we take 2.5 little steps to his one.
The hospital is full. There are people swarming everywhere. Rilee and I stand out in our t-shirts and jeans, but I don't care. Too sick to care. Auub is patient with us. We go through reception...we see more people. Old, young, frail some unfortunately disfigured, some with wounds, some coughing. We circle around looking for a place to sit. Unfortunately, there are people far worse off than us, so I give them our seats. Auub circles around and says "Two together, you sit." We sit.

We see the doctor and the nurse. They weigh us and take our blood pressure. We hear a man throwing a fit at the front counter. He's yelling appointment in English. The rest is in
Urdu, but everyone stops to witness an adult temper tantrum. Even his sandals are unbuckled.

The doctor wears western clothes and has thick glasses . He speaks fluent English. He asks what happened. I explain to him that I've never been sick with this kind of illness. No illness other than the birth of a child has taken me out for a week.
He examines our tummies and asks more questions. He thinks we have food poisoning. We will have blood drawn, stool samples, and medicine. Auub makes a mad dash for the pharmacy line while Rilee and I collapse into the lab line. In two blinks of an eye Auub the magical creature is back.

He gets yelled at and told to leave, but he never leaves us. The lab tech double gloves and sticks the needle in. I say ow, it's a mean little pinching sensation. Auub laughs, but in a friendly way. It's over.

Rilee isn't as lucky. The lab tech misses her vein and once again she's jabbed. Tears roll down her cheek. Auub pats her head and for the first time Rilee is actual tough. The lab tech probes the needle in to my daughters arm. I'm watching her flinch.

Shortly after this we are shuttled back to school. Back in my office, there is a mound of paperwork to do, papers to grade, and then I notice my iphone alarm going off. Crap. What must I do now?

I pack up my stuff to head to sports event software training with Kashif, Junaid, and Kai. My girls burst in about half an hour in to the training. Realizing Rilee is dehydrated and sick we go home. My stomach grumbles and it seems to me, if eating were optional I'd pick that option.
On the way out, I stop by an office of a colleague having problems with our drive folders. I check his permissions and see they are all wrong. Tomorrow, I tell him the kids want to go home.
The day, which started off grim has been in a word "crappin". In adventure? Yes. A fairy tale with magical sprites and unicorns? No. It will continue because tomorrow is a new day my friend. A whole new day.

It was Arranged

The combination of clear blue water, pure sunshine, and lunch should make me happy. An obnoxious bird literally honked and a few wasps dive bombed us, but these events were laughable. So, are you married? Three pairs of hard brown eyes stared at me as I said, "No, divorced. " "How many divorces?"Just one," this question made me kinda smile actually. "So, are you looking?" "Huh?" That came from nowhere. So many questions. I carefully and politely said, "I'm happy."
"Well then", he said..we have a saying here in Pakistan. "What's that?" I asked. He then began to explain something about Pakistani men, but I clearly didn't understand it. This whole conversation was really perplexing. "I don't get it," I said. He sighed.

He explained lots of things to me. The concept of having more than one wife for instance. I'm not sure why, but it took me by surprise. He told me that it was quite common. Actually, I had no occasion to think about it one way or another. He said that there should be an age difference between a wife and a husband of 10-12 years. The husband should be older.

He then began to talk on arranged marriages. I have an arranged marriage, he announced.
You do?
Yes, I do.
I had been working and I remember my mom asked me if I liked this beautiful girl she had introduced me to. Just recalled that she was beautiful and that was it. So, I told my mom, yea sure.
Next thing I know we were engaged and then married.
All I did was work and she was also working, but then she got sick..an appendicitis. I had to sit with her at the hospital. That's when I fell in love with her.
One of the men is shaking his head. Its the unmarried one. He is always telling me, he does not want to get married. We move on to discussing other things and finishing up our lunch.

I'm not reminded of this conversation until I'm checking out at the grocery store three days later. There is a family, which consists of a young woman with an older man and their daughter. He is not happy with their purchases. He puts half of them back on the counter. She looks as though she does not care whatsoever. He has thick rimmed glasses and grey chest hair popping out of his polo shirt. He's wearing blue jeans and a fancy watch. His wife is fashionable and their child is wearing cut off jeans and a t-shirt. It didn't seem to me that there was anything out of the ordinary, but my mind immediately jumps back to our little conversation at the pool.

I immediately look around the store with a pair of new eyes and a whole new set of questions builds for our next lunch meeting.

Saviour

Don't you understand? The server spits nothing, but errors at me as though I've poisoned it. Walking into the server closet brought a UPS explosion. I thought a small bomb had gone off. There were stabilizers on the electrical lines and removing these seemed to help, but how would I have known that? The only thing I knew was that the wiring wasn't to any kind of US electical code. Wasn't there an international code? Why bother looking, why? The equipment that comprises the infrastructure threatens suicide on a daily basis. There are days when I advocate for assisted suicide, but I persist nonetheless. There seemed to be a pound of spaghetti on the floor twisted every which way. No, no that's my cabling. How can this be? The CAT 6 is twisted onto the electrical cords and I just want to scream mostly. Rip it all out. Oh wait, a power supply has died. We have a duplicate TCP/IP. We have overheating. Do we have another switch? Wait, I have to teach a class. Nothing works.

There is a beautiful woman with long hair in the bathroom. I'm convinced she may actually live in the bathroom, but I'm not going to ask. She is going to yell at me, because I'm not sure what I ate. It takes 8 flushes to get everything to clear. There is a 4th of July fountain pouring right out of my rear. Everything is taking so long. No one else is freaking? They just ask when its going to work again, as though someone tripped on a power cord.

Take a deep, deep breath just get through the day if nothing else. One foot in front of the other foot. Closing my eyes to participate in uncooperative sleep brings on a world where everyone is wandering around in black. There is a miscommunication because under our beds there is a hole so deep...it has no bottom. Somehow, a woman was thrown under a bed. The jokester thought he would hear a thud, but there was nothing. It wasn't what it appeared to be at all. There appeared to be a cluttered mess under the bed, just like normal. There were even soft items that accumulated and hovered on the top like clouds. He threw her under there to scare her. Now she was gone. My firefighter is telling him, she is gone. He definitively says, "There will not be a thud." I wake up confused, realizing that it was a nightmare. We dream our fears. We will not be saved.