The Letter of Two Years and Oh Yeah Dad

By Beth
This post is dedicated to my dad. Despite the fact that I love him dearly, I want him to know that, wherever he may be right now, his loving daughter is over in Africa waving her fist at him.

My dad is a very loving father that is wholeheartedly absentminded at times. He is good at hiding it, but he is also extremely good at forgetting the most important things. Like, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that we changed your step-grandfather's funeral from a family kayaking trip to a traditional service. My two brothers and I showed up in bathing suits surrounded by ten other people in their Sunday best (epic fail). Or, oh yeah, I thought your stepbrother's wedding rehearsal dinner started much later, but I guess the flight tickets I advised you to get are going to make you miss it now (sigh). Might I mention that, when I was sixteen, my parents' divorce was also a surprise to me, only mentioned off-hand by my aunt while we were sitting at the kitchen table of our rented beach house:

“So your parents must be in court right around now.”
“What?”
“Oh yeah, they're getting divorced today.”
Someone had forgotten to let Beth know.

So my dad tries to video chat me when my internet is barely strong enough to load a page in under four minutes. When I talk to him, he asks if he can mail me anything.

I wish I could smile and appreciate the gesture. He really is trying to be a good dad. But the fact of the matter is, I'm on a very small island where both international snail mail and phone calling are extremely, extremely difficult and utterly not worth it. Letters can be delayed for as long as a month. And he knows this- I tell him every time I talk to him. And yet a week passes and he asks me again, as if I had never said a word – “Need anything out there, kiddo? I should've given you my water filter. Well, I can still mail it if you want.”

No, Dad, I do not want to be the crazy American that insists on filtering the water that is served to me by my American host (that is already boiled, by the way) as if I were out on one of our camping trips in the Whites. And even if I did want it, there is no way that it would arrive before I left the country. But yes, thank you for asking.

Well, Dany and I finally have supporting evidence of my frustrations. Because when we reached into Ned's mailbox the other day, we pulled out a letter mailed from Virginia with a birthday.

The infamous letter-- see mailing date stamped here

And this isn't just any birthday. This letter was mailed in December of 2007, making it officially almost two years old. It took two years to make it over to São Tomé from Virginia. I told him I could've delivered that letter on foot. He agreed. We stood for a moment in great awe.

Dad, this is why I don't want you to send me anything. Because unless you're expecting me to be back two years from now, I probably won't get it.

So this is all fair and good. The days pass and one night I develop some really horrible heartburn while I'm eating chicken and rice for dinner (weird...). I go to bed and the heartburn continues all night, and in the morning I wake up and I feel like I'm going to die (heartburn that feels like rocks lodged in my chest trying to fight their way out the fast way, stomach pain, killer diarrhea, general body weakness, and, getting into the evening, low fever). I examine my bottle of Doxycycline, what I've been taking daily for malaria prevention, over and over, scanning the directions that came with it. I've been using this stuff for two weeks now and the worst thing that I have encountered was a little stomach discomfort on the first day. Could it be the Doxy with delayed side-effects?

Growing up with a nurse for a mom, I normally don't worry about little things like this and know how to handle them. I got myself a few cans of Coke (ah, delicious Coke with real sugar and not high fructose corn syrup, how I miss thee in the States) to let flatten for drinking, and they helped loads. But seeing as I'm in a very poor country with a really bad hospital care system and am thousands of miles away from any good medical care, and seeing as this little bottle of Doxy says if fever should develop, stop using medication immediately and SEEK EMERGENCY HELP, I worry. The words “emergency help” do not ring well with me.

Phones here don't work- we know this already as so gently mentioned above- so I get on the internet (one of our home's many little luxuries) and find my friend Johnson, who calls the doctor that prescribed Doxy for me. I just want to know if it's possible that my symptoms are side-effects, or if they're something else. Their advice is to go to an ER, because there is nothing they can do from there. It is not comforting.

So here I am, sitting in bed, slightly burning up, with a core that hurts like the dickens, having to either shit or feeling like I'm going to vom every five minutes (making the toilet my new bff), and debating if I should actually make the trip to this “third world” hospital. The brain does crazy things when you're far away, and I panic, maybe more than I should.  Option A: I let this blow over and the next morning I'm too sick to be flown out of here and I die without ever seeing my family again. Option B: I stop taking Doxy to prevent what I'm feeling now but then I catch malaria; see Option A. My outlook isn't good.

I slowly walk into the living room where Ned is watching the news. I tell him how I'm feeling. He laughs and says he knows it's not malaria because he's had that before (what a bamf), so why don't I take this stomach soothing chalk-tasting crap and see how I feel in the morning?

In the morning I'm weak but better; weak mainly because the only thing I've had is a can and a half of Coke and anything else that tries to go down makes my heart flare up like the Fourth of July. But I know my fever is broken (the actual “breaking” of a fever is one of the most interesting sensations, and I really love it) and I'll be okay.

As the following days pass, I get stronger. It is only now, maybe 1.5 weeks later, that food is going down normally again (knock on wood). I'm perfectly fine.

I wait to tell my parents about the fiasco until after I'm better, wanting to be sure they don't worry like parents do. I mention to my dad over IM never to take Doxy and why.

“Oh,” he says, “I never take Doxycycline. I'm allergic to it. Your grandmother was too. She used to have to go to the hospital whenever she took it.”

My life is a game sometimes.

Current report: I'm still on Doxy and haven't had another episode like that one yet. And I figure that if I have to go through that again, at least I know it's not malaria and at least it probably won't kill me. So either I just had some weird temporary reaction, or it's an allergy I'll just have to deal with. Thanks Dad!  ::Shakes fist::