Giant pink pills

Today I came to the realization that I'm sick of being sick and my attempts to fight off whatever it is that's been making me miserable just aren't working. This afternoon I had a meeting scheduled with one of the physicians at the project, and when he walked in, he actually stopped himself short from asking "How are you?" and instead stated the obvious "You're not well." I agreed and asked him if he could do anything to help. "Is your cough productive?" "No." "Do you have a fever or headache?" "Yes." "Congestion?" "Terrible." And, voila, there was my prescription. It was barely legible (as prescriptions tend to be), but I proceeded straight to the pharmacy in town to have it filled.

The pharmacy was a separate adventure. I walked into a large room lined with shelves of medicines from which I was separated by a counter. There were three women in white at the counter and I chose one at random. I approached, said "Bonjour" and presented her with my prescription. She glanced at it for just a second and began typing furiously on her calculator. Immediately I began to wonder if it were possible to be charged a muzungu price at a pharmacy and whether it would be rude if I protested when she told me the total. But then she tore off a scrap of paper, scribbled an amount on it and pointed to another woman who was obviously the cashier. I took the scrap of paper and realized that it said 750 francs ($1.50) and decided protesting was unnecessary. I then paid the cashier and returned to the first woman with my receipt. Before I had even handed her my receipt, she had pulled one of the hundreds of boxes from the shelves behind the counter and was counting out fifteen enormous, bright pink pills.

Desperate for anything that might make me feel better, I swallowed one of the pills as soon as I got home. I then realized I had no idea what I had taken and decided to look up the ingredients listed on the blister pack. The first blurb I found on the first ingredient said "derived from coal tar, it is the active metabolite of phenacetin, but unlike phenacetin, paracetamol has not been shown to be carcinogenic." I was worried. I was worried until I looked further down the page and saw that in the U.S., "paracetamol" is known as "acetaminophen." I breathed a sigh of relief and went on to look up the remaining ingredients. (For anyone who was curious, they were all pain relievers and antihistamines.)

Hopefully I'll start feeling better soon!