Tales of An Amoeba
I truly hope to the bottom of my heart that none of you is ever as up-close and personal with a host of amoebae as I was a last week. I’ll spare you most of the gory details except to say that I proudly have a new feather in my cap. I have now officially puked out the window of a moving car.
There was one heart-warming aspect to this miserable trip to the clinic, however. Allow me to explain: Since the Bali bombings a few years ago, Indonesia has gone into hyper-security mode. Well, that’s what they claim anyway, but those of us who know better know that this is little more than a large-scale employment scheme. No fewer than 6 Indonesians guard the toll-style arm at the entrance to every building drop-off spot or parking garage in the city. One guard runs around the car with a giant dental mirror, one of them opens the hatch-back door to look around, a third raises the bar when you’re clear to pass through. The other 3 stand there taking themselves quite seriously but generally doing a whole lot of nothing.
So as we were approaching the ex-pat medical clinic with my head hanging out the window, the guards hollered loudly at my driver (who seemed quite concerned by the whole situation) and expediently waved us right through straight to the front door. One of the otherwise unoccupied guards managed to make himself useful by hollering at the motor bike that was about to come scooting around the side of the car. He was headed right toward my window to his potential detriment. God bless those security guards.
How do they know I had an amoeba causing the dysentery, you might wonder? Let’s just say that everything that goes in one side must come out the other…and they wanted me to collect it in a little container…twice.
Josh, I think your recent bad day might actually have been worse, but by a very narrow margin!
