Most any group of Americans traveling abroad will include someone like Ann T. Sepsis. If Ann is scrupulously hygienic at home, where the bacteria and microbes have an almost comforting familiarity, she is doubly on guard in strange climes and places where, as she often puts it, “Lord only knows what kind of water that was washed in,” or “they probably wrapped mummies in these bed sheets.” Her roommates are lucky to survive the chemical clouds of sterilizers, insecticides, and air fresheners.
About one-quarter of Ann’s time abroad is spent disinfecting things: sanitizing toilet seats, sterilizing silverware with alcohol wipes, and, most of all, washing her hands with the obsessive frequency of Lady Macbeth. Every doorknob, railing, elevator button, and bathroom fixture is a potential carrier of “diseases that we eradicated centuries ago back home.”
Ann has had so many immunization and vaccination shots that she has more needle tracks on her limbs than a back alley junkie. But, not taking any chances, she is also pumped so full of antibiotics that people might be cured of infections by just sitting next to her. Still, for all of her diligence Ann is often is one to come down with dysentery, or some other form of “revenge” against tourists, which of course, confirms the plague warnings she issues daily. Ann always feels fortunate to get back home alive, where she can properly launder her bio-hazard suit.
If Ann is a bit overzealous in taking precautions, her kindred soul, Sarah Meddick, is likewise with her clinical activities. As ready with a curbside diagnosis as she is to dispense from her astonishingly complete traveling pharmacy, Sarah picks up where Ann’s dire warnings have gone unheeded.
Sarah’s idea of a good travel guide is the Physician’s Desk Reference. Tour managers regularly ask the hotels to give her room 9-1-1. Usually she has one complete piece of luggage devoted to her apothecary, and only the fact that she maintains its medicaments in original prescription bottles and is armed with letters from specialists in communicable diseases distinguishes her from being a ‘mule’ for a Colombian drug cartel.
For Sarah a tour coach is more like a M.A.S.H unit that should have a red cross on the side. She plies its aisles each morning checking on her ‘patients’: “How’d that ibuprofen work on that swollen ankle, Mr. Smith?”
Though she lavishes her clinical attentions without fee, they might cost dearly in personal dignity: “So, that yogurt having some effect on the yeast infection, Marsha? Need any more nitro glycerin Mr. Evans? Your color looks better today; next time remember to use the elevator to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. “And Mr. Bernstein, didn’t I tell you not to drink any liquor with those tranquilizers. Now we’re having a hard time keeping our eyes open, aren’t we, Mr. Bernstein? Mr. Bernstein? Mr. BERNstein. MR. BERNSTEIN!!! WHERE’S MY DEFIBRILLATOR?!”
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.16.2005)