If you think being sick in America is bad, I can promise you
being sick in South Africa is a million times worse. Over the last few weeks I
have been suffering from pretty bad allergies. Of course I wasn’t too worried
about it, I had suffered from allergies before and this was nothing new, or so
I thought. Turns out after three weeks of coughing and sneezing, your body
starts to get mad at you. In my case, my body got super pissed off, and I ended
up with a really bad sinus infection. This is far from my first sinus
infection, so I was able to self-diagnose my problems pretty quickly. Feeling
like my head was a giant balloon and that I had just been punched in the jaw a
couple times made it pretty easy to tell what was going on, but unfortunately being able to
self-diagnose gets you nowhere in getting prescription antibiotics. As much as
I really didn’t want to go to the doctor
in rural South Africa, I also didn’t want to feel like crap for another week or
two, so I gave in and called Peace Corps medical staff. Of course they are
located 10 hours away in Pretoria, so my only option was to have them set up an
appointment for me at the doctor’s office two towns over for the following day.
This is where the fun part really began. The doctor’s office
is located in the town of Ixopo. If I had a car it is maybe 30 minutes from
my village, which isn’t bad at all. However, I don’t have a car, so I had to
brave public transportation to get there. It takes two different taxis to get
from my village to the doctors. I walked up to get the taxi from my village to
my shopping town of Umzimkulu at 11am. Even though my appointment in Ixopo wasn’t
until 2pm, I had to take the 11am taxi out because the next taxi usually doesn’t
leave until school gets out, at 2:45pm. We waited 45 minutes to get the other
13 people needed to cram that pickup truck full before we could head into town.
Those 45 minutes taught me an important lesson; when you are sick, nothing
makes you feel worse than being stuffed in a taxi with 13 other people who are
all yelling at the top of their lungs in a language you don’t understand. I
spent the majority of that drive praying I wouldn’t throw up all over the
person across from me because my head hurt so badly. I kind of wanted to kiss
the ground when we finally got out in Umzimkulu, but then I remembered I was in
a 3rd world country and I probably shouldn’t be putting my face
anywhere near the ground in town.
The next leg of my journey was to catch the taxi from
Umzimkulu to Ixopo. The positive side of this part is that the taxis are
actually vans rather than pickups, so you aren’t quite as smashed in. The
negative side is that the taxis I needed are located in the sketchiest part of
Umzimkulu. On a normal day I am extremely rude to people in that area for
safety reasons. South African culture is that if a woman tells you no nicely
she doesn’t really mean no, she means try harder. Obvious that is not the
message I am ever trying to convey, so I am normally downright rude to men
hanging around the taxi rank. Unfortunately for the men who tried to yell at me
yesterday, I was already in a bad mood, so rude might be an understatement. In
America I’m sure I would have been classified as a bitch, but here I’m betting
they would say I was just being feisty. Once I made it through the obnoxious
drunks, I only had to wait for about 20 minutes for the taxi to fill and head
off to Ixopo. Now, since I had to take the 11am taxi out of my village, I ended
up getting to Ixopo around 1pm for my 2pm appointment. At home I would normally
go sit in the closest Starbucks to burn some time, but coffee shops don’t really
exist in the rural areas, so I went to my next best option, KFC. South Africans
love their KFC, in fact most towns have signs telling you to turn around and go
back the 2km to the closest KFC, just in case you didn’t see it when you drove
by. It wasn’t exactly where I wanted to sit for an hour, but there are far
worse places in these towns to hang out than KFC.
Eventually I felt it was an appropriate time to head to my appointment
across the street. Surprisingly the doctor and the receptionist spoke flawless
English, and I was checking in without a problem. Unsurprisingly they were a
little behind schedule, and I had to wait for a little over an hour to be seen.
Once I was finally taken back it took less than five minutes for the doctor to
confirm that yes I do have a sinus infection and that I needed antibiotics. As
glad as I was to hear that I had been right all along, I was not that happy
that I spent four hours suffering while waiting for a doctor to tell me
something I already knew. My frustrations, however, were substantially lowered
when the doctor just started handing out medications. Turns out in South Africa
some doctors write you prescriptions and send you to the pharmacy, while others
act as a pharmacist and just hand out drugs like candy. The last time I had a
sinus infection in the US I was just given your standard antibiotics and told
to rest for a few days. In South Africa I was given everything I could possibly
need to make my life more comfortable during my recovery, and probably some
things I really didn’t need. I got the usual antibiotics, and on top of that I
got a probiotic supplement so the antibiotics don’t upset my stomach, and over
the counter decongestant, cough syrup with codeine which worked wonders helping
me sleep last night, pain meds just in case (of what I’m not really sure), and
a nasal spray to try and help my allergies. It was kind of like getting a gift
bag for coming to the doctor. The excitement did wear off a little when I
realized I had at least another hour of travel time in order to get home, and
then wore off completely when my last taxi back to my village was filled with
13 other people and 6 live chickens. I was having problems breathing enough as
it was, but adding a bunch of chickens in the back of a packed truck just made
it so much worse.
So, the next time it takes you twenty minutes to get to the
doctor, where you have to wait for another twenty minutes in a spacious waiting
room that’s full of magazines and the smell of cleaning products, don’t complain.
The experience could be so much worse. My new goal is to not have to go back to
the doctor for the next 18 months that I am here. Unfortunately that might be a
little hard with my allergies because I am too much of a baby to take the
stupid nasal spray. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the 12 years I spent
getting water up my nose when I was swimming, but nasal sprays freak me out. I
have spent all day trying to get up the courage to just do it, but every time I
get that little bottle even close to my face I panic and can’t do it. I’m going
to call this one of my 1st world problems in a 3rd world
country.
