Let a billion bacteria bloom.
Remember that mug of tapwater I accidentally drank?
I had some light gastric distress this morning, and thought I'd escaped easy. But those little buggers continued to multiply -- I wished I'd never seen the movie Three Kings; some of those more biologically-oriented special-effects sequences keep coming to mind -- and by mid-morning I felt as though my stomach were filled with jello, and waves of nausea kept pounding me up against the broad sandy shore of the Land of Wooziness. (A lesser land mass than the oft-visited Territory of Abject Misery, which is large enough to be properly classified as an (in)continent and is bounded by the Sea of Despair. One really gets to learn about geography, in my job.)
Antibiotics are sold over-the-counter here. And antibiotics are a fine thing if one is only visiting a germ-ridden place. However, what I learned from my first overseas venture was that heavy use of the same antibiotics over the span of two years turns one into a giant petri dish for the production of superbugs. Before I left, I had to use the equivalent of biological warfare to get rid of a recurrent infection. It finally did get killed off, but, for a while there, I wondered whether I was going to be collateral damage.
So, tonight I'm going to try a folk cure that's worked pretty well for me before.
Feni is twice-distilled spirit made from palm hearts or cashew nuts, and manufactured throughout the state of Goa. (Goa is not actually a city. I didn't know that until I went there.) I find the palm toddies undrinkable, but the cashew variety, when not skunky -- and it's nearly always skunky -- tastes a little like peppery vodka. Feni has three salient qualities: (1) it's wicked-strong, (2) it produces a dreamy kind of inebriation that one can imagine being used in shamanic rituals, and (3) it renders surgically sterile anything it touches.
Good night!
I had some light gastric distress this morning, and thought I'd escaped easy. But those little buggers continued to multiply -- I wished I'd never seen the movie Three Kings; some of those more biologically-oriented special-effects sequences keep coming to mind -- and by mid-morning I felt as though my stomach were filled with jello, and waves of nausea kept pounding me up against the broad sandy shore of the Land of Wooziness. (A lesser land mass than the oft-visited Territory of Abject Misery, which is large enough to be properly classified as an (in)continent and is bounded by the Sea of Despair. One really gets to learn about geography, in my job.)
Antibiotics are sold over-the-counter here. And antibiotics are a fine thing if one is only visiting a germ-ridden place. However, what I learned from my first overseas venture was that heavy use of the same antibiotics over the span of two years turns one into a giant petri dish for the production of superbugs. Before I left, I had to use the equivalent of biological warfare to get rid of a recurrent infection. It finally did get killed off, but, for a while there, I wondered whether I was going to be collateral damage.
So, tonight I'm going to try a folk cure that's worked pretty well for me before.
Feni is twice-distilled spirit made from palm hearts or cashew nuts, and manufactured throughout the state of Goa. (Goa is not actually a city. I didn't know that until I went there.) I find the palm toddies undrinkable, but the cashew variety, when not skunky -- and it's nearly always skunky -- tastes a little like peppery vodka. Feni has three salient qualities: (1) it's wicked-strong, (2) it produces a dreamy kind of inebriation that one can imagine being used in shamanic rituals, and (3) it renders surgically sterile anything it touches.
Good night!
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