A Preliminary Adventure

When one has an adorable little nephew, whom one will not be seeing for about ten months, one is prone to agree to less-than-wise situations just to spend a little more time with him before leaving the country. Hence, when my sister called last Saturday and asked that I babysit the little fellow (who had been sick) because she and her husband had caught whatever my nephew had, I agreed. So my tiny comrade and I spent the day together.

The next morning, I woke up ill, the sort of sore-throat-and-chills kind of ill which usually precedes the feverish, running nose kind of ill. I skipped church, but that was about all that I could allow myself to skip. In about forty-eight hours, I would be leaving America, and there was much to be done. And so, because I've never been able to afford a valet, a butler, or any other type of domestic, I ignored the state of my health and spent Monday packing and moving like a congested, middle class fiend.

During my three flights, I tried to ignore my growing feelings of sickness. This adventure was exciting, after all, and to quote a very articulate woman’s response to the possibility of getting bronchitis, “Ain't nobody got time for that.”

Unfortunately, by the time I woke up in Athens on Thursday morning, I had plenty of time for that, and that appeared to be exactly what I would be doing for a while.  What started as a sore throat had turned into a full-blown high fever/congestion extravaganza.  

Two things occurred to me: first, that there was almost no food in the house. Second, if I went out in search of food now, there was a high likelihood of collapsing on the way (I’m not being overly dramatic on this. Fevers and I have a great deal of enmity between us, and I've learned—painfully—to acknowledge my betters). Images of me crumpled in a ball along the roadside came to mind, shortly followed by vague images of well-meaning, but non-English speaking Greeks trucking me off to a foreign hospital, where another well-meaning doctor removed my kidneys and liver. Since I’m rather fond of my internal apparatus, this vision of pre-death organ donation clinched my decision to wait the fever out at home.

The subsequent hours were humorous, in retrospect. I won’t bore you with details, but I have jumbled memory of a day of eating dried cranberries and peanuts (about all the food I had with me), an attempt at a hot shower by boiling water on the stove, and an embarrassing moment or two of me doubled over a kitchen chair in an effort to placate a bloody nose.

The next morning, I decided to make a go at finding a pharmacy. Apparently, pharmacies are extremely plentiful here, and there’s one on my block. Upon entering, I asked the pharmacist if she spoke English.

“A little,” she replied.

The next few minutes included me pointing at my nose and making a downward motion, to which she pointed at her nose and made another downward motion. A moment later, we were both playing what appeared to be a bizarre type of miniature air trombone. Eventually, she gave me some cold and flu medication, which took care of the congestion, lowered my fever, and knocked me out soundly—so soundly, in fact, that if a doctor managed to sneak into the apartment and remove my liver, I wouldn't have known.

Well, I guess if I turn yellow in a few days, then we’ll know…