Travel drugs and registered nurses

Celia

After I get the serums from the chemist I go straight to the nurse for the needles. Celia is at the surgery and I have spent 30 minutes in five years getting to know her over just a few injections. I almost fall in love each time. I am never sick when I go, I leave knowing I’ll never catch something awful, and I never feel the shot.

So when she greets me saying, ‘please don’t tell me you’ve got hep-B,’ I think it’s because she wouldn’t marry me if I did. I tell her I don’t and she is relieved and I am pleased. ‘I’m here to be vaccinated so I never get it,’ I say.

But what she really wants to know is whether I have the vial in my bag. Oh, then … yes, I do – I do have hep-B.

She already knows I don’t have the disease because she has looked at my file and seen I’m already immune from the other jabs years ago, and I don’t need a booster, and the doctor should have known better. I can see she thinks the dose will be wasted on me. I ask if she wants to buy it.

Celia is gentle and deliberate and her lilting Kiwi accent anaesthetises any pain from the typhoid and the chicken pox going into my arms. A minute later the drugs in my blood are in my head and I feel dull and happy. Another moment later and I’m normal again. That didn’t last long.

‘Where are you going?’ she asks.

‘India,’ I tell her. ‘Egypt before that. Europe. North America. San Francisco first.’

Celia makes sure I have the right malaria tablets. She tries to find penicillin samples in case I get really sick. She signs a letter that lists the vaccinations I’ve had. And she gets the duty manager to buy the hep-B.

‘You’re very kind and think of everything,’ I say.

‘It’s my job,’ she replies.

I tell her about never feeling her needles, and she tells me they are the worst part of her job. I don’t tell her they are the best part of my visits.

Liz

Liz has already told me about hep-B over coffee. ‘Are they still selling that stuff? Nobody gives boosters for hep-B any more.’ She is despondent and emphatic.

‘Selling?’ I think to myself.

Despite what I’ve read about drug companies pushing product I still assume doctors prescribe. Liz is on the inside. Liz is a nurse. She’s told me before that companies now try to woo hospital nurses with free pub meals at weeknight seminars so they’ll tell doctors which drugs to use; which drugs to buy. Nurses are soft targets, apparently, but Liz pays for her own dinners.

Still over coffee and Liz is telling me what I need for India. Liz is so fit everything is in slow motion. Three years ago she decided to take up triathlons. Three weeks ago she qualified for the New York Marathon. When she speaks she speaks fast and fluently about drugs and doses, but with a clarity and affection that is particular to people who know things well, and who care deeply that everyone they know should always be okay. It is too fast for me to understand or to conjure up a question. Even my shortest response time is an eternity for her. She leaves me no time to distrust her.

A couple of days later Liz emails me the list. On it are things ‘only to make sure you don’t spend all your holiday on the bathroom floor with rigors!’ Rigors? I’ve never heard of rigors, except as a singular prefix to death. And I haven’t heard of the infectious diarrhoea she’s talking about either, where I shit blood with a bad fever. At first I didn’t think she was serious about saying ‘you can manage a bit of d & v’.

Then Liz tells me something that is a special comfort: ‘if you get really unwell, just call me and I can talk you through what you need to buy’. I can see there is no-one I will trust more once I’m there. I promise her I’ll get the drugs before I go and I promise myself I will stick to vegie curries and beer and never drink iced water.