23 DAYS TO GO

I’VE STARTED: catching myself mumbling and chanting under my breath, when I’m not thinking about it, driving or walking down the street: “Not long, not long, not long, twenty, twenty-three, twenty, then nineteen eighteenseventeensixteen, three four five, not long notlong…”, not even realizing I’m doing it until people are staring. 

Everything’s starting to fall into place. But money! Oh, money. Flying straight out the door right when we need to hold onto it. Our clothes, perfectly fine two weeks ago, are suddenly falling apart and need replacing. Our packs, perfectly okay before, are ripped and mouldy. And then there’s the doctors…

Seven hundred dollars each on vaccinations. Seven hundred! Adam and I strolled into the medical centre down on Broadway, cocky as can be. We’d agreed – only the essentials. Yellow fever, natch. Maybe one of the Heps. At worst, a Tetanus booster. $200 should cover it.

The doctor played it cool at first.

“Ever been to South America, doctor?” Adam asked, making conversation.

“Nah, man!,” grinned the doctor, “Always wanted to, though. Always giving people the shots, never getting them myself.”

We laughed. We shared a moment. We bonded. And then he turned us around, threw us over a barrel and had his merry way with us.

“Have you guys thought about rabies?”

“No,” we answered confidently.

“You should think about rabies. You’ll need to get three shots. They’ll be $360. And then you’ll need to decide which malaria medication you want to buy from me. Malaria meds work out at about $4 a tablet. You’ll need to take them every day, as well as for a month afterward. Let me print you some information.”

At which point he printed us off the disease info sheets, a veritable catalogue of ways to die in South America. Adam remained cool, calm, collected. I felt the first few beads of sweat appear on my brow. I’ve always been a hypochondriac. Every cold is pneumonia, every fever is meningitis, every cut is septicemic. Rabies and malaria are not words I want to hear.

I steadied myself, and charged onward.

“Mmm. We can’t really afford rabies,” I said, “and we probably won’t get it, right? And I don’t know – is it really worth getting the malaria tablets if we’re going to be over there so long?”

“Firstly,” he said, “If you get rabies, and you start to show symptoms, you can’t be treated. You will die. Secondly, if you get malaria, you will probably also die, or at least wish that you were dead for a very long time.”

We got the damn vaccinations. The nurse shuffled across the room in socks and Crocs and dealt them out, three in each arm, flu, polio, yellow fever, rabies, hep A, hep B, typhoid, cholera.

“Which is the most painful?” asked Adam.

“The bill,” she cackled.

I decided to give it one last try.

“Do you really think this rabies shot is necessary?” I asked.

“How long are you going for?” 

“Twelve to eighteen months,” I replied.

Her old cat eyes widened.

“Let me read you an email I just got from a guy in Peru,” she said, fiddling absently with her mouse for all of ten seconds before flinging it aside, “oh, god, it’s not working. But anyway, this email from this guy, he said that he’s just surrounded by rabid mongooses – wait, is it mongooses or mongeese? Anyway, he’s just surrounded by rabid mongeese all the time, and he said it’s lucky that he got his rabies shot, because otherwise he’d probably be dead.”

What a way to go. Ambushed in Peru by a pack of rabid mongooses.

These rabies shots had better be worth it. I will consider this trip an abject failure if I am bitten by any less than three rabid animals – and I want to pick the animals. Jaguar, ocelot and alpaca - in that order - or else I’m packing up and going home.