things are getting serious

I spent the last two weeks spending money -- a camera, a sleeping mat (for hard beds, you don't want to be around me if I can't sleep!), all the odds and ends you need in the way of bug repellent, etc. Finally, the day for my shots arrived. I think this actually was the thing that made me realize, that, yes, I am going to another place, a very long ways away from here. Four shots, including yellow fever, and malaria pills. As I recently mentioned to a friend, I took a parasitology class in college which gave me a healthy respect for the myriad of nasty little critters which can make you sick in tropical countries -- malaria is just one of the more well known of them. There are any number of nasty worm diseases that just make me ill thinking about them. You bet I will not be eating anything I can't peel or cook, and staying out of any bodies of water. Fortunately I have had several years of practice from the time we lived in Chile and Peru, both of which had their own set of creepy diseases -- hepatitis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) -- passed by "kissing bugs", hydatid cyst disease....the last one is particularly ugly...it is a tapeworm disease that normally gets passed back and forth between sheep dogs and sheep, but if a person becomes a secondary host, huge cysts may form in any part of your body with hundreds of tapeworm heads (only heads) in them. It makes me nauseous just to think about it. I never touched a dog the whole time we were in Chile.