<< back << home

We both had been itching for another adventure someplace warm, someplace cheap, someplace Spanish-speaking. This trip, six weeks in Guatemala, was one we’d planned together.

In all my travels, I’d had the good fortune of not being sick on the road. A cold here or there, an uncomfortable stomach, but I’d never fallen seriously ill. Michelle, on the other hand, had experienced this before.

Once, in Ecuador, she’d had wrenching pangs of diarrhea. Now, in this Guatemalan pharmacy, we both waited nervously in line hoping our turn would come before another round of cramps and a frantic rush to the nearest bathroom.

It wasn’t that we’d gone traveling unprepared. We made appointments at our local travel clinics before coming to Guatemala. There, we updated our immunizations, received malaria medication and large doses of anti-bacterial pills.

At the first gut-twisting bouts of diarrhea, we’d read the instructions for these pills. They seemed incredibly strong, an entire page of side effects scared us away. Besides, they were anti-bacterial.

We knew that amoebas were a main cause of intestinal problems in Guatemala. Amoebas weren’t bacteria. If we truly had amoebas, our medication wouldn’t work.

Having been through this before, Michelle was a firm believer in local medicine. "These are their bugs. They know what to do with them," she claimed.

She had a point. If we had Guatemalan amoebas, we might as well have Guatemalan pills. Only we didn’t have amoebas. We had giardia.

Again, Michelle’s previous experience had come in handy.

“We need to find a lab,” she said.

“A lab?” I repeated. “For what?”

It turns out she was right. Checking with workers at our hotel, we confirmed that in Guatemala, when one shows signs of sickness, a trip to the laboratory is in order.

There, a blood, urine or stool sample is taken, tests are done and a report is printed. The report can then be taken to a doctor, who will simply read the findings and prescribe a medication, for a charge of $15 USD.

Or, one can skip the doctor and head straight for the pharmacy, hand over the lab diagnosis and get pills. This is what we had done.

By asking around, we’d found a laboratory. For twenty quetzals, which is approximately $3USD, we left stool samples collected in film canisters— an embarrassing and repulsing experience we survived with giggles.

We returned a few hours later to pick up our typed reports. Our results, in Spanish, told which tests had been performed. The lab had checked our samples for lipids, blood, and various larvae, as well as amoebas, which we were thrilled we did not have.

Yet, at the bottom of the list in bold, we read our tests were positive for giardia lamblia, a parasite. Not only that, we learned a new vocabulary word.

“Quistes,” our reports also read.

“What’s that?” we asked the lab tech.

“Huevos, eggs,” he responded.

Apparently, Michelle and I were hosts.

We thought about what we had recently eaten and suspected pizza. After swapping tales with other backpackers, it had become the culprit.

Pizza appears safe; it is familiar and arrives at the table hot like guidebooks advise to kill any lingering bacteria. However, pizza isn’t fully cooked. It stays in the oven long enough to melt the cheese, not burn it.

At any point, in the preparation process, if any of the toppings come into contact with dirty knives, cutting boards or hands, the germs picked up are not killed in the oven. They are incubated.

It might not have been the pizza. We might have ingested contaminated water. Although we purchased bottled water, we might have swallowed some in the shower.

Even a mundane act, like taking off our shoes, could have passed on the parasite. If we had stepped in infected dog urine in the street, then touched our shoes, then touched our mouths, we could have picked up giardia.

Any number of things could have made us sick. The important thing now, just two weeks into our trip, was to kill the parasite before the eggs started hatching.

A spot opened at the pharmacy counter. Michelle and I stepped eagerly forward, lab results in hand.

A short Guatemalan stood on the other side of the computer. Normally, his height would not have been remarkable, most Guatemalans were small. Yet, this particular Guatemalan, it seemed, had not yet finished growing.

Michelle and I took one look at our clerk and guessed his age to be about twelve. He was dressed in a white lab coat and some sort of infected, scabbed-over pimple marked his left cheek. Fang-like eyeteeth protruded from his smile. Was this really our pharmacist?

Uncertain, we handed our lab reports to him. He picked up Michelle’s, read the first two lines and broke into a fit of giggles. We knew what was at the top of the page—the color and consistency of our lab sample. At least this was proof he could read, if not proof of his age.

Humiliated by his giggles, we almost turned and left. Yet, parasites plan for no one.

We felt okay now, but cramps could come at any minute, we’d already waited in line. With newfound determination, I pointed to the bottom of Michelle’s report, to the diagnosis.

The boy pharmacist nodded, still giggling, then left for a back room. He returned with two different boxes of pills and a strange set of instructions. Two pills every hour with food.

“That’s not right,” we told the boy pharmacist.

“Yes,” he assured, it was.

“But that’s a lot of pills, and a lot of food,” we protested.

“Yes,” he agreed.

The pharmacist at the next station overhead and leaned in to offer help. A young woman in her twenties, she eyed the lab report and cast a sympathetic smile our way. She typed a moment on her computer.

Then, in rapid Spanish we didn’t understand, she barked at the boy. He scurried back to the supply room, head hung low. This time he returned with an arm full of boxes and spread them on the counter. Each box was a different brand of pills; we could choose whichever we wanted. But how to choose?

By now, we’d attracted the attention of yet another pharmacist, this time a grown man. With three generations assisting, we were allowed to open each box and view the pills.

Most were large, white and non-coated. All were individually sealed, like cold medicine in the United States, so we didn’t dirty any. Reading the leaflet in each box—again in Spanish, we were able to make out dosages and side effects.

Yet, our main interest was to ensure that whichever drug we chose, it treated giardia. Most of the medications offered a list of ailments it cured. If we didn’t spot giardia on the list, we put those pills aside.

“But this is good,” argued the boy, picking up box we’d set aside.

“Hush,” scolded the young woman.

“And this one too,” he protested, offended by yet another rejected brand.

“Leave them be,” she snapped.

The grown pharmacist, understanding our anxiety to find the right medicine for our disease, and perhaps our distrust of the boy, pulled a pill book from under the counter. It was three years old.

Michelle and I were weary to consult it. The grown pharmacist persisted however, opening the thick pages and sliding it across the counter.

The book listed ailments alphabetically, each entry with a list of drugs used for treatment. Cross-checking the leaflets with the pill book, Michelle and I narrowed our choices to three, none of which suggested doses of two pills every hour with food.

We selected the brand Quistemizole for two reasons. First, the dosage of three pills a day with meals, for ten days, seemed reasonable. Since we knew our intestines were host to giardia eggs, or “quistes,”it pleased us that our medication shared the name of our infliction.

To this, the boy pharmacist giggled agreement.

“Yes, yes,” he nodded. That made perfect sense.

It did, we thought, carrying our boxes to the cashier. We made it safely from the pharmacy and back to our hotel. Three pills and a day later, Michelle and I were on the road to recovery.

Kelly Westhoff is a freelance writer and teacher in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. She writes for many local publications and is in the process of completing her first book, a travel memoir.

<< home

<< back