When I was 21 and spending a semester in Wales, I traveled around France, Italy, and Spain during our month-long Easter break. I was not too surprised to discover while in Paris that I had an ear infection that could not be ignored (my usual treatment of choice). I was already sleeping in a cheap room at the Woodstock Hostel, my top bunk only inches from the ceiling, and my lower bunk partner shaking the entire rickety thing every time she moved (which was approximately 90 times a minute). Sleeping with a wad of Kleenex held to my ear to mop up the foul-smelling oozing mixture of thick, yellowish-brown drainage and blood did not improve the situation. I prepared myself for spending part of the next day seeking not only a doctor, but an ear specialist, using a language of which I know exactly one word: merci (which I had just learned that day because there’s nothing to make you feel like the rudest person alive like the look you get when you’re unable to say “thank you” to a French person).
What I ended up finding was a pediatrician. At 21, I had long since passed the age of pediatrician patient material. But I had been wandering around Paris for nearly an hour, and everything was still in French and my ear was still oozing, and here was this sign that said something that vaguely resembled “pediatrics,” and had a picture of a handsome doctor smiling at a toddler who had no idea that this nice man was going to cause her a great deal of pain after the camera was gone. The doctor’s office was located on a typically narrow Parisian street in a building that looked like it had seen better days, and I had a vague sense that I wouldn’t want to be alone on that street after nightfall. It was the kind of place that dimwitted American girls go into when they’re traveling Europe alone in bad slasher flicks. Also comforting: there wasn’t a single other person on the entire street and it had a definite air of desertion.
I entered the office with the assumption that anyone as well-educated as a doctor would know some English, and the hope that said doctor would be able to direct me to an ENT for people over the age of 12, preferably located in a place no farther and no more difficult to find than around the corner. Rather than refer me to someone else, the doctor agreed to see me himself.
He seemed baffled and stunned that an American could possibly have found herself in his office. He led me to a room that had a standard doctor’s office bed and an ornate desk covered in papers. He took my vitals and looked continuously into my eyes. He measured my breathing with his hands on my back for at least a full minute. He put both hands on my cheeks and bemoaned my inability to speak French. There were a lot of long, awkward pauses while he looked at me with a curious expression as if I had told him I’d come from the future, and I wondered if I was going to make it back out to the deserted street with shabby buildings.
He went into a supply closet at the back of the room and came back carrying two pills for me to take. I took them in my hand and looked at them warily while he fetched a cup of water. Should I take them? What if he were drugging me and I’d wake up naked and chained to the wall? How would my parents ever find out what had happened to me? How good were the French authorities (assuming they eventually discovered me) about learning the identity of abducted women and notifying their foreign relatives? Did my parents have the money to ship my body home? Was I to be buried in a pauper’s grave in France, my very name forever unknown?
I have never since been able to visit any foreign country without wondering how word of my demise would reach my parents. Out of all these imagined deaths in foreign lands, only my thoughts of freezing to death in a remote Romanian village, my and my husband’s bodies carried by horse-cart to a local cemetery, our tragic deaths the subject of many Romanian villagers’ animated conversations for centuries to come, rivaled the images that went through my mind as I wondered whether I should take those pills. I reasoned that the likelihood that this doctor kept such strong sedatives on hand on the off chance that a naive girl would come into his office seeking help were slim, but that didn’t really make me feel much better.
By the time he came back with the water I had resolved to pretend to take them but really just toss them aside when he wasn’t looking, but he never stopped looking at me. His gaze was fixed continuously and unwaveringly on me. I took the pills.
He showed me to his desk and filled out a prescription, then handed it to me and sighed, again saying longingly, “You must speak French.” I promised I would learn. He gave me his business card and implored me to write to him. I promised I would. I studied the prescription, knowing damn well I wasn’t going to get it filled if I didn’t know what he had just prescribed for me. There, amidst all the French with its overabundance of vowels, I saw it: Augmentin. I know that! I’ve had that! That will not make me unable to function or impair my judgment! I asked what I owed him, but he refused payment. Business card and prescription in hand, I hurried out the door, back onto the increasingly creepy street, and rushed to the nearest pharmacy.
What I did not remember was that Augmentin gives me yeast infections. It is a common side effect and I have not needed to remember it because every doctor I’ve ever had always asks me if I have developed a yeast infection from Augmentin, which triggers my memory, and the doctor prescribes something else. But why would a pediatrician think to ask this?
I was in Barcelona when the yeast infection hit, and between all the headiness of being a young lass off on a grand adventure in Europe and the somewhat irregular showering, it took me two days to figure out what was going on and the cause. It was a Saturday night when I figured it out and I and my traveling companions (it would be stretching it to call them my friends) had just returned to our hostel after a miserable day of sight-seeing and souvenir shopping in the rain. They had already cracked open their vodka and I figured I could wait until the morning to find a drug store, so I joined them in our dining room to drink my 3 € bottle of champagne and succumb to their demands to watch Spanish television (none of us spoke Spanish).
As I mentioned, this was a Saturday night, which means the next day was a Sunday.
Spain is closed on Sundays.
I do not mean that you can’t go to a nice restaurant or a department store on Sundays in Spain. I do not even mean to indicate that even the fast food joints in Spain are closed on Sundays. I mean the country of Spain is closed on Sundays. The whole country. I would not be too terribly surprised to learn that they do not let people over the border on Sundays. The only shop I saw open was a candy store, and I’m pretty sure it was owned by the last two remaining Spanish Jews.
Without exaggeration, I went to twenty-three pharmacies that day, and all twenty-three were closed. If you are asking why I would bother to keep walking to each new pharmacy when the first seven or so were gated shut, you have obviously never been a woman on the third day of a yeast infection. I had to maintain hope or I would have laid down on that Spanish sidewalk, curled up, and wished for death. It seemed impossible to me that every drug store in Spain could be closed on Sundays. Surely Spanish people get sick on Sundays.
I didn’t give up after the twenty-third pharmacy; I just couldn’t find any more. I had to resign myself to waiting another day.
By Monday I was in Italy. I do not speak Italian either. I didn’t think this would really be a problem since I figured I’d be able to recognize a box of yeast infection medication even if it was in Yiddish. How different could they look from their English counterparts?
I did not foresee the sorry fact that Italy doesn’t keep their feminine hygiene products out in the open where just anyone can get to them. Oh, no, only the pharmacists have access to them; you have to ask the pharmacist. You have to tell the pharmacist, “Hey, my crotch itches, you got anything to help me with that?”
I checked my phrase book but although there were such helpful things as, “Go away,” the advice not to use “ciao” with strangers, and “one million” (clearly the most frequently used number in standard tourist traveling), there was nothing like, “I need medicine for a yeast infection,” or “Where are your feminine hygiene products?” It did not even list the word for “fire,” which I thought I could perhaps say while pointing in agony at my crotch to give the impression of burning. Suddenly the challenge was not finding an open pharmacy, but one with a pharmacist who spoke English. I am pretty sure that learning how to count in English is not closely followed by “yeast infection” on the vocabulary page, so I needed someone who was actually fluent in English, not someone who had studied it in high school.
What I got was a woman who may or may not have been able to count in English but who had evidently not stuck around for the “words related to feminine health and hygiene” day. But she did know “infection,” so I was halfway there.
Unable to communicate the more important half of my problem, we simply stood half-smiling at each other while I repeated “yeast infection,” and “um,” as if she simply needed to be reminded of what exactly my problem was. This continued for roughly 60 seconds, which is a lot longer when you’re trying to communicate such a need than it is when you’re trying to catch a bus.
No longer able to take the feeling of idiocy that was fast descending over me, I said hopefully, “Bacteria.” Her eyes lit up and she nodded her head vigorously, so I said, “Woman? Woman bacteria?” and tried to discreetly point between my legs, which is an impossible action to do discreetly, particularly with two additional Italian pharmacists watching the intriguing American with foreign pharmaceutical needs, and beaming with pride at their English-speaking colleague.
Understanding lighted in the woman’s eyes and she looked at me as if I had just presented her with a brand new puppy, rather than an overabundance of vaginal fungus.
“Ohhh, yes, yes!” she gushed and motioned for me to wait a minute as she hurried excitedly behind the counter. (Evidently an American with a yeast infection was quite an event.)
It occurred to me that perhaps she hadn’t understood me correctly at all and thought I had some kind of STD, and was now going to give me some medication that in the absence of an STD to fight off would make my ovaries fall out or my clitoris shrivel up or my G-spot burn off. In an effort to prevent such an undesirable result I tried to clarify the true nature of my discomfort when she returned.
“Um.”
I felt it best to start with a universal, something with which we were already comfortable before trying to express my total absence of a sex life.
“Just woman bacteria. No man. No, no man. Natural woman bacteria but too much.” I added, “Side effect,” as I pulled out my packet of Augmentin and showed it to her. It was, of course, all in French. (What, McDonald’s can make ketchup packets with a dozen languages on them, even though said packets cannot possibly be mistaken for anything else, but pharmaceutical companies haven’t caught on to this concept yet?) My Italian friend smiled and nodded politely, but clearly didn’t care about my insistence that my recent toils in vaginal hell were not in any way the result of irresponsible sex.
Opening a plain white box with large medicinal jargon that looked like it would still be incomprehensible to one fluent in Italian, she pulled out the directions and said, “You speak small Italian, yes?” I nodded uncertainly and she pointed to the directions and said, “Three times day, you see?” I smiled and nodded, not mentioning that my knowledge of Italian extended no further than “spaghetti” and “Chianti,” which I had expected to be sufficient to fulfill all my needs and desires during a week-long stay in Italy.
She pulled a tube of cream and a plastic syringe from the box, saying, “This go in this and then you …” She trailed off, leaving me to figure out the rest of the appealing business for myself. I felt like exclaiming, “Sure, sure, I getcha. Nothin’ beats squirtin’ yeast-killin’ cream up my kootch when I’m going to be walking all over Rome,” but I feared it might confuse her.
Glancing into the box I was horrified to see that there were at least two dozen syringes. My eyes grew wide in shock as I calculated 24 divided by three times a day and contemplated having to go through the whole process and not be free of the accursed situation for eight entire days. With all previous yeast infections I had gone straight for the Monistat-3, wondering who would even consider messing around with the 7-day version. Crotch rot is not the time to be frugal. I knew, of course, that yeast infection medication used to take upwards of two weeks to be entirely effective, but surely Italy had gotten the word by now about improved techniques. To know and yet not provide would be outright barbarism.
“Eight days?!” I squeaked.
My new friend laughed and said, “No, no. Just three, maybe four days. More here but not need. It come back, then use. Yes?” I nodded and tried to hide my relief.
“You have boy, yes?”
“NO!” I nearly screamed. Then, smiling nervously, “No, no boy. Not now. Someday. I mean, it’s just a dry spell. I’ll be back in business soon. My OB-GYN back home gave me the morning-after pill when she heard I was coming on this trip: ‘Just in case … being around all those suave European men, you know.’ She thinks I can get some. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. I mean, I’m here with all these Italian men. You know how they are. I mean, yeah, I guess I’ll have to wait for this to clear up but then I am back in the game. I’m sorry, what was the question? No, no boy. Just me. Just me and my oozing ear and my itchy, burning poon.” Then, for good measure, “No boy.”
She smiled politely again, then said, “No boy until gone.” I nodded, paid, and shuffled out.
In three days, I was fine, and my ear infection had even cleared up. And do you know what I learned? I learned how to say, “Lievito infezione.”
I think it translates to something like, “Leavened infection.” Close enough, yes?
