Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [100]
“It is very sweet of you to come,” I say. It is difficult for me to speak through the nausea.
They’ve been looking around my house curiously. “You don’t live here alone, do you?” says Noor.
I nod. “Yes. It’s just me.”
They look at each other and then back at me.
“That is terrible,” says Najma. “You have no one?”
“We don’t think you should be here alone,” says Noor. “Not when you are sick.”
“I’m okay.”
They look deeply skeptical.
Outside, Salem is waiting in the van. I dread the ride, nauseated as I am, but Salem is as good a driver as there is in Sana’a. We head for the Yemeni-German Hospital, because it is the closest. This is the same hospital where I had the incompetent X-rays, but I don’t know where else to go.
Najma and Noor tell the clerk at the front desk what kind of doctor I want, and he gives me a file. I pay him several thousand riyals and take the file to a main waiting room.
Several doors open off of the main waiting room, each for a different specialist. We wait for at least a half hour to see the internist, sitting mostly in silence, as I am too ill to talk. Men with their arms in casts come out of the orthopedist’s office. Old women in setarrhs, traditional Sana’ani dresses of red and blue cloth, limp from the internist’s office. Men sitting next to me cough and spit. I begin to wish I hadn’t come, feeling that I am more likely to pick up an illness here than to cure one.
Finally, we see the doctor. He speaks English, so I tell Najma and Noor they can leave me. I explain to him the problem and say I hope he can give me something to ease the nausea. Then I show him the packet of little green pills I have been taking.
He pales. “Stop taking these immediately,” he says. “These are for pain! Not for nausea.”
I immediately realize my mistake. I have been taking the prescription painkillers I was given for my ribs, which are to be taken once every twenty-four hours, rather than the nausea pills, which are to be taken two every hour. Frantically, I try to remember how many I have taken. Six. Maybe eight. Will I be okay? Oh god, and I took two Advils!
The doctor assures me I will live, though I probably won’t feel much better for twenty-four hours. I don’t think I can survive feeling like this for that long and am grateful when he writes me a prescription for antinausea medication.
At the pharmacy, though, I am given an enormous bag of liquid, a needle, and a packet of powders. “To inject,” he says. I stare at him in horror. He actually seems to expect me to mix up the powders with the liquid and inject the solution into myself. After what I have seen of the hygiene of Yemeni hospitals, I refuse to allow another needle into my arm.
We return to the doctor to argue about this. He says that I need the injection. I reiterate that I don’t. Finally, clearly annoyed, he writes me a prescription for antinausea pills, which cost the rest of the riyals I have.
At home, I ring a friend in New York, who looks up the specific painkiller on the Internet to double-check whether I will die from the overdose. He also checks to make sure the antinausea medication they gave me is actually antinausea medication. It is, al-hamdulillah. But the list of warning signs he reads off to me about the painkiller makes me feel panicky.
“If you throw up something that looks like coffee grounds—”
“I don’t have that.”
“Or have pain and nausea in your stomach—”
“I have that!”
“Or you lose feeling in one side—”
“Nope.”
“Headache—”
“Yes.” My head is in searing pain.
He makes me promise that if I feel worse at all I will ring Nabeel and get someone at the embassy to help me.
In my journal, I make a list of lessons learned:
Never, ever, drink vodka selected by a twenty-four-year-old.
Never drink flavored alcohol, particularly green apple.
Never let a British person refill your glass while you aren’t watching.
When you wake up nauseated