Prompt: A journal entry describing a journey. What can---or can’t---you see along the way? How does your perspective change with the change of place?
I grabbed the black plastic trash bag as I stumbled from the lobby bathroom to meet Geraldo. Her shepherded me into el Taxi as I emptied out the contents of my stomach into my new bag. Frantic Spanish and a haggling over the price – always, the haggling in this country, always – eventually gave way to a four-block ride to the hospital.
The emergency room had the kind of puke green walls that hospitals are infamous for. I lied on a bed behind the curtain staring at the ceiling as the nurses muttered among themselves and at Geraldo in that dirty Dominican Spanish that I had so quickly come to hate in the last week. I needed pruebas – tests – done, and lots of them.
I shuffled to the bathroom, where I succeeded in producing the needed…samples. When I returned to my bed more needles and an IV, my first ever, found their ways into my arms. Staring at the fluorescent light above my eyes, I drifted into a daze. I wished that I had been able to go out with the group last night, that I had thought of somewhere better than the Dominican Republic to go for Spring Break, that I had some water. I really needed water.
In less than an hour a wrinkled man wheeled me up through the hospital’s bowels to the third floor. Inexplicably, I had been placed in the pediatric ward, with an image of Barney painted on the door to my private room. I thought of the framed Barney Fan Club membership certificate still hanging on the wall of my childhood room.
For the next fifty hours, it was just me, Barney, and the millions of cholera bacilli inhabiting my bowels hanging out in the pediatric ward of a hospital in Santo Domingo. Traveling sure has provided me with some strange bedfellows.
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