Drugs Expats Love

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-08-18 06:38:00 UTC
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This guest post was written by my global health co-blogger Alanna Shaikh - also the blogger extraordinaire behind the development blog Blood and Milk.

You thought this was going to be about fun drugs, didn’t you? But it’s not. Instead, it’s about the drugs that get us all through the day. The legal, medicinal, take them when you’re sick drugs. You can sing the praises of oral contraception, malaria prophylaxis, Benadryl, or ibuprofen, but these are the top three that I won’t travel without:

1. Imodium – Old hands know you only take this when you need to be stopped up ASAP. It doesn’t cure you – in fact, you’ll probably feel sick longer. A certain horrible roiling feeling in your stomach and guts that has no release. But nothing will come out of any orifice in any unseemly way, and when you’re about to spend 12 hours on rough road in a land-cruiser, you need that.

2. Excedrin – Aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine. Like sleep in a cheery plastic bottle. It will help you survive the painful cramping that the Imodium can’t stop, keep you moving through the too much cheap beer headache, and help you survive when you didn’t sleep because you spent all night swatting mosquitoes. Sure, it’s hard on your liver. But if you were the kind of person who worried about your liver, you wouldn’t be an aid worker, would you?

3. Cipro – Michael wrote a haiku about Cipro. I could write a sonnet. Cipro is an angel on horseback, a white knight in your time of misery. Cipro is miraculous. Unlike Imodium, Cipro will actually make you better. Just when you think you may really die from dehydration and sheer misery, you remember you can turn to Cipro. It kills what ails you, almost always, from STIs to UTIs to diarrhea to typhoid.

[Image from Janet's photostream on flickr]

Alanna Shaikh
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