I barely escaped with my life!

It was an eventful and traumatic Saturday here in Cadiz City. It started out innocently enough, playing scrabble with Ryan, waiting for the power to come back on. Then, walking through my room, I swiped my foot against the bed, and a deadly splinter got lodged deep under the toenail of my baby toe. My host brother Elvin is a nurse, so he looked at it for me, and him and my host mother decided I had to go to the emergency clinic, since we couldn’t remove it ourselves. We dashed to the clinic a mere 8 hours after the terrible incident. Walking into the emergency clinic made me a bit nervous, especially at the first mention of an injection, and the not-entirely-sterile conditions of the room. There were five beautiful young Filipina nurses waiting to greet me, and they asked me to sit at the doctor’s desk while they prepared the instruments of torture. The doctor quoted English poetry to me, Whitman and Emerson, and was most offended that I wasn’t familiar with Thomas Grey, a contemporary of Shakespeare! And Keats! I covered up for my ignorance by saying I was more familiar with American poetry. He showed me a book of poems by a local author and encouraged me to meet him. The last place I expected to meet a soft-spoken poet was in a free clinic in the Phlippines. I have never been so glad that this country speaks English, though, when the Dr. Homer (really his name!) told me they would give me one injection for the pain, and one for tetanus. I was able to quickly tell him that I was totally current on my tetanus shots, and I really really didn’t need one. (Some of you may not be aware that I am a huge baby about getting shots. Well, now you know. Yes, I cry like the little girl that I am whenever I have to get one.) After a bit more poetry, they put me up on a table and I stuck my foot out and never looked at it again. One of the 18-year old nurses came over to talk to me and distract me, and she did a pretty good job. I experienced two moments of awful pain, which I assume were the injection and the removal of the ‘foreign body’ from my toe. They wrapped my baby toe up in gauze, and I put my flip flops back on, and we were on our way back home.