Get Set...

River blindness! Typhoid! Dengue! Botflies! Oh my!

Oh crap.

Going to Panama means going to a tropical country with lots of crazy exotic parasites and stuff.
This morning I woke up an hour early so I could swallow the last of my four typhoid oral vaccine pills. I have yet to get the hang of swallowing pills; dude, I buy chewable multivitamins. They taste terrible like sweet powdery sour apples (I guess "berry" was the flavor they were going for), but better than the taste you get when you try to chew pills most people just swallow; damn, vitamin C is sour!

Anyway, my dad took me to the county health department a week or two ago and the nice but geographically-challenged RN gave me a shot in each arm; the left got yellow fever and the right got Hep A, which apparently I had missed out on last time I got shots. I was up-to-date on tetanus and stuff, so... yay.

Of course, malaria is big in the rural areas of Panama, and though my host family lives in Panama City (or Gamboa... which is near Panama City... but then again, everything in Panama is near Panama City) but there is currently no vaccine for malaria. If I head off to rural Panama for, say, a camping trip, I have to (gasp) take "anti-malarial" pills a few days in advance and every few days for several weeks. Great.

Anyway, I also got info on my host family! Two parents and an 18-year-old daughter. I wrote them a letter (I didn't get their email address) and I hope it gets there safely... if not, well, they won't know how bad my Spanish is until I get there in... 24 days!