Rx me!
“Peel everything you eat, don’t sleep near pigs, Happy travels! Come back for a parasite stool test in August.” Over a month ago the nurse practitioner at the travel clinic in Burlington sent me away with prescriptions for Mefloquine, an anti-malaria drug, and Ciprofloxacin, a broad spectrum antibiotic that works against severe traveller’s diarrhea.
By the time I reached Vietnam I was well through half the Cipro regiment – with rural Laos ahead I needed to refill the prescription. It wasn’t the street food that did my stomach in – it happened when I used my dirty hands to transfer leftover ice into a water bottle and then let that mixture brew in the hot dorm for three days before taking a sip of it. If you should get that far you will taste little bacteria in your water, at this point Do Not Swallow the yucky mixture even if you are very thirsty. I swallowed and the few days that followed made me happy to have antibiotics available as a last resort.
Ho Chi Minh City and Lawnin to the rescue again! “Have the moto driver drop you off at the racetrack and then walk back and forth around the area until you see a narrow alley. You might not find it but if you do the drugs they sell are real cheap… oh yeah, you’ll see a large bookstore on your left before the alley.” With those directions how could I miss it? One specific little dark alley in Ho Chi Minh… the next day I was not expecting to find anything, let alone this! There were a lot of different drugs available:
I got excited and began to ask for all kinds of medications I might need in the future including Fasigyn, Diflucan, and Ciprofloxacin. No, no, and yes, how much do you need? Ten please, my Lonely Planet suggests 500mg of Cipro twice a day for five days. The other drugs were newer and weren’t available at this market. The Cipro the pharmacy assistant brought out was 585mg – she pointed out that it was made in Korea and she’d give me a discount from 120,000 dong to 90,000 dong for ten (1 US dollar is 16,726 Dong). I thought this was a little pricey for Vietnamese alley drugs but still less than half my copay in the states so I took them. It wasn’t until I got back to the hotel that I realized I had managed to buy not 10 pills but 10 complete doses of Cipro (100 pills total) at the drug market – now I can make up to 9 friends with traveler’s diarrhea and cure them all! What a relief.
Tags: HCMC, Magyarország, Việt Nam, Vietnam
Greta
Can you leave me some Cipro in Bangkok? I’ll be needing it…
This reminds me of the shock I had 20 years ago when I was taking care of a number of Koren families who all wanted Amoxicillin when their babies had colds, and said that babies never got ear infections when they were in Korea. I was very surprised to learn that Amoxilcillin was in the Korean OTC cold remedies- and there I was worrying about resistance whenever I handed out a prescription…..
I agree with Micheal- though I follow the Blog avidly and enjoy it immensely, it will be great to talk in person!
love,
mamad