Burness Global: Stories

Kerala Houseboat (credit: Preeti Singh)

Wangari Maathai talks about a hummingbird helping put out a forest fire.  I tried to be a hummingbird on another issue once and had my beak taped shut.

I took a special trip to India earlier this year – special because it involved relatives who almost never see each other to be together for a week.  Three of us headed from dry, dusty, blazing-hot New Delhi to the lushly green, humid, blazing-hot Kerala. This southern state is famous for its calm “backwaters” that are plied by deliberately rustic, thatched-roof, wooden tourist houseboats once designed to transport rice harvests.

On the first of the seven-day trip, one of my relatives began having dreadful intestinal issues, including pain and cramping that almost immobilized him. All he wanted in life then was a constantly-refilled bottle of filtered water and long naps on the padded benches on the houseboat’s covered deck.  “This will go away on its own,” he said, not realizing how troubling it was for me to see him in pain.

It took me one day to convince him—or for him to convince himself—that my cache of the antibiotic Cipro, left over from a recent trip to Gabon where it hadn’t been needed, might be the fastest way to not spend the rest of precious vacation time in a fog of misery.

Years of reading about the rapid evolution of drug-resistant disease organisms—ranging from the parasite that causes malaria to the bacteria that causes staph infections—had me handing him the bottle of white tablets with a warning: take a week’s worth even if you start to feel better.  I figure it’s every person’s individual responsibility not to abuse antibiotics and, if they must use them, to take an entire course of medication as indicated. Otherwise, we’re told, when you stop early you’ve killed most of the bacteria but left behind the sturdiest, which will then be the ones that flourish and become harder to kill the next time around in a vicious cycle that will be eventually leave us without effective drugs.  It is happening every day.

But this prodigy of worldly sophistication handed me back the remaining pills after two days.  “Thank you,” he said, “but I feel well now and the side effects of these pills are now what’s making me feel bad.”  How bad could it be?  Unfortunately, India is advanced enough in communications that we could use a USB-stick-modem to connect our laptop to the internet in the middle of a relaxing houseboat cruise.  So, nausea, vomiting, dizziness or drowsiness.  But think selflessly, I urged. You’re helping keep Cipro viable against stomach bugs well into the future for other people, ones who might be too poor to afford anything better once the cheap, once-reliable standbys stop working, I pleaded.

But it didn’t work. I felt helpless—I cannot imagine what doctors and nurses go through with TB patients who, for example, have to show up at clinics over the course of 6 to 10 months to take really unpleasant combinations of pills in order to beat the disease, when I can’t get a sophisticated person like my relative to adhere to a simple treatment regimen.  I guess now I understand a little better why there isn’t just drug-resistant tuberculosis, or even multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, but extensively multi-drug resistant TB ravaging various corners of the world today.

I lost on this one, but won’t mean I won’t try again given the opportunity.