Islamabad: Teaming Petri Dish

Last night I got acutely ill with my fifth microbial visitor in as many weeks; I have been sick so much that, after a normal digestive proceeding, I exit the bathroom with a warm sense of self-congratulation and, no doubt, a piece of giardia-contaminated toilet paper stuck to the heel of my shoe. (Expats here talk about blighted bodily functions with the frequency and compulsion of big time investors discussing stock market fluctuations -- it is even an appropriate topic to discuss over dinner).

At the urging of several friends who insist they've never heard of anyone with the same sick to healthy ratio of days, I called the doctor, a wonderful woman who works for the Canadian High Commission. She did not buy my theory that I have a rare disease that exhibits itself in frequent and seemingly isolated bouts of communion with the toilet, and I thought this was good news until she told me that instead I have the exact profile of a sub-sub-set of expats who are extremely, as she euphemistically put it, "sensitive" to the microbial world of Pakistan. In other words, I am Modern Medicine's captured spoils in its ceaseless war with Natural Selection. I was supposed to be the chaff, the unselected, the termination point for whatever heritable lines of constitutional weakness I am, thanks to Cipro and Flagyl and bleach, perpetuating. This sounds almost criminal, doesn't it? I feel a little like a character in a Jane Austen book, one of those timid, bonnet-headed ladies who has afternoon spells and a frequent need for Mr. Darcy's dampened handkerchief. Or like one of the women, laid up with "brain fever," that Sherlock Holmes saves from that diabolical Professor Moriarty.