Living on a Vaccination Passport and a Prayer

An unexpectedly complicated preparation for my trip to Buenos Aires was finding out about vaccinations. I contacted my family doctor to say that I was going to Argentina, expecting to get the Estonian version of “here are the required vaccinations which we will do on Monday”. Instead, she referred me to the Clinic for Infectious Diseases, which was not really a building I wanted to be seen walking in and out of.

I arrived early for my appointment. The clinic receptionist asked me full volume what I was getting treated for before sending me upstairs to talk to the nurse.

Already off-kilter, the nurse then waved away my insistence that I didn’t speak Estonian, pointing out that I’d just said that in Estonian. This is one sentence that I’ve learned to say extremely well, which is possibly not working in my favor. In halting words, I explained that I was going to Argentina and then sat back, my vocabulary expended.

She pulled up a browser with the website for the US Government Center for Disease Control already loaded. Slowly she read their page on travelling to Argentina in English and helpfully translated the key points into Estonian for me.

Did I know about typhoid? A little, I said.

She gave me a list of instructions: don’t drink the water, don’t open my mouth while in the shower, use disinfectant on my hands after washing, use bottled water for brushing my teeth. Don’t eat… She paused, grumbling briefly at the CDC website, which apparently did not give enough food advice on their typhoid page, and said something that I didn’t understand. She rephrased again and then sighed at my lack of fluency; she didn’t know the words in English. “Don’t eat salads,” she settled on.

I grinned. “Eat steak?”

“Yes! Eat steak.” She was not smiling.

Now that that was covered, she shifted back to Estonian to offer me vaccinations against yellow fever and hepatitis A. There was also a lot of rabies in Argentina, she told me, and then I got lost again. She shifted to English. If I got bitten by a dog or a monkey, I must go straight to the hospital.

I nodded to let her know that I was taking her advice seriously, while wondering how likely it was that I would be bitten by a monkey attending an Ethereum conference in Buenos Aires and also how it was that the nurse knew the English word for “monkey” but not the word for “uncooked food.”

Then she quizzed me on my intentions. What was I doing there? Was the conference for work or pleasure? Would I be with other people?

Buenos Aires has a population of 16 million, so I was unlikely to be alone. Or was this a euphemistic phrase and she was working up to a talk on sexually transmitted diseases of Latin America? I told her I didn’t understand the question.

“Are you travelling alone?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be in the countryside?”

I shrugged. I was hoping to head out of town for a few days, if possible. I struggled with the phrasing but it turned out her English included the word “hiking”. She asked me another question where I understood only two words in the scramble: pleasure and risk.

Please god don’t let this be about sexually transmitted diseases. I apologized in English for not understanding.

“Do you like risk?”

I clamped my mouth shut, trying to keep the words Do you know who I am? from leaving my mouth. It seemed like a bad idea to admit to a history of risk-taking behavior in the Center for Infectious Diseases.

“No?”

“Good!” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think we should give you the rabies shot.”

Over the next few minutes, I made sense of her logic. If I were alone and hiking, I was at higher risk of being bitten by something (a monkey?) and I would need urgent treatment. But equally, it would be harder for me to get treated immediately, as there was no one who could take me to the hospital. She didn’t want me to die of rabies, so she would give me two rabies shots here and then if I did get bitten in Argentina, it was less urgent, I just needed to tell them that I’d already had two of the four shots. With that, she began preparing a syringe. Apparently, the time for discussion was over.

So, that’s my update. I’m vaccinated, almost packed, and still trying to work out what the hell I’m doing.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash