Gross

No account of my excavations overseas would be complete without the inevitable health problems that occur.

So far, nothing really bad, but as anyone who read my journal entries from the trip will know, doxycycline is the devil. To illustrate, here is a recent picture of my thumbnails.





Note the lovely yellow color, weird shiny-ness, and the fact that they'll probably fall off soon. This, boys and girls, is what a sunburn through the nail looks like. So, yeah. Next season, I either go into debt or risk a psychotic break on one of the other available options.

In other news, I've had to go to the doctor since I'm feeling a little under the weather and don't want to risk it being something serious. I love these trips.

Doctor: "You've been where?"
Me: "In Sudan. Not Darfur. Not around refugees. In the desert. Doing archaeological salvage work."
Doctor: "So, you're an archaeologist?"
Me: "Yeah, more or less."
Doctor: "That's pretty cool."

Fast forward through medical history questions, etc.

Doctor: "You went swimming in the Nile!?!?!?!?!?!"
Me: "What part of we were living in a local village without running water, and only intermittent electricity did you not understand? I'd been bathing in it, washing clothes in it, and washing dishes in it for months."
Doctor: "You used Nile water?!?!?!?!"
Me: "I didn't drink the shit (that was Tom's thing...). Look, what the hell was I supposed to do? Not bathe for 2 damn months? Go dowsing for another water source on my days off? Introduce modern infrastructure to a village that's going to be torn down in a few months?"

Anyway, I wouldn't mind so much - but some of these people are supposed to specialize in travel medicine. Is it too much to ask that they actually...I dunno...travel? I mean, to somewhere other than Paris for the weekend?

By the time they get themselves sorted out and I sort out where I can go on our damn insurance, I'll either be well or will have had something the likes of Alien jump out of my stomach. If the latter, I can only hope it does that at the conference I'm going to end of next week. And that it latches on to the face of a certain someone there....