Have you ever experienced getting sick in a foreign country with no family or loved ones nearby?
If you haven’t, let me paint you a mental picture: Me. In a Buenos Aires hospital on a Saturday morning because I had bronchitis. The process of obtaining healthcare in a foreign country is difficult but in this one you literally take a number from a slot machine and hope that a doctor can see you at some point.
It was a beautiful spring day outside of the hospital waiting room so the windows had been left open to allow the wind to blow in. All of a sudden, in the midst of waiting for a doctor, I glanced up to see a mangy, flea-bitten cat simply walk in through one of the open windows and into the emergency room. Something about seeing a stray animal enter a hospital (what I normally imagine as a hygienic, humans-only kind of zone) was strange. Something about having had a fever for three days was also strange and with this combination I began to cry.
In the last week I have cried three times.
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