“You’ve got an amoeba,” the doctor said as he passed me by. “The nurse will give you medicine.”
I gave the nurse a confused look. I had returned to the clinic Saturday to check in on the tests they’d run. “You’re fine, but we’ll just do tests to make sure,” the doctor had said Friday.
An amoeba? The last time I crossed paths with an amoeba was in a high school biology textbook. None of the captions under those diagrams ever said anything about amoebas making me sick. (Granted, I did spend more time in biology class setting things on fire with bunson burners than reading the textbook—part of the reason I now spend my days in a newsroom and not a lab.)
“How did I get an amoeba?” I asked the nurse as she handed me an alarmingly large stack of pill-filled boxes.
She took on the amused expression of someone who knows too much about how the human body works, taking pity on someone who was, until a second ago, quite happy living in ignorant bliss.
The nurse told me how I likely got it, while explaining that it’s a form of parasite.
I’d rather not explain, but let’s just say there are a few restaurants I ate in during the days leading up to getting sick that won’t be receiving me as a repeat customer.
