Immigrants on the Move

To say I had an alternative upbringing would be the understatement of the century; my dad is an acupuncturist and both my parents lean heavily into the camp of hippy ideals. When I was sick for the first seventeen years of my life my dad would pour Chinese concoctions down my throat and then treat me with acupuncture needles. The only time I recall seeing a doctor was a weekend where he went away and I ended up in hospital because I had an asthma attack. It wasn’t until my early adult years that I began exploring the world of pharmaceutical products, and even then it was mostly just ibuprofen.

In the UK you can buy paracetamol and other painkillers almost everywhere, in the supermarket, in your local corner shop. The dose is fixed at 250mg and anything higher either requires the third degree from the pharmacist or a doctor’s note. When we lived in Spain I would ask the pharmacist for the lowest dosage of ibuprofen and they would laugh at me and hand over 400mg, with a look that said this is for babies. In France, the children were dosed with 500mg regularly, and the adults would often take 1000mg. My husband and I have always relied on Lemsip when we got sick, must be that English theory that a hot drink is the cure for everything.

I worked as an ESL teacher in France, teaching children from 4 years old to 12 years old and my hardy immune system resisted the bugs and illnesses that the children coughed onto me on a daily basis. Sadly, my husband’s immune system was not so strong. He suffered more fever, more flu, and more coughs and colds during those 3 years in France than I have ever seen him experience since.

During one particularly bad bout of flu, nothing I tried was bringing his fever down. I was terrified of the thought of taking him into hospital, not knowing if I was capable of communicating our needs or symptoms, and despite us transporting large quantities of Lemsip over from the UK, this trusted treatment was not working. So I trekked though the rain to the pharmacy, practising my French sentence with every step I took and pleading with the woman in charge to give me something to calm the fever. She gave me three different treatments including some plain paracetamol, some syrup and a third unknown with instructions, that I mostly understood, on how to dispense them.

I dosed up my husband and within a few hours the fever calmed down, I was relieved and quietly proud that I had managed to sail over another overseas hurdle. But I crowed too soon, the day after as my husband, feeling better, took a shower he collapsed. I will pause here to say, he is 6’4″ (just under 2 metres), I am 5’7″ (1.7m) and often skinnier than I should be. I somehow managed to get him moved onto a seat, then dried off and dressed before helping him into the car and rushing to the doctors.

My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness, you realise that you are not the boss. It is the other way around. Federico Fellini.

The doctor checked his heart and informed us that it wasn’t beating regularly, and referred us immediately to a cardiologist who, impressively, saw us that same day. Half of his heart had stopped beating properly, which meant the other half was working twice as hard to pump blood around his body. This would be the start of some of the most stressful days of my life, as we waited to see if the medication the doctor prescribed would reset his heart beat. The alternative was for him to have his heart manually restarted with a defibrillator, a thought which terrified me.

Thankfully, his heart reset itself and he recovered his strength over the following weeks. Being the research queen that I am (nerd), I wanted to understand where this sudden heart issue had come from. I searched many many articles and the conclusion I came to (unproven and more of a personal opinion) was that the dosage strength of the French medication, on our sensitive British systems was too much and it shocked his body, which in turn caused the heart to beat out of rhythm. I also learned a previously unknown fact; Lemsip contains 1000mg of paracetamol. So for a system that had only previously dealt with small doses, it was suddenly being overladen with almost 8 times the amount of medication it was accustomed to.

I learned a valuable lesson that day; doctors/pharmacists often don’t take into account the dosage amount compared to the size, weight, or resistance to medication of the patient. It made me hyper aware of both what I was taking, and how sensitive my body might be to that particular drug. My experience moving around the world is that the tolerance of nearly all the countries outside of the UK is much higher than the tolerance of the British people, because as a general rule our doses are much smaller. I do now take 600mg doses of ibuprofen, but on the occasions I have been offered 1000mg I still flatly refuse.