Before I get to the grisly matter at hand: We cooked a big meal, it was delicious, and we all loved each other soooo much. Easter, this time. We made a toast to the lamb.

Surprisingly, for a meal that started at 4 in the afternoon, I didn’t eat myself sick, but somehow we did get on the topic of throwing up. And telling my Cairo barfing story made me think that since I haven’t done anything worth writing about recently (those aren’t even my deviled eggs in the Easter photos–I just held the egg halves while Karl piped), I’d catch up on old times, a la Jefe. This story even involves drugs, of a sort.

From my very first day in Cairo, I was sick. I’d gone there for CASA, this hard-core Arabic program that lasts precisely one year and is the hazing process and crucible for any Middle East scholar of merit. (That’s a bit of foreshadowing–note that I am not at this time a Mid East scholar of merit.) Cairo is truly one of the world’s great cities, as I’d learned on a previous stint there that involved serious research into its nightclub culture, but I wasn’t too excited about going this time, due to various misgivings: already, my future as a medieval Arabic poetry pundit was in doubt, and my boyfriend at the time was back in the States.

Almost immediately, the city of 19 million clamorous strolling knife sharpeners, horn-happy cabbies and sidewalk lechers took its toll on my body. After a nasty long flight that required extensive napping in a construction zone at the Frankfurt airport (am I remembering this right? I do of course remember meeting Aaron on the plane, who asked me if I happened to know Peter M. at Princeton), our merry band of twenty Arabic dorks were whisked from the airport to our hotel, sent to bed, and roused at 8am to sticky summer heat and a quietly sweating buffet in the breakfast room. By noon, I was peeling off from the campus walking tour to go heave up my morning meal in a strange bathroom.

The school staff were very solicitous, because someone on the program had actually died the previous year, collapsed in a diabetic coma and not discovered for days. So I had people ringing me up and coming by with presents and telling me strange medical tips, and I managed to regain enough intestinal stability to start class along with everyone else.

But I was never quite right, it seemed, and in a few more weeks I was sick enough to go the campus clinic. The doctor there listened to me describe my symptoms–just nothin’ was staying in–and rather blithely, I thought, diagnosed me with amoebic dysentery, but as I’d been lying in bed thumbing through all the woeful tropical disease descriptions, I was just happy it wasn’t meningitis. He gave me a prescription for Flagyl and sent me on my way.

Even at that point, I was no stranger to throwing up, as I’ve always been a stomach-stress kind of person (ask my third-grade friends about my behavior post-state-spelling-bee, and a chocolate ice-cream soda). I was also no stranger to Flagyl, known as the top-of-the-line, most vicious of all anti-every-little-critter drugs. While I hadn’t taken it myself, my good friend Karen, whom I’d met on my previous visit to Cairo in 1992, had practically been a Flagyl junkie that summer, and she’d still had to be whisked back to a hospital in the States on short notice in the middle of the night. (You should’ve seen her shopping for gifts right before she left, though–intense GI trouble can make you into a very insistent bargainer with very little patience for dilly-dallying.)

So as I walked toward the pharmacy with my Flagyl prescription in my hand, I was a little worried. Would this even help?

And even more important, would I be able to drink while I was on this?

See, coming up the following weekend was the very first party of the CASA season. Already I could see that this was going to be just like high school, all cliquey and shit, and it seemed crucial not to be marked as the outcast by the other 19 people, whom I would be in class with all day every day for the next year, this early on, as it could easily ruin my time in Cairo and affect the rest of my Arabic career. I’m not exaggerating–bitter CASA-year rivalries are legendary, persisting for decades, so that so-called colleagues are still snubbing each other in the halls at the annual Middle East Studies Association conference. And of course I was in Cairo–so how could I pass up the opportunity to drink a gin-and-tonic under the dusty chandeliers in Aaron’s faded-glory colonial-era apartment in Garden City?

So I got my prescription filled at the pharmacy, a kind of sloppy process in which the guy just slid me a few blister packs over the counter and sent me on my way. No box with dosages, or warnings, or explicit words on whether I shouldor shouldn’t booze it up.

On my walk home, I reasoned that if it were really horrible for me to have a drink, either the doctor or the pharmacist would have said something…right? I figured it’s just like any other antibiotic, and booze would just make it less effective (which I now know is a lie, as it happens–turns out antibiotics just make you get drunk faster). I know, this all sounds really, really bad and addicted and dangerous to someone just reading this, but when your life has come to consist solely of shuffling back and forth between bed and the bathroom, you really start looking forward to some kind of social outlet.

Well, party night rolls around, and my course of Flagyl is nearly up anyway, so I have a wee gin and tonic and start a-chatting with my colleagues. About halfway into my second drink, one of the Mormon guys is dancing with me and flips me over his head (gee, remember the swing dance revival? Those crazy 90s…). A little bit after that, the room becomes quite spinny, and I’m not feeling so hot. A little bit after that, I’m discreetly vomiting in the faded-glory colonial-era bathroom. I go back out and check my gin and tonic: No, I didn’t drink any more than half of that second one.

Oddly, throwing up hadn’t really made me feel any better. After a while, I’m feeling so much worse I can’t even rally to go home. But I’m in a room full of all-but-strangers and I don’t want to let on quite how shitty I feel. Because I only drank ONE AND A HALF drinks. What’s wrong with me? I’ve got plenty of time to mull this over, sitting on the floor, head propped up against the wall, quietly sweating and wondering how much longer before I have to bolt to the bathroom again. I was just about to turn 25…maybe this was just what getting old felt like?

After what felt like a million years, I got home, only a few blocks away. I threw up again for good measure, drank a ton of water, and went to bed, hoping for quick sleep and no dreams about my clearly impending mortality.

The next morning, whaddya know, I still felt like shit. In fact, I could safely say that this was the very worst hangover I’d had in my entire life. It didn’t help that I was in Cairo, in July, with no air conditioning. And like every apartment in Cairo, ours was directly across from a mosque with a loudspeaker. It was Friday, so roundabout noontime, the big weekly sermon started. I was pressed against the cold marble floor in the bathroom as the guy across the street began to declaim. If this had happened at the end of my year there, I would’ve been able to understand that they guy was yelling, in his formal, grandiose, near-medieval, super-bombastic Arabic, that GIVING ALMS IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD, ONE OF THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM!!! or something equally benign. But at the time, he sounded like he must certainly be saying, “DECADENT, DRUNKEN AMERICAN WOMEN MUST SUFFER, AND SUFFER, AND SUFFER SOME MORE!!!” and he said it for about 45 minutes.

The sun finally set that day, probably the longest of my life up to that point, and I went to bed again with high hopes for full recovery in the morning.

No luck. I still felt like shit the next day, but at least it was just ordinary hangover-level by now, and the uncontrollable retching seemed to have subsided. But I felt bad enough that I called my mom, the first of several near-collapse calls I made that year. I explained my situation, throwing in the self-pitying part about feeling really old. My mom, who’s an herbalist, went into instant diagnostic mode. I could hear the pages of her Physician’s Desk Reference flipping in the background.

“Wait–Flagyl? You didn’t drink, did you?!” she finally said.

“I swear, just one and a half drinks! And the pharmacist didn’t say I couldn’t!”

“Oh, honey,” she said in that same I’m-so-very-sorry way she reserves for when I adopt a particularly unflattering style of dress. “It says here that one of the major components of Flagyl is also the active ingredient in Antabuse. You know, the drug that they give alcoholics to make them hate drinking so much they’ll never do it again.”

If I’d had more than spotty dial-up Internet then, I could have found out all of this. (Oh, that’s just great–reading all that now, I see that I actually could’ve died.) But when I heard my mom say that then, all I could think was, Thank god, I’m not getting old after all.

I wish I could say that once I recovered from that hellish little interlude, the rest of the year was smooth sailing. But no–I just kept yakking away, for no particular reason. After just a couple more months, all my fellow CASA people were bragging about how they were practically eating raw chicken right off the sidewalk, and I was still having nightmarish visions of the few shreds of amoeba-coated lettuce that had snuck into my sandwich, as I hunched over the toilet. I’m surprised my teeth didn’t fall out.

But the great thing about the whole Flagyl incident is that I really did appreciate my booze a lot more after that–and, I’ll be honest, drinking is what got me through my last six months there. And I did really teach myself to cook that year, because I couldn’t eat anything in restaurants for most of the time. I went to cooking lessons at the Indian consulate, which was hilarious and useful, and made me feel like not the only idiot in Cairo. But that’s maybe a separate story…and it doesn’t involve so much throwing up.