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Back from Mexico & 2 Crises Await

I spent my last twenty-four hours in Mexico leaving the country, first boarding a bus in Puerto Escondido at around 8 in the evening, accompanied by my Mexican community - Daniel from Montana (also bipolar, who provided me with lithium when I was out, briefly) and Gregory & Antonio from Canada, (neither mentally ill but fine folks to drink wine and eat fish with.)

People had told me to prepare for Mexican busses - that they were all sweltering hot and filled with farm animals and such. This is out of date information - these days, Mexican busses are so overloaded with air-conditioning that you could hang a side of beef in the bus I was on, so I had layered up with sweat-shirts, sweaters, long underwear, bluejeans - and I was still freakin' cold.

Bus to Mexico City took all night. Taxi to airport took a half an hour and cost almost half as much as the bus ride. I checked in, ditched my big bags and spent hours in the bar and food court area, drinking beer with stranded passangers from Scotland who'd missed a connecting flight. No worries. We took turns watching each other's bags to go pee and check out the McDonald's menu in Spanish.

My flight for Dallas left at 2pm. I arrived around 5pm, and somehow cleared customs, though not before some jarhead shit-for-brains told me my passport was "too dirty" for travel. Whatever the fuck. Here's the big kick in the pants on customs - you arrive in America, get your bags from a special baggage claim area, then go through a security checkpoint and re-check your bags. Fucking unreal. They unload the bags, we carry them through a minimal checkpoint, then we put them back in the check-in. Stupid stupid stupid. No wonder all the airlines are going bankrupt.

Another flight to Albuquerque and I'm home. One of my bags was damn near ripped apart in the zeal of Homeland Security to inspect it - it contained an ancient laptop and my leather jacket, but they just Had to Know what was inside. Sigh...I was greeted at the airport by my friend Courtney and we went home and I gave her a gift and we drank a little beer and that was that. I was home at last.

The next day I tried to normalize things - went to the golf course for a bucket of balls - I hit several over 225 yards, I'll have you know - and just puttered around my house. Day after that, it occurred to me that I actually couldn't remember the last time I'd taken my meds - and so I began to look through the debris for them. And I couldn't find the lithium. And I started to panic in a bad way.

Before I left for Mexico, I had filled a prescription for Lexapro at my local Walgreen's pharmacy, a script that was supposed to contain 15 units of 20mg Lexapro that I could split into 10s for 30-days worth of 10mg/day dosages. Instead, Walgreen's, in it's infinite wisdom had decided that I only needed 15 *10mg* tablets - a stupid mistake that's easily rectified when one is in-country, a deadly decision when the patient flies to Mexico without reading the label and checking the number of pills, which of course, I did not.

posted by by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw @ 11:22 AM