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But all the fun and games caught up with me after a few weeks. After all those nights of not
sleeping and all those days of too much lovemaking, my body struck back and I got attacked
by a nasty infection in my bladder. A typical affliction of the overly sexed, especially likely to
strike when you’re not used to being overly sexed anymore. It came up as fast as any tragedy
can strike. I was walking through town one morning doing some chores when suddenly I was
buckled over with burning pain and fever. I’d had these infections before, during my wayward
youth, so I knew what it was. I panicked for a moment—these things can be awful—but then
thought, “Thank God my best friend in Bali is a healer,” and I ran into Wayan’s shop.
“I’m sick!” I said.
She took one look at me and said, “You sick from making too much sex, Liz.”
I groaned, buried my face in my hands, embarrassed.
She chuckled, said, “You can’t keep secrets from Wayan.. .”
I was in godawful pain. Anyone who’s ever had this infection knows the dreadful feeling;
anyone who hasn’t experienced this specific suffering—well, just make up your own torturous
metaphor, preferably using the term “fire poker” someplace in the sentence.
Wayan, like a veteran firefighter or an ER surgeon, never moves fast. She methodically
started chopping some herbs, boiling some roots, wandering back and forth between her kit-
chen and me, bringing me one warm, brown, toxic-tasting concoction after another, saying,
“Drink, honey.. .”
Whenever the next batch boiled, she would sit across from me, giving me sly, dirty looks
and using the opportunity to get nosy.
“You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?”
“Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy.”
“Felipe has a vasectomy?” she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, “Felipe has
a villa in Tuscany?” (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) “Very difficult in Bali to get a
man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control.”
(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent
birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man