I have never been sick in another country, but I always stock up on the best over-the-counter headache medicines when I’m in Spain, and D.R. Harris’s "Pick-Me-Up" (excellent for hangovers) when I’m in London.

As for foreign doctors, the only experience I’ve ever had with one was on a ship. When we were in college, my first cousin Frances and I took my grandfather on a cruise through the Caribbean (for reasons I now cannot fathom — I imagine so that he would pay for it).

DeeDee (the name we called him) had been an officer in the Navy during World War II and I think the last cruise ship he’d been on was the Andria Doria. So he was used to being in white tie at the captain’s table and there we were on a giant Cunard that was like a slightly nicer floating Holiday Inn and sharing a table with some really, really nice (and very patient) people from Waco, TX.

DeeDee was a pretty good sport until we got off one morning in Venezuela, and an unsuspecting waiter told DeeDee he was not allowed to serve him a martini until noon. For a scary moment I thought he might literally break the poor man’s neck. He started off every day with martinis anyway, but on this particular occasion he was also self-medicating — he had bursitis in his shoulder and it was driving him crazy, but he refused to see the ship’s doctor. "He wouldn’t be a doctor on a ship if he weren’t a bum" — bum being the worst epithet in his lexicon, worse even than "s.o.b." The bum seemed pretty okay to us — he was tanned and English and so good-looking that Frances and I shamelessly flirted with him every night in the bar.

Anyway, the shoulder got so bad that we finally forced DeeDee into the doctor’s office. The guy gave him a shot of cortisone, the shoulder instantly felt better and the bum was elevated to: "You know, I think that ship’s doctor is one of the finest physicians I’ve ever encountered — and don’t you find him remarkably attractive?"