A Canadian in Costa Rica

"Are you absolutely sure you know what you're doing?" I asked my boyfriend as he prepared to inject a dose of cortisone into my right butt-cheek. He drew a cross on my buttocks with his fingers, and then pointed at the upper-right section. Theoretically this was the safety zone where you would miss the sciatic nerve.
“See, it’s easy,” he said and patted my bum.
I had hoped the problem would resolve itself, but after suffering in the tropical humidity with severe shoulder pain for several weeks I'd had enough. My work-related injury had not gone away through the exercises recommended by my physiotherapist, and I was unable to even get undressed by myself. I felt demoralized and alone in a foreign country where I struggled with basic communication.
Before arriving in Matagalpa two months earlier, I had known almost nothing about Nicaragua. The occasional bout of food poisoning, constant cat-calls and overall noise left me with considerable doubt, and I continued to reconsider my decision every time the water shut off in the middle of a shower, or when the neighbour’s kids locked me into the apartment one afternoon. Nothing could have prepared me, however, for the terror I felt while Eric swabbed my skin with alcohol we’d purchased at the corner pharmacy.
When the doctor had given me the first dose of cortisone at the clinic, he joked with Eric in Spanish as he stuck me with the needle. I blinked back tears and tried to see the humour in the situation. News stories of rare staph infections began to flit through my head when I noticed the brown mould growing on the medical diagrams and all over the ceiling. It was undoubtedly cleaner in the room we shared at the guest house, but at least at the clinic I was in the hands of a trained professional.
"Ok, I'm going to do it on the count of three," Eric said and we counted together. The injection hurt less than when the doctor had done it, and I felt an immense sense of gratitude that he had missed my sciatic nerve.
After he had applied a tiny Band-Aid and carefully discarded the used needle, he sank down onto the bed and put his hands over his face.
"Oh my god," he groaned. I began to worry anew that he had forgotten some essential part of the process, when he continued:
"That was the most terrifying thing I've ever done."
We didn’t make it past six months living in that small Nicaraguan city, but I don’t regret the terrifying moment we shared on our Matagalpan adventure.