Waking up Thursday was pretty rough.  Mostly because Josh was up multiple times Wednesday night with pain in the back of his head.  If you read the post from Tuesday, you’ll remember that Josh felt something sting his head during the beginning of their night dive, but, we weren’t able to find any marks and it wasn’t hurting him.  He complained of pain throughout Wednesday night, but, I still couldn’t see anything wrong with the area that he was pointing to.  Ibuprofen seemed to help, so, he started an every-four-hour regimen.  We figured we would keep an eye on things throughout the day and get on with experiencing Bonaire.

After breakfast, it was time for our third and final boat dive of the week.  We left the dock promptly at 1000 and the weather was BEAUTIFUL!  Out first dive site Karpata, which Josh had gotten to dive earlier in the week.  I was super excited because I was, admittedly, pretty jealous that I chickened out doing the dive because of the entrance.  Now was my opportunity to get to see it!  The underwater landscape was just as incredible as everyone had said it was!  It was just like being in the mountains, except underwater.  And where there would have been trees, there were massive walls of corals.  It was absolutely breathtaking.  Truth be told, it was pretty difficult to stay aware of my dive buddy and the rest of the group because I was SO distracted by what I was looking at.  Our dive leader successfully drew my attention to a fire worm, which was pretty cool.  But, the rest of the dive, I was in my own world, trying to process what my eyes were seeing.

Our second boat dive was at the house reef, Eighteenth Palm.  We saw two lionfish, a ton of eels including another spotted sharptail eel and a 6-foot long barracuda!

After the second boat dive, Josh was pretty adamant that he was not getting back in the water until his head felt better.  He was experiencing some significant discomfort and pain on the back of his head where he got stung.  I took another look and was able to see a bit of redness and a few marks where it seemed like he may have been bitten or stung, but, nothing that seemed to equate to the level of pain and discomfort Josh was describing.

We figured some Benadryl might help.  If not with the pain, maybe at least get him some sleep.  I hopped in the rental truck and headed a bit north in search of Benadryl.  I quickly remembered that I was pretty far away from home when I arrived at the islands “biggest” grocery store, which was smaller than any chain grocery store I’ve ever been in.  After about 20 minutes of scouring the smallish store for any type of medicine, I finally headed for the checkout, with gummy worms and no Benadryl.  I asked the cashier where I could find Benadryl, but she just looked at me.  Despite English being the primary language spoken on Bonaire, the locals speak a variety of foreign languages, and, depending on who you’re talking to, English may not be one of them.  Pills?, I asked.  No response.  Medicine?, I asked.  No response.  Uhh…Advil?  Ahhhh, the cashier responded, pharmacy!  Yes, yes, pharmacy!  That’ll do!  The cashier graciously wrote down the name of the pharmacy on a piece of register tape and handed it to me.  “Botika Sabana” the small paper said.  I didn’t even try to ask for directions.  After saying thank you a million times, I headed out to the rental truck and opened up Google Maps.  (Thank GOD for Google Maps!)  Turns out Botika Sabana was just a short drive from the grocery store and pretty easy to find.  The pharmacist at Botika Sabana informed me that the pharmacy had run out of Benadryl earlier in the day, so she couldn’t help me.  But, she suggested, the convenience store up the road a ways should be able to help.  I hopped back in the truck and headed to the convenience store.  Much to my surprise, the convenience store had a  larger selection of common medications than the pharmacy did and I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why.  But, I found the Benadryl quickly and headed back to the resort.

The rest of the evening was pretty low-key, thanks to Josh + Benadryl.  We had some dinner and then went to bed early, hopeful that Josh’s head would feel better in the morning.