This post has no pictures - don't worry that's a good thing. We've been sick all week!
I woke up Monday morning with a sinus headache, chills, aches, and slight fever. I took sinus Tylenol all day and night. By Tuesday morning I gave up and called Steve at work to figure how to get to the clinic.
The Hansons are an older couple from our church. They are both American doctors. After coming to Bucharest years ago they have actually become citizens here and opened a clinic. It is for Romanians and Foreigners. For the Romanians they fill out a form and the fee is based on the household income. Our fee (for Westerners) was $50 for the visit.
Dr. Hanson was available for a 1pm appointment so Steve left work to come home and take me in to see him. He figured I had a sinus infection and prescribed penicillin, claratin, and these nose drops to clear the congestion (which are the best thing ever invented!). Medicine here, we found out, is very inexpensive. All this was less than $20!
By Wednesday morning, I woke up feeling much better and started doing some laundry. You can't let it build up here. :) Maria on the other hand woke up feeling horrible. She stayed on the sofa all day without an appetite and slept. By that night we decided that if she still felt warm in the morning we would head back to the clinic.
Thursday morning you could feel the heat radiating from her body. We called the Hansons at home around 7am and they worked us in for an 11:00am appt. Traffic was crazy and we were VERY late for our appointment but that's not such a big deal here. They took Maria's temperature and it was 103.4! Dr. Hanson wanted blood work done to know if we were dealing with a viral or bacterial infection. Sadly the clinic cannot afford the lab machine right now so we had to go to another clinic to draw blood and run the test. Maria must have been really "out-of-it" because none of this registered with her. I was thinking how mature and brave she was being about having blood taken. Well when we walked into the room with the ladies in white with rubber gloves, she figured it out! After calming down, she let them run the test and we waited for the result. Yeah no bacteria!
Dr. Hanson called our cell phone on the way home and said no medicine, just lots of rest and fluids. She spent the rest of the day on the sofa asleep. Around 3:30 am she woke me up and said she thought she might be hungry. At this point it had been a little over 40 hrs. since her last solid food. I got up and she ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of water. Then back to bed.
Today she's had a small appetite but still low energy. Lots of reading and drawing. I think both of us are ready to get outside this weekend and it looks like the weather is going to cooperate.
We're still planning on going to the glass factory in the morning and then just hanging around here for the rest of the weekend.
