Peru #3

Friday
After waking up a few times, it was finally beginning to be light outside.  I like to sleep in all kinds of funky positions, usually keeping my hands underneath me or the pillow, so it was really hard to sleep with an IV in my hand.  Not to mention the weird noises and the nurses who care about you enough to check on you a few times during the night as well.  So that being said, I think I slept well for where I was.

Marie, my clinic roomie, and I were both super excited to wake up because we thought we could check out of this hotel....or clinic.  But sadly, they said we would have to stay at least until lunch.  We also thought they said we had to finish the bottle of fluids that was draining into our arms, so the race began!  Our IVs had been finicky enough that we watched the nurses adjust them multiple times and learned how to do it ourselves.  Of course, once I knew how to do that, I had that thing going as fast as possible.  It made my arm cold and ache a little, but I wanted to get out of there!  I was still holding on to a bit of hope that I would get to go to Machu Picchu that day.  Needless to say, that didn't happen.  And the nurses didn't actually mean that we got to go home sooner if we finished our IV fluids.  Double bummer.  I was really hydrated.

Lunch time came and we were super excited...not to eat, but to get out of there.  Now, please don't take this the wrong way - the nurses were super sweet, the doctors were tall, dark, and handsome, and the pjs were comfy.  We were treated so well in our clinic, especially compared to our friends still in Lima, but we were in a foreign country and just wanted to get back to our planned adventures.

They brought us lunch around 12:30 pm, and Marie and I were so excited we couldn't sit still.  And then they told us that we could leave after DINNER.  Ugh.  Not good news.  Especially because by this point we kept breakfast in our bodies for the appropriate amount of time and we were drinking water on top of having IVs.  We felt like we were ready to leave.

So we "suffered" through a few more hours waiting for dinner to come.  They started talking about dinner, and then they started talking about our discharge papers!  HORRAY!  They fed us dinner while they were signing our papers, so we actually got out of there a little bit earlier than we thought.  What a great day!  Tommy got to leave with us, but Mary had to stay one more night.  She had an upper respiratory thing on top of all the stomach stuff, so she needed to stay.

Officially we were all diagnosed with Salmonella.  Apparently salmonella is a very broad term, and our specific case was Typhoid Fever.  That sure takes you back to the 1800s doesn't it?  The guys at work like to call me Typhoid Sara now.  We looked it up online, and that is a little dangerous.  You learn all sorts of things you don't really want to learn.

We called a taxi and headed back to our hotel.  Marie and I were super excited to put our own clothes on, get our IVs out, and take a shower!  Our showers in our hotel were super fancy and nice with warmed floors, but also it was just nice to see the sun again.  I'm being dramatic, I know, but Marie and I talked about how we have a much better appreciation for nurses, patients, and being outside.  We lost all sense of time in the clinic.  Luckily there was a tiny window that we could kind of tell if it was light or not, but even then we were convinced there was a light bulb in there and not actually daylight.

After our showers and clean clothes, we went to the hotel restaurant to have some dinner.  The dinner they served to us at the clinic was chicken soup, and we were all convinced that we got sick from chicken, so we were not too excited to eat that.  We had some delicious grilled cheese at the hotel and then went to bed.

Early Saturday morning, I woke up because my stomach was upset again.  I was convinced that it was the medicine, so I would be ok in a little while.  Well, a few hours later I was still not doing well, so I went to Marie's room and woke them up.  They called the clinic for me and they said to come back in.  Dang it!!  More to come later....

dun dun dun! haha.