Wow, you thought I'd forgotten to finish this blog, didn't you?
I woke up my friends super early on Saturday morning after I had been puking through the night. They helped me call the clinic and they said I should come back in. At this point I wanted to do anything but go back to the clinic. We had a flight to catch back to Lima at about 1 pm that afternoon, and then just after midnight we were headed back to the States. There was NO WAY I was not going to be on either of those planes. But, the wonderful people at the clinic knew that we had a flight, and assured us that I wouldn't be there very long.
Matt, Marie, and I climbed into another cab and he wisked us to the clinic. They asked me a few questions and discovered that my stomach just didn't appreciate the antibiotics, no big deal. The nice nurse gave me a giant shot of anti-nausea "stuff" and I felt better in about 30 minutes. The needle was rather large and the amount of medicine was intense, so Matt and Marie distracted me by asking me how Chris and I met. I hardly even felt the needle :)
After I sat and waited for the medicine to kick in, we were all set to go! Mary had stayed overnight in the clinic because of a respiratory thing, and she was going to be discharged about the same time as me. Then we just had our massive clinic bill to deal with. Luckily, the total was in Soles and not Dollars, so it wasn't bad at all (the exchange rate was 2.78 while we were there). Considering the charge of an overnight clinic stay in the US, our bill was quite reasonable. A few people with us didn't have health insurance, and they were actually excited to pay that bill verses one from the US. Interesting...
We piled in more cabs and headed back to the hotel. By that time Mandy was discharged too, so all 7 of us were back together! We met in the hotel lobby and then met our lovely tour guide Reuben was there to meet us and we headed back to the airport. I snapped as many pictures out of the window of the bus as we drove as I could, but I still didn't get very many pictures at all. We also were a little concerned because we had 14 bags between the 7 of us, since the poor people in Lima didn't have their bags.
Luckily, the airlines in Peru don't charge for extra bags, so we were good to go. We went through the amazing security and then sat at our gate, and sat, and sat, and sat. The time for our flight came and went and no one was around to ask any questions. About 20 or 30 minutes after our scheduled flight time, the wonderful front desk agent arrived, and we were soon boarding. That flight was much less eventful than the flight to Cusco.
When we landed in Cusco, you would have thought Peggy thought we were dead. She was so excited to see us living and walking, crying and hugging each one of us. I think she was just glad to see her suitcase.
We went back to our first hotel and hung out with the rest of our crew. They were definitely not as lively as we were. I blame that on our excellent medical care and our other medicine - laughter. We laughed and joked so much about puke and diarrhea that it didn't matter to us any more. We had a great group stuck in Cusco. We ate some dinner at the hotel, and after a lot of discussing, we decided to not go to the last congregation. The timing just wasn't going to work, so we went to the local market for about 45 minutes instead. I was able to buy just a few souvenirs, so for those of you who didn't get them, I apologize. But you can have me happy and health as a souvenir instead :)
After our adventure to the market, we got back to the hotel to find that Mike had been discharged and sent back to the hotel. We were finally all in the same place. Mike was still not feeling very well, but they decided with the help of our Peruvian friend Nora who is a nurse and open air of the hotel that Mike would recover faster than in the hospital. Peggy and Mike stayed behind just one more day in Peru.
We piled into the vans for our last experience with Peruvian traffic. We got to the airport and started to check in to our flight....that was delayed over 3 hours! We were supposed to leave at 12:30 pm, so we were already exhausted and just really wanted to get home. Well, after a few hours of sitting in the airport terminal, we made it safely back to the states. I've never been so happy to be in Texas!!!
