January 8, 2011

So, the above picture is where we spent our entire day, yesterday.  Can you guess?  Castle?  No.  Church?  No.  Really big restaurant?  No.  The mall?  I wish.

It’s the “Hospital de Nossa Senhora da Graca”.  Otherwise known as our local hospital in Tomar. Wanna hear the story?  If so – keep going.  If not – Just go to the next post of pictures.

You know how I’ve been sick just about this whole time in Portugal?  And then we got these 2 dogs from the pound, right?  Well, these dogs have ear mites; which we took them in to the vet to get medication for.  Then about 2 days later (about a week ago) I got all these itchy bumps all over me.  I assumed that the mites had gotten to me.  Well, I’d had enough.  Rick took me to our local clinic, next to Tanner’s school.  But, they said I couldn’t go there because I wasn’t a patient, yet.  I would first need to go to the hospital.  I guess they do things the opposite here.  We were thinking the day would be easy:  go to the clinic, have the doc prescribe me some antibiotics to build my immune system, and get some medication to kill the mites.  But, that would be too easy.  So, we go to the hospital.  At the reception desk they tell us we’d have to go to the “Urgencia” dept. (which I’m thinking is one step down from the “emergency room” or it may have even been the emergency room – not sure).  Anyways, after checking in - we wait.  We sit in a waiting room with lots of other people. The waiting room was quite the experience.  They would roll a gurney in with a very sick looking person on it and just leave them lying in the middle of the waiting room.  Sometimes they would just roll it right up to our legs, as we sat in the chairs along the wall.  One poor woman, who had been there since before we got there, was calling out “O Senhora!!”  really loud almost the entire day.  She had been fine when we first got there, but then she started trying to sit up and get off the gurney.  So, they put these restraints on her wrists and ankles.  It was very sad.  I guess she was saying some “bad” words at one point because everyone in the waiting room was laughing.  But, I felt really bad for her.  I wished I could have talked to her, to calm her down.  The nurse would come over every so often and that would help for a little while.  Another lady in the waiting room would go talk to her occasionally and that would help to.  Anyhow, we were there for a long time. 

 I finally get seen by a doctor who hears my symptoms & looks at the bumps.  He first says that the bumps are definitely not mite bites.  I doubted his conclusion.  It was just too coincidental that I would get these spots at the same time that the dogs got ear mites.  Anyways, he says the fever thing is definitely something to look into.  3-4 months of a fever coming and going is just too long, he says.  I’d have to agree.  I won’t give you the minute by minute details (because it was just a lot of sitting and waiting).  But, basically they did a urinalysis, drew blood twice (each arm), they did a chest x-ray (I think to rule out TB, because that’s common here), and they did an abdominal ultrasound because my blood work showed an elevated amount of enzymes in the liver.  At one point, before they had gotten my blood results back, Rick asked if we could just go and come back.  We needed to get some things in town and pick up Tanner from school. By this time it was about 2pm and all they’d done was draw blood (oh, we’d gotten there at 10am).  We figured we’d come back and get the test results later.  Our friend Fatocha had also been calling and checking on me.  She thought it was ridiculous that I was still there.  She thought maybe we didn’t understand and that we were supposed to “take a number” or something.  So, she ended up calling the nurse in the urgencia department at the same time Rick went to see if we could leave.  The nurse went and talked to the doctor for us, who in turn called the lab to get my results.  That’s when they found out that my enzymes were too high.  The doctor said Rick could leave, but that I’d have to stay because I may have an “infectious disease” and they would need to run other tests.  Ok – I think I have turned into a big baby because, honestly, I almost started crying.  But, I told myself – oh, suck it up, you can handle this.  So, Rick didn’t leave right away, but he did have to go get Tanner about an hour later.  So, there I sat – listening to “O Senhora” for about an hour and a half by myself.  Luckily, they didn’t call me for my next tests until Rick had gotten back.  The girl that did my chest x-ray ended up being from Canada and spoke perfect English, and they let Rick come in with me during the ultrasound, since the doc didn’t speak English.  The ultrasound showed nothing wrong – so that was good.  So, to sum up my LONG 12 ½ day and all my tests at the hospital:

They don’t think I have an “infectious disease” such as Hepatitis.  Oh, side note.  It’s so great to have a “clean” lifestyle.  I actually felt proud being able to say nope – don’t drink alcohol, nope – don’t smoke, yep  – eat pretty healthy, yep - been married to the same person for 21 years.  Those things quickly ruled out several possibilities.  It was funny, though, when the doctor asked me if I drink and I said no – he said “oh, that’s too bad Portugal has great wine”, while he laughed.  The other interesting thing to go with that is – both doctors that saw me were heavy smokers, as are most Portuguese men (even in the health care field).  Anyways, everything seems normal except for the elevated enzyme count (liver problem).  So, they scheduled me to come back next week and do all the lab work again and then I have another appt on the 31^st to find out the results.  We’re just at a wait and see point now.  Oh, and one other thing – the bites, which aren’t bites – turns out to be a skin rash caused by my liver.  You know how you can turn yellow/jaundice because of your liver?  Well, I guess the liver can cause lots of weird things to come out in your skin – my rash being one of them.