It’s been over 20 years since I spent any quality time in a hospital, so I don’t have a good basis of comparison. I think I am a grumpy patient, I get that from my Dad. They just came in to take three MORE vials of blood and 4 more slides. Either way, I am cool as long as they only take stuff OUT, and don’t put anything IN. I have no trust of hospitals. They can have all the blood and poop they want, and X-rays are pretty noninvasive. But when they first mentioned a body-cavity exam, I jumped out of bed and was going for my backpack. Luckily, I asked for clarification, and found out that “body cavity search” in Spanish means you get an ultrasound… a little different than in the USA.<\/p>\n
Then the wheelchair showed up to take me to the ultrasound. “Um, I’m not getting in that thing,” I told the baffled looking nurses. “Come back when I’m 80 and we can talk about it.” The second bit at least made them chuckle, and they let me walk myself.<\/p>\n
The ultrasound tech was friendly, and basically checked out all the organs I know the words for in Spanish… and a few I don’t. He said that they all looked fine, and that he hadn’t seen anything in the X-rays either. (I checked his lab coat, and he’s also the radiologist, apparently.) He DID find and photograph an anomaly on my ves\u00edcula biliar<\/em>, though, but he said it probably isn’t anything I should worry about.<\/p>\n But guess what, I did worry! That was the one organ he mentioned that I didn’t know the English for. I returned to my laptop, and confirmed my guess: gall bladder. Ironically, my dad just had his removed less than 2 months ago. Nothing will probably come of it, but I can’t help wonder if they would do surgery for that here, in Guatemala City, or if they would medevac me to the military base in Panama? Blech.<\/p>\n But, in general, I can’t complain too much about the care I am getting…yet. Sure, the instrument tray is rusty, the rooms are without heat and straight from the 60s, and they use mercury thermometers right after I’ve had some water… but I can let that slip. The nurses are friendly, the doctors are willing to talk, and they use disposable syringes and lancets. Lets hope it stays this friendly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been over 20 years since I spent any quality time in a hospital, so I don’t have a good basis of comparison. I think I am a grumpy patient, I get that from my Dad. They just came in to take three MORE vials of blood and 4 more slides. Either way, I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jims-guatemala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}