the size of marcie's kidneys

hello!!!
well have we got a great new years happening. the first day (which i should not be telling you about--we have decided to officially delete it from our calender) so. really, pretend with us: this is all fictional. I'll just tell you for fun.

So, January 1st when we were at our volunteer placement. Getting ready for bed and Carmen said he was cold. Which was not that unrealistic of a thing to say. It gets down to about 12 degrees C and in a concerete house with no heating, it's cold. Anyways, then he started to shiver violently. It got a little intense and especially because he is not that dramatic of a guy.

I, on the other hand, had been having some difficulty with my stomach recently and was starting to feel the familliar pang of nausea and stomach spasms. This was a hard night to get through and in the morning our Buba told us to go to the hospital. He told us of a good place to go, a private hospital. So off we went.

We arrived at a nearly empty, whitewashed building under construction and started wandering around trying to find someone to direct us because the signs were all in Nepali. We finally met with a doctor who thought we both needed a whole bunch of tests. Let me spare you the abhorrant details involved with obtaining specimen samples in a developing country (private hospital or not). We recieved the results in an hour.

We were very happy to find nothing too serious, no worms, no malaria, no typhoid, ect. Carmen just had a little bowel infection which was probably related to food poisioning. I recieved kind of a surprising result related to my "serum amylase" (this is for the medical people): my value was 247 on a scale of 28-100. So they decided that this might be a bit of a problem and they scheduled me for an abdominal ultrasound. It was kind of surprising because here I just had a little stomach ache, carmen was REALLY sick, and now I was getting further testing.

So the next day we went back and they examined the entire contents of my abdomen through ultrasound, EXCEPT my stomach (which was the one giving me the problem) but I think they diagnosed me through process of elimination- meaning, everything else looks fine (and by the way, my left and right kidneys are appx. 98 and 95 mm). So they guessed that the problem was possibly gastritis, a condition caused by infrequent eating, pollution inhalation and stress.

While I was getting this ultrasound, I could not see the screen, but I was watching Carmen's face for his reaction as He has never seen any ultrasound before. He looked totally horrified. And here I was thinking, what is wrong? When It was all finished and the technition said "Looks like everything is perfect" Carmen's face lightened and he put his arm on me and said "I saw all these huge black holes and I was like what the heck is wrong and I thought the Doctor was going to say, actually Marcie you are full of huge black holes all over the place, that is really bad."
So we were both relieved to find out these holes are inside everyone. At least on the ultrasound screen.

SO they sent us off with a whole bunch of pills. We've started to feel like two senior citizens, always reminding eachother to take our pills. Carmen has got back to normal and we are very happy for that. I am still hoping things will get better but am still feeling sick sometimes.

It is not fun feeling sick when there is SO MUCH to enjoy. It can get in the way. But we are really happy that nothing worse has happened to either of us.

So that was our (deleted) start to the new year.
Trust me, things are waaaaaay better now.

Marcie and Carmen