Visit to the Doctor's Office

This will come as a surprise, but I had to cut my first day of work short to go to the hospital.

In the last entries I wrote about the discomfort I felt in my lungs from Saturday’s dust storm. Well, today at work I spent 15-20 minutes in the bathroom trying to stifle a severe nosebleed. A colleague of mine named Anita called a taxi and told the driver to take me to the hospital. Ugh. . .talk about having a bad first day of work!

Andrew came with to the hospital and was very helpful. It turned out to be a pretty interesting excursion. We drove through some new parts of the city. Up until this point we hadn’t really seen any slums or any indicators of extreme poverty. But on the ride to the hospital we were exposed to some of this stuff. I saw lots of groups of little kids walking through the street, in really dangerous areas where they were at risk of being hit by a car. We passed some slums, as well as a bridge that some people seem to be living under. There were cots and things set up under it, as well as some rickshaws piled high with supplies. A surprising amount of adults were just walking through the middle of busy streets right in the middle of heavy traffic.

I also saw lots of cool stuff on the way there. One thing that stands out to me is that things are very colorful. Women tend to wear beautiful outfits. There are tons of vendors on the side of the road selling fruit, or just about anything else you could think of. We passed a vendor selling mops and brooms, all of different colors, just sticking out of this huge bin on the side of the road. Most of the main roads have an island in the middle. The curb on both the island and on the sidewalk is painted in black and white alternating stripes. This will probably not come as a surprise to many of you, but lots of things that I see here remind me of the UK. I feel that my previous experiences in the UK have helped ease me into things slightly.

The hospital was teeming with people but I was ushered in to a doctor’s office immediately. He prescribed me two inhalers and some nasal spray. Woohoo! I am thankful that there is no infection at this point. Hopefully this medication will do the trick and I won’t have to go back to see the doctor again. I started taking the medication right away and I feel much better already. I was also relieved when both Anita and the doctor said Saturday’s weather was atypical and that heavy dust storms are pretty uncommon.

We’re back at the apartment now. It’s too bad that we had to cut our first day at work short, but hopefully tomorrow will go better!