Halloween in Spain....a full week of......thrills
Trip Start
Aug 27, 2009
1
32
45
Trip End
Dec 21, 2009
Valladolid, Castile-León, Spain and Canary Islands
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Anyways, starting with Halloween. Halloween is a fairly new holiday over here (imported for the English countries....Ireland/US), and their interpretation of it is a little different than ours. Only the children and college students dress up, but the costumes are very different. There are no funny costumes, no political costumes, and no...err...slutty costumes for the ladies. Everything is only scary, including the women. It was quite a shock to see girls our age dressed in full face paint as a dead person, instead of as a naughty school teacher or some other porn star variation. In any case, we spent the night trying to get pictures with as many dressed up people as we could. It led to some interesting conversations. I uploaded some pictures from Facebook of this.
All the real fun started on Monday afternoon, when I started getting a fever. We didn't have school that day, due to some other random national holiday, so I was hoping that it would just be some quick thing that would be going away overnight. I got close to thinking that this would be the case when the fever had completely subsided by Tuesday afternoon, after missing only a day of classes. I figured it was just a 24 hour virus or something, and got on with life.
However, Wednesday I woke up with some weird stomach pains, that were especially noticeable when I ate. For most of the day, i just assumed it was a byproduct of the fever I had, and kind of ignored it. However, by Wednesday night the pain was starting to concentrate in my lower, right side....which is when the red flags started going off.
Thursday morning I woke up without the stomach ache but with extreme pain and tenderness in the same area. Thanks to Google, I knew this was a sign of appendicitis, so I headed off to school to talk to my professors about it. I was planning on trying to get through the days worth of classes and then heading to the doctor afterward, however my professors had a greater sense of urgency. My grammar professor canceled her class, and drove me to the doctor herself to get things checked out. Since I'm insured through the school, I got a taste of Spain's private health care system, which is apparently quite a bit nicer than the public system. The doctor at the first place did a few tests and told us that he didn't feel it was appendicitis, however he suggested we get some tests done to make sure since I was showing classic signs of it.
We then headed from the clinic off to Campo Grande Hospital, the main hospital in central Valladolid, to get some analysis done. During the Echo...it didn't take long for the doctor to tell me that it was appendicitis. He showed it to me on the machine and told me that it was a pretty clear case of it (it just looked like grey blobs to me). From there, I went to get tons of blood taken from nurses who were really excited to practice their nonexistent English skills ("This good we have liquid of you and you sit now here good ok"......"uhh what?"). After the tests were done, I had to wait around a while for lab work to come back. My grammar professor had to take off to teach another class, so she was replaced by the director of the program that I'm in who got me through all the paperwork.
Around 2pm, I got put in a bed and hooked up to my IV (by a 17 year old, no less). From there, things moved pretty fast. I got taken up to the inpatient area of the hospital, where another one of my professors, the directors nephew, my host mom and 2 of my classmates (Jessica and Emily) showed up with my stuff. By 4:15 I was being talked to about the surgery (I may have understood half) and I was in surgery by 4:30 pm. I don't really remember much of that. I was out pretty fast.
When I woke up, my two classmates, one of my professors and the director were still there. I got put on morphine pretty fast, since I was freezing and in a good deal of pain. Apparently one of my professors was asking me how I was doing to which I responded "No puedo hablar espanol" ("I can't speak Spanish"). Apparently my brain only functions in one language while coming out of anesthesia. My professors were fairly amused at the message I left on mom's voicemail...which went something along the lines of "Hi mom, I had appendicitis, so then I had an operation, and now I'm all better.....yadda yadda". They told me that they would be freaking out if they ever got a message like that.
The first night was probably the roughest in terms of pain, it wasn't all that bad. The nurses came in every few hours to refill pain killers. The program director offered to spend the night, but I told her I thought I'd be fine. The next day was extremely boring. I wasn't allowed to eat real food, so I basically just drank juice and Manzanilla all day (chamomile tea in english I think). I spent most of my time reading, and talking to the people who came to visit, which included two students in the program, my grammar professor, my culture/conversation professor, my art/literature professor, the founder of the program, the director of the program, her nephew and my host mom. I was able to walk a little which was good.
I was discharged on Saturday, finally....at which point I was mostly just bored as could be. My host mom took my home, and I've pretty much just been laying in bed since...eating a little. Basically, fun times in Spain this week. Interestingly enough, this story has apparently already reached Wisconsin in full...as one of my friends told me that I was discussed during the Orientation to Study Abroad class on saturday, as well as in the International studies office. This whole thing should hopefully be the source of a few interesting stories when I get home.
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Uploaded a few pictures from Facebook of Ireland and Halloween
