We have a couple of updates from the last post about our well-being.  First, the doctor said we may have malaria.  Everyone kind of laughed at this thought because we haven’t been anywhere that would make that possible, but all the doctors we have seen said our symptoms match malaria.   Interesting.

Second, we actually were well for the week we were home and didn’t get sick again that weekend, but the very next weekend we were down for the count once again (in case you haven’t read my last post about our health, we’ve been getting sick every weekend for the last month and a half, not through the weeks, we’re always oddly fine on Monday).  On Friday, Burke went to the doctor and they said it looked like bronchitis and wrote him a prescription for it.  He didn’t have his insurance card so I was going to pick it up for him when I got home.  But as it turned out, by the end of the day I was feeling quite ill so the moment I got off work, I walked home as quickly as I could and crashed right into bed.  The next day Slavo took me to the emergency room again.  There was a new doctor we hadn’t seen before who spoke English and I felt very well taken care of with him.  He asked questions that it seemed like a doctor normally would and even took my temperature.  He said there was nothing that appeared wrong with me, and it didn’t seem like the flu either.  However, I did have a temperature of 38C which is apparently pretty substantial. He said he could not do anything further for me, so he recommended me to the Infectious Diseases department of the hospital.

When we got to the infectious disease department, Slavo started to explain our symptoms by first mentioning our headaches and the nurse who was very busy treating the no one else that was there stopped listening at that point and reported to the doctor in the back by saying, “Americans here with headaches… we don’t treat headaches.”  We were worried we had a skeptic for a doctor before he even saw us, but Burke said maybe he would be like House.

I expressed several times and still feel that our saving grace was my temperature because with out it we appeared pretty infectious disease free.  They proceed to do some pretty typical things including listening to our breathing, poking around our stomachs, and taking our blood pressure.  They said that my blood pressure was too low and asked if it was normal for me to be low, I said it’s lowish but still always healthy (it was 100/80 at the time).  Based on that, what comes next shouldn’t surprise anyone: the nurse swabbed my mouth and took a mere 3cL of blood.  I just about passed out as I mentally struggled to tell Slavo I didn’t feel well, but instead it was more of a falling back on the bed that I had been sitting on.

Finally Burke was allowed back into the examination room after sitting in the cold hallway for at least an hour.  They did his entire exam in about five minutes and sent our blood samples with us so that we could drop them at the other hospital ourselves.  They said if we did this, we would have most of the results within the night.  We didn’t hear back that night, but Slavo did tell us the next morning what they said.  We have a bacterial infection in our blood that has inflamed our blood cells (or something like that).  It’s more specific than what the doctor thought, but he was right in giving us a stronger antibiotic so I guess he was kind of like House.

This morning we went to our regular doctor again and we should know more of our test results later today and then the final results in a week.  The doctor thought we were a little crazy for wanting to go back to school after being sick for the weekend, but she allowed it.

In any case, we would still appreciate your prayers for our recovery and will probably give another update on our health when we know the final count and hopefully don’t get sick again.

In other news, our kitten is still very cute and is good company to the sick.