The Twelfth of October - Doctor's

Armine's dad and his brothers make wine every fall.  They buy something like 500 lbs of grapes....


Monday morning we went to another doctor, for a second opinion for me and for a first opinion for Armine. I got on the US Embassy website to find the number of a Dr. who spoke English. There were several listed and I called all of them but none of them answered. I’d look up the medical clinic’s web-site, and there wouldn’t be a phone number listed anywhere. It was driving me crazy. So I went with Armine and her mom to the Health House, with Georgian speaking doctors.

The Health House is more of a campus of doctor’s offices. General Care in one building, radiology in another, ortho doctor’s somewhere else, with no communication between any of them.

The first place we went did an ultra-sound on Armine. I’m not sure what they ultra-sounded, I wasn’t allowed in the room. Then they did an ultra-sound on my ankle, and told me there was a lot of blood around my ankle…. The technician lady gave me a prescription (ok, not really a prescription, I don’t think they have those here, she just wrote down what I should get) for some kind of gel that I would put on my ankle which would help the swelling go down. My whole foot was really swollen at this point. We’d spent the whole previous day at the police station and in a bus, so I never got a chance to lie down.

We went into another room and they did a bunch of tests on Armine, she was having bad headaches, so they were checking her balance and how well she could focus her eyes, etc….

Armine’s mom paid for all this and kept the receipt to give to Bad Guy. And then we hopped to the radiology building. They told me it was about 100 meters, which is about a football field. I still have no crutches….the doctor we visited first didn’t have any and didn’t know where we could get some. I’d been hopping on one leg for some time now. I had Armine’s grandmother’s cane with me, but it just isn’t as helpful as crutches. I didn’t want to get a taxi for 100 m, so I hopped. I hopped for a long time before we realized the building was further than we thought. So we ended up getting a taxi anyway. My right leg was killing me from all the hopping, and everyone we passed stopped and stared….

We got to the x-ray building and the machine was on the second floor, no elevator. We both got x-rayed and had to wait an hour for them to develop. Armine’s mom walked around the whole time looking, unsuccessfully, for some crutches. While we were at the x-ray place Bad Guy showed up with his cousin (a girl), and two buddies. Varazdat, Armine’s brother, knew Bad Guy was bringing friends, so he came with two of his buddies. Armine hoped a fight wouldn’t break out, I did. This time I had a cane and Bad Guy wasn’t driving car, so I would have the upper hand.

The x-rays were finally given to us but the doctor to look at the x-rays was in a different building. So I hopped another 100 meters to a different building, with 10 people in tow, down 3 flights of stairs to the basement. I hopped into a doctor’s office and he looked at my ankle for a second, then a car crash victim walked in with a dislocated shoulder and sat down on the exam table next to me, so the doctor diverted his attention. The guy was obviously in a lot of pain and Armine was getting really squeamish, so we hopped into the hallway to wait a minute. When we got back into the doctor’s office he looked at my x-ray and said it wasn’t broken and started to prepare a cast. I wasn’t cool with this. I had Armine ask a bunch of questions, but the doctor just shrugged them off. It was odd that the doctor wasn’t consulting; he was making his own decisions and just doing it. I didn’t want or think I needed a cast, but he was set on it. I didn’t want it hard all around, so he just did a hard cast on the back of my calf and then ran it under my foot. The rest is just a soft wrap. My foot was still really swollen, but it would be easy enough for me to loosen or tighten it, since it was mostly just a wrap.

But now I can’t put spread on the prescription gel to help with the swelling, the gel the first doctor told me to get. There isn’t any communication between these doctor’s. So one will tell you one thing and another will tell you another and I guess I just have to pick which one I’ll listen to….

The ortho dr then looked at Armine’s x-ray, which showed that one of the discs in her spine, at her neck, didn’t look right, so he told her to get an MRI. I sat outside the doctors office with Varazdat and his buddies and Bad Guy and his buddies while Armine went and got an MRI. The results wouldn’t come back for another day.

Bad Guy paid for the x-ray’s and was given receipts for everything else.

All Armine and I do all day is lay around. I keep watching this Argentinean soap opera which is dubbed into Georgian. Every 15 minutes Armine brings me up to speed on what is going on: “This girl is crying because her husband’s previously lost at sea wife just came back and he is still in love with her. But the lost at sea wife was having an affair with some other guy before she disappeared and she loves them both. Then some other woman is hiding from the police in a basement because she was having an affair with her sisters husband, who then framed her sister by killing her husband. And then this guy got run over by a car by some woman because he was cheating on her, and now his legs have to be amputated….” It’s great. And one night a TV show came on and it was the Georgian version of Friends. It took me about 2 seconds to say ‘wait a minute, what is this?’ The set is almost identical, though the coffee shop is called ‘coffee house’ not ‘central perk’. Georgian Ross is fat.

Ben has changed his ticket and will now ride through Turkey with me after Christmas.

My ankle feels like it’s doing better. I don’t ever put weight on it and it only hurts if I put weight on it, so I’m not feeling any pain. I’m very anxious for some type of conclusion to Armine’s MRI. I wish she didn’t have to deal with this.

All things considered, we’re both terribly lucky. I’m lucky that I have such nice people willing to look after me and that I’m not stuck in some hotel in the middle of nowhere by myself. And we’re both lucky that we more or less walked away from it. When we were in one of the hospital’s the other day they wheeled some guy in who had two huge black eyes, cuts all over his face and wasn’t breathing on his own. That could easily both Armine and myself in Akhaltsikhe, Georgia……

I’m going to go watch more soap opera’s…..