Hernias

Two nights again in the middle of the night, Rick suddenly said, “This is not right, Ann.” He described what was happening and I knew right away he was describing a hernia. He said it had been happening off and on for about a month, but he just kept stuffing it back up in and not paying any attention to it, because he did not know what it was. Well, now it is about the size of a bean on one side and the size of a large plum on the other side. He is in no pain, but we can hear water sloshing around in there!

If we were in the States we would simply go to the dr. and then proceed. But life is not quite that easy if you are overseas. Instead I quickly posted on Facebook and asked for help (haha), but got what I needed. I had visions for the rest of the night of putting him on a plane for Pennsylvania in the morning and then filling in for his classes for the last week of classes, but we are 2 weeks away from being in the US. Can’t this wait? Overall opinion is “yes, it can.”

We wechatted (Asian social media) with an expat friend who is at the nursing college. She asked the nursing instructor who said get a truss. I asked our friend to get the Chinese character for that. She sent a character. We took the character to the pharmacy. They seemingly could not understand it. Since we were out biking anyway, we continued on to the small University hospital, thinking that the hospital pharmacy might have it. We went to the registrar/cashier and asked if we could buy whatever was indicated by the Chinese character. He started to try to translate the whole wechat conversation, and we kept saying, “No, no, just this character.” He finally told us that character just says, “Yes”. So we grabbed a student who just walked in and he looked it up on his phone for the word “hernia”. We ended up with a doctor to look at Rick, which was probably the best anyway. It was 7 at night at an ER. There was not another single patient in sight and it cost $7 USD. (Love this country.) The doctor assured us that we can wait for two weeks until we are in the States, and he also wrote out the correct word in Chinese characters. Went back to the original pharmacy and got a truss. We also now are in the process of getting doctor appointments set up in Pennsylvania for June 14. Now we just need to decide how we are going to get suitcases clear home without lifting them once.