I've written recently about moving to Portugal when your country elects a dictator and my previous posts on why I choose Portugal. Now we are going to talk about how hard it can be to move to a new place where you don't know whats going on and have a problem.
Last May I had come back from dinner and was watching TV and all the sudden it felt like I was dying and had a lot of pain in my abdomen/upper chest. Not me trying to ignore it for a few hours and hope it went away, after all I had been to the hosptial once and had met my doctor BUT I had never had a problem, much less at midnight by myself, in a country I wasn't terribly familiar with. I thought about calling my husband but he was at work and asleep already. So I paced around for a few hours before I decided to go to the hospital.
I grabbed an uber and opted for the hosptial that my doctor was at as I had seen the urgent care/emergency section when I was there prior. We pull up to the hosptial at about 3am, no one around and no real clear signs of how to get in, perfect. I wander around for about 10 minutes before I manage to find the doors that are open, then it probably takes me another 5 minutes to figure out where to go once I get inside.
I check in and wait. Having never been to any sort of urgent care outside the US and I'm in a bunch of pain and I don't know whats going on, it's all sorts of fun. They call me back, I explain in English and crappy Portugese whats going on, they take some blood and send me back out to the waiting room which is thankfully empty as I curl up on the chair. In about 1/2 hour they call me back again and start and IV that I have no idea what it was. Whatever it was it wasn't helping much and while I was in a random room hooked up to the IV the dr came back after seeing my bloodwork results and seemed surprised something was actually wrong and I that I wasn't a drunk tourist. Turns out my liver values were all over the place and my bile duct was partially clogged. He added something else to the IV (again who knows what) and left. Once the IV's were out he said they were going to do an ultrasound of my liver but couldn't do it until 7-8am when everyone came in for the day, so back into the waiting room I went for an hour or so.
Once morning rolled around they called me back for the liver ultrasound and sent me to the dr as soon as it was done (no waiting for hours for results at least). Turns out my liver was hiccuping because I was on a high does of antibiotics for a persistant sinus infection and I was allergic to the antibiotic I had been prescribed.
All this to say I am very independent and "comfortable with being uncomfortable" and even for me this pushed the bounds; not speaking the language well, being in pain, not knowing really whats going on, and it was 4am, it was a lot. Sure I came out more confindent because of it, but it's hard. These are the types of experiences I am talking about when I say you need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
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