Thursday, May 7, 2015 -- Week #12 - Day #80 - San Pedro Sula

10:02 pm

Today was a lot of hospitaling and officing, finished my papers this morning and then got another stack to finish up tonight and in the morning as well...I'm seeing why this week is crazy for the medics. Silly missionaries.

Over here, they jokingly call weak people "fresas" or strawberries, the equivalent of when we say someone's a pansy. So that's kinda fun to call people strawberries because they're so fragile and require a lot of care.

Among today's enfermos (sick people), we had a missionary with a diaphragmatic hernia, so that was interesting, but it's minor enough that unless they do any heavy lifting, they should be fine until they finish their mission next week. And also a missionary with a "sun allergy," or rather, a sensitivity to light in their eyes that's causing some problems, so when they go out walking around they have to use an umbrella or wear sunglasses. It's really quite amazing the range of medical issues we encounter here. I thought the most amusing so far was the sun allergy...never heard of that one before.

E Markus gave me a Spanish / English medical dictionary

Pretty hilarious to read through, at least for me!  :)

Also, in one of our actual lessons tonight, the family had a beautiful black cat that took a liking to me in about 4 seconds and ended up on my lap. I rubbed his head and he started purring, and pushed his head into my hand...guess he likes his head getting scratched. He actually reminded me a lot of Toothless from "How to Train Your Dragon," even had the same calm green eyes. Pretty neat.

A lot of people here have a pet of some sort, usually a dog or cat or bird, haven't seen any fish. A good 85% of the dogs that people have are little, which I'm not really a fan of. I've only seen a few medium-large sized dogs. And there is almost at least 1 dog barking, always, no matter where you go. Sometimes a whole group of them along the street all find something interesting, and they'll all bark and whine at the same time for a minute or two, weird. But our neighbor has 2 little tiny dogs, both Chihuahua mixes, so that's a delight.  One's mixed with Terrier, and the other with what appears to be Rottweiler, I think, so I have no idea how that happened, exactly.  But the part-Terrier one is constantly yapping and growling and barking at you whenever you set foot outside of your house, and the other one jumps up on you and is extremely energetic and will run inside our house when we open the door for anything...it's also been determined that I can't use the hammock if they're outside.  And they both fight all the time and defend their "territory" with vigor. I think I'll have my fill of little dogs by the time I get home.

Chispa and Toto... the landlady's Chihuahua mixes that are crazy!

Today was good, lots of running around to citas... we still do contacting in the hospitals and as we're walking around and with the taxis, so that's good. Poor Hna Robles is always embarrassed about our datos, so I talked to E Santiago again tonight to report how things are going. So we're all good over here in paradise. It didn't feel too crazy hot today, so that was nice, too, had a breeze going most of the day.