Riding An Ambulance

I took a little detour in my future business plans to go on my first Ambulance ride.  Let's back up a little, Nik got the stomach bug at the beginning of last week, Tuesday morning he woke up with stuff coming out the front and back, if you know what I mean.  The throwing up only lasted the one day and he did it only 4 times, but the back door was left open and there was a lot of that stuff going on.  Katerina also got sick with the same thing at school on Thursday so we brought her home, but she was feeling better by Saturday night, but Nik he was not doing good.  On Saturday and Sunday the diarrhea had started to look white and it still sounded like he was turning on a faucet when he went in the bathroom, it was just pouring out.  Monday morning he had another bathroom visit and we decided it was time to go to the Hospital.
The closest hospital for us to go to is in Trikala a 20 minute drive.  We arrived after dropping Katerina off at school and waited.  Greek hospitals are an interesting thing, you get your paper from the front (showing them you have insurance) then you go wait in your area for the doctor, the doctor's generally arrive between 9-10 and for the most part it is a first come first serve situation.  But some people can be a bit pushy, we had one on this visit, she didn't even have  a child with her, looked like a drug addict and was asking for drugs for her "sick child", the nurse and doctor just ignored her.
Our Pediatric doctor was young, she only ran a blood test on Nik and asked us to come back later when we had the results.

Waiting for the blood test results, Nik was born here just a little over 9 years ago.

As we waited Nik got sick again, luckily I had wipes on me, because the hospitals do no have toilet paper or paper towels in the bathrooms and first I had to find a bathroom that was not dirty, yuk...
We came back with the blood test results, and they had us do a ultra-sound and x-ray, then they admitted us upstairs to start some fluids for Nikolaos.

Arthur had gone to pick up Kat, we are waiting to do the X-ray in this picture.

When we got upstairs we had a different doctor and she felt it would be better if Nik went to Larissa, a bigger town with Pediatric surgeons, they didn't have any pediatric surgeons in Trikala.  Both Arthur and I were a little resistant to this since it felt unnecessary but she was adamant that with Nik's pre-existing condition, he was born with Hirschsprung's and half of his colon was removed.  That if there was any need for surgery he would need to be close to doctor's who could perform them.  So I waved good-bye to Katerina and Arthur and Nik and I went on an Ambulance ride.

Nik did this same exact trip when he was just a few hours old, so he was old hat to it and fell asleep on the journey.  I on the other hand had my fist clinched as we shuttled at jet speed down the free-way in the clanking metal death contraption, the 1 hour trip took only about 30 minutes.  We slowed down as we entered the city only because of the traffic and then we screeched into the ambulance entrance with the roof scraping the top of ambulance bay.  A doctor had sat in the back with me the whole way and when we arrived we waited for another doctor to come down to accept Nik into the hospital, by then it was 5 pm. and the place was dead, like scary dead, the nurse looked bored as she played on her phone.

waiting room with one of those cool air tube delivery system things in the corner

The hospital doctor arrived after 20 minutes, listened to what the other doctor had to say, looked at the X-ray and then admitted Nik.  The first doctor along with the ambulance crew, who had stayed took off back to Trikala.  This new doctor requested we do another X-ray, jeez, so an orderly came with a wheelchair to take Nik there.

This hospital was scary, no one around except us, loads of pallets all over.  The hospital staff were not friendly at all, poor Nik was just pushed around by the X-ray technician, no explanation at all, "hey we are going to lift your shirt off, move a little to the right" nothing, she just pushed him and undressed him like he was a Ken doll.  Then the orderly wheeled us up to our hole in the wall room, ugh.

4 beds, 4 closets, no bathroom, Thank goodness we were the only ones in the room.

The bathroom was in another room that had one child in it, otherwise it was just the 2 kids and their moms on this floor.
Thank goodness for Greek hospital verandah's I'm pretty sure American hospitals do not have these, but I would recommend them to any Hospital Architect to have these built, they are pretty sweet.

early morning silence.

I took this picture in the early morning and shortly after a nurse came in to put some medicine directly into the drip system, she must have pushed it in to fast because it ended up making Nik's arm balloon up like Popeye.  So out came the drip system.
 The Pediatric surgeon arrived, poked around Nik's abdomen declared nothing was wrong and sent us to the pediatric ward.  They wanted to put the drip system back in but even the head pediatric doctor had trouble finding a viable vein, even after assuring me that he knew what to do, versus people in other places, lol.
So we spent a second night in this hospital, at least here, they kept asking for pee and stool samples, which I couldn't understand why they didn't ask for those at the first hospital, but after the one night on a drip system, Nik was as good as new, and we were discharged after many hours of waiting on Wednesday, we didn't leave the hospital till 4, Nik fell asleep in the car and when we got home he went straight to bed and slept till 5 this morning a good 12 hour sleep, perfect for healing the body.
Funny story:
One time when I was walking to the room an elderly women approached me to ask if I could travel with her on the elevator, she was scared to ride alone.  I said sure no problem, poor little thing here all alone, but she had reason to be scared because look what was going on when we were exciting the hospital.

That's right, they were working on the elevator, I'm not sure if anyone got stuck on it or not, but it was the same one I had taken with the elderly woman the day before, lol.