Finnish hospitals & fish tanks

Why fish tanks you might ask? Well, because they make me smile and were probably the only familiar thing in the Finnish hospital. I mean, there's no such thing as "American" fish or "Finnish" fish. Fish are fish. Therefore, fish tanks are fish tanks. Right? 

Wednesday, August 29th 2012

Excuse the horrible photo quality,
I took this with my mobile phone.

What a long day it has been! Where do I even begin? Well, when I first got to Finland all was well and my health was great. About a week before my departure I had been sick with a bad cold but thankfully had gotten healthy before I left for my big adventure - or at least so I thought. A little less than 2 weeks ago I started to come down with a small cold, nothing too serious.. you know, a bit of a runny nose and not much else. It progressively started to get stronger though starting with a fever and more sickness. This only lasted a few days and I started to get better again, until a couple of days ago where it started going downhill again. My fever came back and my congestion kept getting worse. My host parents finally decided that it was time for me to go ahead and see a doctor, just to see why it hasn't gone away yet - by now it should have. And what a good idea it was to go! What we thought would be a quick doctor's visit ended up being a long day of 7 hours at the hospital. Wondering how it all got to this point? Well, let me explain:

I had my doctor's appointment yesterday at 12 noon and had scheduled just a regular check up. The nurse checked all of my symptoms, took some tests, and found out my results were a lot higher than normal. Apparently I was in fact, pretty sick. And so they suggested I go to the hospital to get further treatment and find out what it was that made me so sick. After many tests, some x-rays and examinations I found out that I had a sinus infection called Sinusitis. Basically, my cold had made so much mucus that it blocked the opening of my sinuses. Ok, ok - I promise I won't give you too many gory details. I know it's rather gross... even I think so and I was the one who had to hear/experience all the lovely details. haha. 

The doctor's had decided that it was too blocked to be able to just clear with some medications so they wanted to do a nasal puncture first to clear all that was in my system and then proceed to prescribe medicine to finish the process. If you're not sure what a puncture is I would suggest looking it up on google - it's not exactly the best thing ever and for those of you who don't like these kind of details, as I said previously, I don't want to gross you out too much.

Throughout the entire process it was rather difficult, I was tired and not feeling well at all and they had to do many uncomfortable things. I think I was a lot more sensitive to everything because I'm away from home so it's just that more scary and frightening. I have to say though that I am so blessed to have such loving, and caring host parents who made sure that I got the best treatment possible to get back to health. My host mom was amazing and left work to face the entire day with me and I am so thankful for that. Finnish hospitals are very different and of course, all in Finnish... so I was so very happy to have someone who spoke the language and who was able to help me navigate everywhere.

This is just from one night's sleep. Crazy? I know.

Both yesterday and today I had to stay home from school but now I am very well rested and ready to face normal life again. I've been drinking gallons of water, sleeping like a koala bear, and using more tissues than I could ever think was humanly possible to use in such a short period of time.