Woke up on my own at a good time this morning. Got up and wrote for a bit, gave Luciana her morning antibiotic. We have to take her back to the hospital today to get the lab results that are waiting to verify that we are using the right medication. Should be a quick trip and we hope to get that amazing pizza again while we are there.
The trip into Rethymno went pretty well. Although finding parking was a little challenging being the middle of the day. We figured out that the hospital had free parking, though, just nothing written in English so that made it a little harder than it would have been. I am sure that if we could read Greek that we would have known right away, but we don’t so….
We stopped into the ER’s paediatrician clinic but had to wait as the attending doctor was busy making the rounds. We waited for a bit and then they had me go down and get the lab results for Luciana that we had been waiting on. Then, since they just need to read the results when the doctor returns, we decided to have Dominica and Luciana wait there while Liesl and I went on to the pizza restaurant so that we could get the food ordered and be ready for when Dominica and Luciana could join us. The food is all freshly made and easily takes half an hour so we figured that this would save us a bit of time in the long run.
Liesl picked a table outside and we ordered our food. The same veggie pizza that we had the other day, French fries and pasta with cheese for Ciana. We had a nice time just sitting outside together, although the pizza place is on a side street in the city so the only view is of a cafe next door, the side of the hospital and a few automotive repair shops. Not an exciting spot, but a nice neighbourhood.
The food came and Liesl and I were able to eat before Dominica and Luciana made it out to join us. It had taken some time because the doctor was busy on rounds for a while and then had gotten a second opinion on the test results from another doctor before letting them go. It is worth noting that this entire visit, even using the ER and the lab again, cost absolutely nothing and was all covered in the less than seven Euros that we spent last week!
So the results are that we have been using the right antibiotic and that Ciana does in fact just have a UTI and nothing serious and no surprises. Everything is as they thought on Friday, this was purely a double check process to be totally sure that everything was well and that nothing had been missed. The hospital is a little concerned that she has had two UTIs and is not even five years old yet so they want to do more tests once she is all better and done with her antibiotic series. So they have asked us to come back sometime next week so that they can do a sonogram to look at her kidneys – an extra step that would normally just be skipped in the US. We continue to be very impressed with the healthcare here (and some Canadian friends living here have told us that the Greek healthcare is excellent as well, even compared to higher Canadian standards!)
Dominica said that the timing was perfect as the food was just the right temperature for her to sit down and eat as soon as she arrived.
After our meal we decided to take a little drive as the sun was out, the day was beautiful and we were already twenty minutes away from the house. We have seen so little of Crete that we wanted to at least get to see a little bit of it. So we decided to just drive east out of Rethymno on the main road, the same one that we had taken on Friday night, and see where it went.
Outside of the city we hopped onto the “highway” which is a funny thing to call it. The biggest highway in all of Crete, the GR90 / E75 that connects the three biggest cities together in a straight line is smaller, by a bit, than the “highway” that I grew up on back home. It is a two lane highway with moderate shoulders. At some times it does not even have a centre line. The fastest speeds that we saw posted are only eighty kilometres per hour, although people were routinely driving around one hundred and ten.
We made it about two thirds of the way to the capital before it started getting a little darker out and we knew that we would not get to see much more if we kept going and the girls were anxious to get back home. So we turned around and drove back to Prines. At least we got to see a little bit of the Crete coast line, which was gorgeous. This was very much Crete as we imagined it, nearly desert-like rocky hills spilling down into the Aegean. It was a nice, if short, drive.
We got back home and I set to trying to catch up with all of the work and posting and stuff that I had missed while being away for the most of the day. It was probably after six when we were finally back to our village. We managed to get a parking spot down by the church again. We have not had to park in the far away space south of town for a while now.
Busy evening, not a lot of time to hang out after spending the day together doing errands around Crete. Tomorrow will be quite busy as well.