Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It is Monday and everyone is a bit tired after the weekend.  Luciana is feeling just fine today, no signs of being sick at all.  We are very happy about that.  Nothing serious, just a simple infection.  And she has the right medicine now.

I got up and posted and wrote for a while, then we were off as a family to go grocery shopping.  We have pretty much run out of foodstuffs at home and our extended (non-staple) foods are pretty much depleted.  So this was our big grocery run and possibly our last big one while in Greece (it is amazing how quickly we get to the point that we have to start pulling back on food in the house!)

We started with a stop to the pharmacy where we needed to get more of the antibiotic for Luciana.  We had only gotten one bottle of it when I was there on Saturday but we need three.  So we made a quick and easy stop there.

We stopped at our favourite bakery heading down the hill and picked up some bread and profiterole.

Then we went down to the Lidl at the big intersection north of our village sitting just north of the highway.  We did our big shopping there as they have great prices and many of the products that we want, like Dominica’s favourite muesli.  We did a bunch of shopping there.

On the way back to the village we stopped at the fourth grocery that we use and grabbed the peanut butter that the girls like (or at least the one that they put up with) as that is the only place that regularly stocks it. Then it was back home for us.

A rather long outing of grocery shopping, but successful and we will not likely be doing anything like that for the rest of the time that we are in Greece.  It will be all small things from here on out, we need to make sure that the fridge and pantry are cleaned out before it is time for us to move on to Romania in six or seven weeks.

Luciana is “all better” today.  No signs of fever at all since before the hospital on Friday night.  She is perky and happy and just wanted to spend today playing.

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a bit this morning.  She continues to love the game.  She can lose hours with that game.

Dominica and I did a little looking for games online today.  We spent some time talking about how we could use video game design as part of the girls’ homeschool curriculum and I was taking her through video game studio products available via Steam like RPGMaker.  She was very excited about what tools were available so we looked through lots of products and then tons of games that were commercially made with RPGMaker.

Once we had the video game room to ourselves, Dominica and I took some time this afternoon to play Highrise Heroes together.  We played a lot and are down into the last sixteen levels or so!  We are really enjoying that game but we have run into a few levels that are insanely difficult.  We had a few that took a few tries and we are currently stuck on one that we cannot get through at all.  The jump in difficulty in being able to even progress to the next level is dramatic and doesn’t fit well with the initial feeling of the game.

Luciana insisted in playing a game for a little while.  So we played some Goat Simulator.  It is amazing how good she has gotten at that game.  She is very adept at playing it and has figured out some cool tricks that I never thought of.  The roller coaster throws you out so you can’t ride it, for example, but she figured out that if you lick it you get to ride it while being thrown out and flying in the air by your tongue.  It is hilarious.

Once she was done playing Dominica played Millenium which is an RPGMaker game from a moderate sized game developer so that she could see the kinds of things that can be made with the tool sets.  We snuggled on one of the beds in the game room, the only seating that we have, and played that for probably two hours until we were getting pretty sleepy.  Then we played Secrets of a Lost Planet for a while which started off like it might be okay but quickly devolved into total nonsense and appears that about five minutes into development the writer(s) must have walked out and left everyone unsure what to do so they just took stock hidden object images that they had available and stuck them wherever they fit in a sci-fi adventure game.  It’s nuts.

By the end of the day we had spent nearly the entire day in the game room.  It was a nice change.  Relaxing and a chance to actually do something fun.

We were all very tired here this morning in the Miller household.  But thank goodness we woke up and Luciana was feeling well.  No fever today at all and she was her regular, happy self.

My first order of business was driving to the pharmacy in the next town to get her antibiotics and more of Dominica’s acid reflux medication.  Like our other European medical experiences, this was easy and cheap.  No wait whatsoever, had the medicine the moment that I walked in the door and the antibiotics was just four Euros and Dominica’s acid reflux stuff was thirteen Euros for more than double the volume that she gets for seventeen dollars at the CVS in Texas.  So a bit better than half the price!

It was a lovely day, but only I went out for the drive.  I got back and Luciana took her medicine right away.  Then I went to the grocery store and got us supplies for dinner.  Mostly potatoes so that Dominica can make her corn and potato soup again.

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a while this afternoon.  She made huge progress and opened up new areas of the game.  She was super excited about that.  Luciana just hung out in her little spot under my work loft and watched videos until she fell asleep.  She is feeling much better but is still pretty run down and needs a lot of sleep.  But she is very clearly on the road to recovery.

I did a bit of writing and stuff this afternoon.  Got three new “sections” of my Linux Administration book done today.  Working hard today to catch up on stuff as yesterday was basically a lost day completely.

The girls were both on the tired side.  Luciana slept much of the afternoon.  Dominica was pretty run down, too.  She made dinner, made sure that Luciana got her second dose of medicine and then went to bed to try to get some sleep by ten!

The girls watching Glitter Force together on Netflix this evening.  That is Liesl’s new favourite show.

Around eleven this evening our beautiful, mild day turning into a crazy storm.  Some rain and wind that was blowing stacks of metal chairs around outside.  We dropped from about seventy two degrees during the day to fifty five at night in about one hour.  Storms can roll in very quickly when you live on the sea.

What is really amazing is that it was a ninety degree difference between us here in Greece and back home in New York less than a week ago.  Watertown, New York, we heard, was the world’s coldest city one day, even!  Everyone back home was buried under snow and bitter cold.  Now it is five degrees warmer there than here, right now!

The storm lasted into the night.  All of our metal chairs outside were blown all around and the noise was incredible.  Living out on an island does make for a lot of wind potential.

We all slept in quite a bit today, Dominica was the first one up.  The rest of us slept into the afternoon.  Luciana, thankfully, had her fever down to 101 during the night and down to 100 by the time that she got up, and she was feeling well.  She actually got up and went and played with Liesl upstairs for quite a while before coming downstairs, which they almost never do.  They are much happier children today.

It is another just wonderful day on Crete.  We opened all the windows and doors and it is bright and sunny but not much wind today so things are not all getting blown around.  This is just about perfect.

By the time that Luciana had been awake for about three hours, her temperature was down to 99!  Her fever has officially broken now.  And she is much perkier and asking for food, real food again.

We were counting our chickens too soon, today.  By late afternoon Luciana suddenly spiked to a fever of 103.7!  Too fast and too hot for comfort.  We gave her ten minutes or so and she had come down to 103, but we could not wait at this point so we got the kids ready and set out to find a doctor for her.

The twenty four hour clinic that we found was very far east of the city, so we had quite a long drive ahead of us.  Long in relational terms, it is slow driving through the city but the total journey could not have been fifteen miles.  But we did not know the area at all, we have never driving to the east side of the city before, let alone beyond it.

We actually did pretty well getting right to and finding the clinic.  Sadly, the advertised 24×7 clinic was closed.  Maybe out of business, who knows.  Thank goodness there was another clinic that we knew about right down the block so we went there and it was straight in to see the doctor in an instant.  This was a private clinic, not a public one.

The doctor spent some time with Luciana and decided that she needed tests from  lab at the hospital.  It was twenty Euros for the visit, which is not bad.  While we were there Ciana’s temperature was still over 103.  The doctor asked us if Luciana was always this pale.  We were pretty surprised as she’s not pale at all by our standards!  Apparently in Greece we are all so pale that it throws people off.

We drove back to the city.  Luciana said that she was hungry and really wanted to eat, which is a good sign, but this was a bad time to try to eat anything and we did not have any idea how to find convenient food.  She told us that she does not want to go back home and eat but wants to eat in a restaurant tonight.  Apparently we have not been eating out enough.

We did pretty well at locating the hospital which is buried in a part of the city where you cannot see it at all, even sitting on the street in front of it you would never know that it is there.  We went in and it was straight into the ER (it was late, where else can you go and it was the only entrance) and they got us into see the doctor in like, well, instantly.  We actually spent the most time between the car and the doctor telling them how to spell my first name than anything else.  I’ve never been in a hospital that got you cared for so quickly.

The doctor was very nice and examined Luciana again.  By this time, not even close to an hour later, her temperature was all the way down to normal!  Crazy.  She visibly felt fine and was acting pretty normal, too.  The examination went well enough, thankfully just about everyone speaks English on Crete, and the doctor said that she had no concerns, that this was just a fever and likely a virus and that the fever is just the body correctly fighting it off and that we should wait it out a few more days before being concerned.  Technically just had only had the fever for two full days at this point, it takes four for concern.  The doctor’s one concern was a UTI so wanted to do a urinalysis to be sure that that wasn’t the issue as that is not viral and would need antibiotics.  But ear infection and throat are definitely ruled out.

So we did the urine test, dropped that off with the lab, were told that we would have to wait two hours until eleven thirty (it was somewhat obviously nine thirty at this point) to get the results.  We could get dinner while we waited, which everyone needed as none of us had eaten all day at this point.

We stopped and paid the bill before leaving.  We were rather shocked to find that our trip to the hospital, without insurance to help cover us, not just going to the hospital but hitting the ER, paediatrics and using the lab cost us two cents under seven Euro.  That’s right, we gave them a whopping seven Euro and got change back!  Quick truly just one percent what this would have cost in the States.  Not seven hundred Euro, which we were prepared for, but seven!  It is truly a different world.  And better care than we get from clinics or hospitals back home.  Once again we are so happy with Greece (and Europe.)

We dropped some things off at the car and discovered that the lights had been half left on again.  This time at least we had an excuse with the emergency, them being half turned off, no way to see the light from them under the city street lights, etc.  Thank goodness the car turned over.  So we took a few minutes to sit in the car and relax while the battery topped up.  I left the girls there and walked down the street to see what our handy dinner options would be.  That way we were not wasting car charging time while seeking food.  I found a very nearby cafe and a pizza place and figured one of those two would do just fine.  I came back and got the family and we walked down the street.

Everyone opted for the pizza place.  It had a few people in it but was essentially empty.  At first they brought us menus that were one hundred percent in Greek.  Um, not going to work.  We could not tell what a single thing was.  They found some with partial English in them after a bit, though.

Luciana just wanted French fries, which was fine.  Anything to get her eating.  She has been mostly living on juice (mostly orange and carrot) for days.  She just needs calories to fuel the fever.  The rest of us got our own fries with cheese on them and a vegetable pizza, even Liesl wanted the veggie pizza.

The fries came out and we got Luciana eating.  Then the pizza came.  Liesl was ready to burst with excitement when it arrived.

The pizza ended up being truly epic.  Positively delicious.  One of the best I have ever had.  Liesl thinks it is her all time favourite.   It was so good.

After dinner we had an hour to kill, yet.  The girls just wanted to sit in the car and watch videos on their Kindle Fires.  Dominica was happy to sit with them.  I used the time to have a nice, long walk around that part of Rethymno and get to know town a little.  It was a nice, quiet Friday night and the weather was just cool enough to make it nice for a walk.  It was a great chance to just relax for a bit.

At about eleven thirty we went in to the lab and picked up the results.   Then we had a small adventure trying to find the paediatric department which turned out to be on the first floor and over a bridge.  We found it and the same doctor that we had before in the ER (the ER has its own paediatric department) checked Luciana out again.  She looked at the lab results and instantly it was clear that Luciana had a UTI, which explains nearly all of the symptoms.  We really should have guessed it before tonight but we think she had a stomach bug just before getting the UTI that confused us.  But that was Monday and she was fine until the fever hit on Wednesday evening. There was a gap but we did not really notice.  And it means that the rest of us have probably just had a cold and that was masking things, too.

The doctor decided to do one more urine test, just to be safe.  But we will find out about that later should it show that this first one was wrong.  We got a prescription for an antibiotic and were on our way quite quickly.  A quick stop at the lab to drop off the work to be done and we were on our way home.  No additional charge for this extra visit or lab work.

There was no pharmacy open on the way home, it was around midnight at this point, so we will have to deal with that first thing in the morning.  We got home and the kids relaxed for a bit.  Luciana watched some Dora the Explorer and Liesl played Castaway Paradise.  Dominica was the first to bed, by hours.

The girls stayed up and got me to play Goat Simulator a little and then had me get them some food.  It wasn’t until around four that I finally got them off to bed.  I wanted to get SGL all caught up before turning in myself to make sure that everyone knew what the status was on Luciana’s hospital visit before calling it a night.

Luciana’s fever did not return at all this evening.  The high temperature taken at the first clinic was the last elevated temperature that we saw and she was awake for about eight hours after that reading was taken.  She was in a pretty good mood all evening as well.  Although she did tell me that she wanted to sleep alone again tonight because when she is sick she likes having lots of room.

We have been hoping for some unique Greek experiences.  I am not sure that this is exactly what we had had in mind, but I suppose that there is always a silver lining.  We really are getting the experience of what it is like to live in Greece and deal with normal, every day problems.  This is one that will definitely be good reference material for others travelling like us.