The Surgery

Today (Monday) saw us drive to 'The Surgery', a Medical Clinic set up predominantly for Mzungu (western) patients. This is our third visit to the clinic in less than a week. Our previous visits were for Eli (last Thursday) and for Hannah and Lydia (last Friday).

To cut a long story short we've been quite sick as a family for more than a week. While we were all sick at the same time initially, it's been the kids, especially Hannah and Eli, who have been sick the longest.

Our visit last Friday revealed that Lydia had caught an Intestinal Amoeba. Based on the symptoms being the same for all 3 kids, Dr Stockley diagnosed that Hannah and Eli had the same problem and prescribed the same medication.

While Lydia and Eli responded quite quickly to the treatment, Hannah's symptoms continued.

The reason for dropping into 'The Surgery' today was to deliver a stool sample from Hannah and Eli (to confirm the presence of an Intestinal Amoeba). While there I decided I might as well give a stool sample to check myself out as well.

According to the test results we are all clear of Intestinal Amoebas (praise the Lord) but as Hannah has high levels of yeast (probably due to her not eating very much and her taking the wrong medication for the past few days) Dr Stockley prescribed her some alternative medication for the next 4 days.

While the initial medication for Intestinal Amoebas cost 100,000 schillings, Hannah's new medication only cost 2,000 schillings.

Interestingly we waited for a total of 5 hours on our 3 visits to 'The Surgery'.

Of even more interest was that we met Lynda, a lady from Australia who is married to Peter (Joel) Schuurs, older brother of Mark Schuurs who was in my Year 11 and 12 class at St Peters Lutheran College. It certainly is a small world?