We’re not doing so well over here in Kazakhstan at the moment.

The kids came down with this terrible, terrible stomach virus. I thought it was food poisoning from the chicken but changed my mind after I was hit by the virus a few days later.

I don’t eat meat here often. The whole horse meat concept has turned me off all meat. I think I mentioned before that Kevin’s hockey team fed the players horse meat four times without telling them what they were eating. Tricking someone into eating a horse is just disgusting, but apparently it’s similar enough to beef that the players never knew the difference.

Well we finally got over the stomach virus (vomit central) and wouldn’t you know, I come down with a awful ear infection. By the third day, the pain was so intense that I began to vomit again. I had to break out the Vicodin that I had left over from my surgery this past summer. And unfortunately the pills were left over for a reason: Vicodin makes me vomit…every single time. But I had to take something for the pain and I didn’t have any options!

After puking non-stop for days on end, Kevin asks his team doctor to give me something for my ear. He gives me…an ointment. Yay, lucky me. Whatever happened to good old ear drops and antibiotics?

Thankfully, a hockey wife friend came to the rescue with some homeopathic ear infection medication from Florida. So I fought off my ear infection with homeopathic medicine, massive amounts of Advil during the day and a pain killer before bed each evening.

Just as my ears are clearing up, Noah starts acting peculiar with wet diapers.

In order for him to get into the English pre-school, he has to be potty trained. For about two weeks, we’ve been working with him on this. And for about two weeks, he has been making us change his diaper every single time he wets it, even the smallest amount.I figured that he was just realizing that he doesn’t like being wet.

But things were getting outrageous at night!! Kevin or I would have 8 slightly wet diapers piled up on his bedroom floor every morning… meaning, we were getting out of bed 8 times a night to change his diaper every time he cried for it! I mentioned this to my mom, who immediately thought urinary track infection.

The North American players have an English speaking assistant who translates everything for them. Their assistant is actually the General Manager of the team, so although he does a ton of stuff for the players they aren’t as lucky as the wives.

We have a female an assistant who doesn’t have any other responsibilities and is always available to us. She’s a little bit younger than us and doesn’t mind arranging for whatever we want or need.

So I call up my Russian translator/assistant and we take Noah into the Kazakhstan hospital to get checked out.

The Russian translator knows basic English pretty well, but start throwing in body parts and medical terms and things start to get funny. Funny… as long as it’s not your two year old that is in pain! So thankfully my Herbal Remedy Hockey Wife friend went to the hospital with us. She speaks perfect English and Slovakian- which is close to Russian, and is also able to help translate things quite a bit.

The Kazakhstan hospital is…well…not unspeakable, but very outdated from a Westerners point of view.

It reminded me of what a turn of the century psychiatric hospital must have looked like in the United States.

All of the supplies are military looking. It’s a very cold, detached atmosphere that would most certainly drive someone over the edge if they were in for an extended hospital visit. I can’t even describe it. For a country that can spend a gazillion billion dollars on building a brand new city, you would think they would put some money into updated hospital supplies so that you don’t feel like you are walking into a Vietnam medical tent every time you get sick… which by the way, you have to go the hospital every single time you are sick. There aren’t any private practices here.

At any rate, the doctor is friendly enough (a rare find here, as no one ever smiles). But apparently Kazakhstan babies are born potty trained, because she wants me to make Noah pee in a cup so she can test it.

I laugh.

She saw me take off his diaper. How did she think I would get him to pee in a cup?

I try to explain that Noah still wears his diapers and will only pee in the diaper. I am talking through the assistant/translator, trying to explain that there is no possible way that I am going to collect urine from Noah. I’ve been trying to get him to pee on the potty seat for two weeks and it hasn’t happened. The doctor is getting annoyed with me and just can’t comprehend why I won’t make Noah pee in a cup.

I argue through the translator for five minutes, to no avail. I was saying all sorts of things that the translator didn’t understand and couldn’t translate because she can’t pick up on American sarcasm: “What am I supposed to do, have him pee in the same diaper all day long and then wring it out into a cup?!”

I was getting upset at the doctor and the translator just kept repeating “collect his urine in a cup for testing”. I could have knocked their heads together.

Everyone was getting aggravated until I mentioned that maybe the doctor should just do a blood test to check for an infection.

Then I gasped. A blood test? Had those words really just popped out of my mouth? We’re in a developing country… and I just asked for a blood test?

I was instantly mortified. But the doctor agreed that a blood test was the way to go, so off we went to the front of the hospital to pay for a blood test in cash.

The walk to the front of the hospital was a blur. I was just looking all around at the less than ideal supplies and conditions while telling my Herbal Remedy friend that I couldn’t go through with this blood test for Noah.

What if the needles were dirty? What if the needles infected Noah with something? I was going to back out of the whole thing. I was sick to my stomach. I was dizzy. I was about to bolt out of the door but I also knew that Noah was sick and I couldn’t leave that hospital without an antibiotic for him.

I finally agreed to at least go check out the blood test situation.

As long as the needle was brand new and in an unopened package I would go through with the blood test.

After waiting for a while, we were called back into the tiny office and I’m immediately uncomfortable.

A nurse is sitting behind a plain wooden desk preparing a bunch of strange tools. She starts peeling masking tape away from this rolled up green paper towel, unrolls the paper towel and proceeds to assemble the tool.

It didn’t look like a needle but I completely freaked out. That seemed unsanitary. Who packages medical supplies in paper towels and masking tape? Who knows how clean those things are?!

I tell the translator, “I’m leaving”.

The translator rolls her eyes and thinks I’m overreacting. It’s not even the needle, she tells me.

The doctor is looking over at me and can tell that I am apprehensive. She tells the translator that there are no syringes, the nurse will merely prick Noah’s finger and collect blood with a medicine dropper

The nurse pulls out a modern looking apparatus that is commonly used to prick the fingers of diabetic people to test their blood sugar levels and I am instantly relieved.

She proceeds to squeeze blood out of Noah’s chubby little finger, and suck it up with the long glass medicine dropper that was packaged in the green paper towel. It takes much longer than expected to collect enough blood.

45-50 seconds and I was getting weak at the knees. I could have passed out, but I pictured myself being carried away on one of the ancient green army gurneys and I pulled myself together.

Noah on the other hand was happy as a clam, and didn’t make a whimper throughout the entire procedure.

After the blood was taken, we were told to wait in the hospital for an hour while the lab results were being processed.

Great. Just how I want to spend an hour.

Instead of waiting in the hospital, we decide to drive around the city for a bit of shopping. More to come on the prices of things over here, but we don’t shop much, because it’s outrageously expensive to shop for basic necessities in this city! Case in point: Noah’s $700/USD snow suit that he’ll outgrow by next month. Thank goodness I bought Ava’s snowsuit and coat at Baby Gap for $80 before I left the US!

When we return from shopping, we follow our translator/assistant around the hospital for 10 minutes as she tried to locate the lab. The lab was another plain room with a wooden desk, a microscope and some test tubes full of blood.

We didn’t enter the room but I found it odd that we were picking up the lab results and hand delivering them to the doctor ourselves.

The doctor explained the results to my translator and then explained the results again, allowing the translator to tell me what was going on.

It took ten minutes of translations and questions to get the proper diagnosis out of the translator who wasn’t sure about the terms and kept referring to a Russian/English dictionary.

The doctor is pointing to her kidneys, which is in turn making me think that the bladder infection traveled up into Noah’s kidneys. The translator is saying “infection not in organs in body” so I am trying to figure out if it’s just some sort of skin infection or if it’s a bladder infection!

Turns out that Noah does have a urinary tract infection but it did not travel into the kidneys. The blood work also showed that he was anemic. This is because Noah refuses to eat many solid foods, and instead drinks a ton of milk everyday which does not contain any iron.

The doctor then doles out the remedies.

1. The antibiotic for the urinary tract infection. This arrives in powder form which I have to mix with water.

2. A cranberry based syrup to help clear up his UT infection. I am supposed boil this syrup with some unknown amount of water, and force Noah to drink it out of a cup. This would be quite an accomplishment considering that he barely drinks regular juice. I try to tell the doctor this, but she just thinks I am being difficult.

3. Iron supplements which he is to take once a day for a month.

4. Droplets of something else that my Herbal Remedy friend couldn’t translate. He’s supposed to take ten droplets two to three times a day for ten days. Hum….

5. And chopped up Daisy’s. As in the flower. Now this is a funny one because I interpreted this wrong from the translator in the hospital when the doctor was telling me about it. The translator told me to mix a spoonful of “flour” with water to make a paste and then wash Noah private area with it once a day for five days. I found this disgusting and told the other wives that there is no way I am following these directions. One of the wives thought maybe it worked as a pain killer. But then I received actual dried out, chopped up “flowers” from the pharmacy and I realized this must be some sort of herbal treatment.

6. The doctor also told me that Noah is not to have any cold liquids for ten days. Not even milk.

Yeah, whatever, I will take some and leave some when it comes to the medical recommendations over here.

To top everything off, Noah got his foot stuck in a treadmill at my Herbal Remedy Friend’s house. We thought it might be broken, but he’s walking on it just fine and I am pretty sure it’s just a really bad bruise.

More to come…and lots of pictures to follow as soon as I find a new battery charger for my camera!