Day 187 - Medical Tourism Part Two

We were woken up this morning by all kinds of commotion from the courtyard beside the house. The courtyard is the staging area for the family's business of Coke and San Miguel distribution. With the holiday party season rapidly approaching, business is booming, and trucks laden with crates roll in and out from early in the morning until well into the night. Everyone is involved somehow. Even little PI tries to do her part.

This part of the post may be TMI, but here's what happened. Travelling messed with my biology, resulting in a 3-week instead of a 4-week menstrual cycle. Annoying in the relative unavailability of tampons on this side of the world (If you are travelling for a long time, and you see tampons, stock up, even if you don't need them. You might not run into them again for months on end.). Doubly annoying in that it made my 8 month supply of birth control run out at month six. Which is how I wound up spending part this afternoon with Auntie T's OBGyn. Who teased me for not making Cz's mom a grandma yet. All the plumbing checked out, and I soon had prescription in hand for another round of pills.

Unfortunately the hospital pharmacy doesn't carry that brand of pill, and the doctor recommended that we go to a Mercury pharmacy. One Mercury lay near to the hospital, the other was in the mall we visited yesterday. Cz, wanting to revisit the video arcade at the mall, coaxed his mom into choosing that branch with promises of another dish of halo halo. The bribe proved sufficient, and soon we were back on yesterday's turf. The line at the mall pharmacy was long, long, long, which made Cz happy. He was able to play video games until he ran out of pesos, and joined us just in time for black gulaman (the treat we chose over halo halo - it's like extreme bubble tea). Cz and I are keeping the prescription close at hand for fear that earnest Aunties and In-Laws might replace the pills with Tic-Tacs in their zeal for grandbabies.

Incidentally, the OBGyn was very friendly. She shares the same last name as one of Cz's dad's very good friends in VA beach. It turns out that her husband and and the VA beach family are from the same neighborhood in the Philippines. That neighborhood is so small that there is a good chance that they are related. Small world, no?

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the spa. We (Cz, Cz's mom, Cousin R- not the one in hospital, obviously -, and I) treated ourselves to a 1 hour foot spa - foot soak, scrub, and massage up to the knee. We should have taken before and after picks of Cz's feet. I think he lost two shoe sizes in callouses. After the foot spa, we went in for an hour-long full body Thai massages. A Thai massage combines kneading with yoga-type bending and stretching, walking on parts of one's body, and in general tossing one about like a rag doll. Afterwards we felt like happy limp noodles. The total cost for over two hours of spa goodness - about $10 each.

After our spa treatment, we went to an all-you-can-eat buffet. The food was far tastier than the $2.50 a head the price would imply, and Uncle/Cousin R kept us laughing for the whole meal. All in all, a very pleasant day.

PS the Uncle R that is in the hospital is showing some signs of improvement.