how about this?

so i woke up this morning... worked out for 45 minutes, had a lazy breakfast, and was getting ready to go on a 5 mile walk before it rained (i've walked 96 miles since memorial day... when i hit 100 ben is taking me out for dinner and a movie... i had hoped that would be today... due to weather, perhaps not til tomorrow... doht)

checking my email just before i headed out, i got the following email from one of my czech students:

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Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:09:24 -0400
Subject: are you coming?

Hi Lara,
are you coming today?
I just would like to ask you if you gave me a lift to a medical centre.
I tried your Hill office, but nobody was there.
Marek

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immediate change of plans for lara... instead of going for a walk and then having a lazy afternoon of studying until i'm on a grad school panel for the RISE REU at 4:30 tonight, i booked it to get ready quickly and get to campus to help marek out.

because really, if you've never been sick in a foreign country (even if you know the language), you have no idea how scary it can be.

when i was in budapest i passed out and cut my head just centimeters from my eye, and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. getting papers in order and getting the hungarian grad students working with us to help me figure out what doctors i was allowed to see with my american student insurance was crazy, and then having a doctor put stitches in my head within centimeters of my eyeball (you can still feel the scar below the skin, it's kinda cool ;-) ) who only spoke in hungarian was intimidating. i learned then and there that fluency in crazy medical words for different kinds of pain and illness is difficult even if you've gained a decent day-to-day knowledge of the language.

anyhow, not knowing what was wrong with marek, and glad he trusts me to seek out my help, i headed to campus ASAP to be helpful.

i found him in his office and asked "hi, so what's the problem?"
he replied "i have an increasing ganglia in my side... and feel cold and flu like all over"
i asked "ganglia? i've heard that word but i don't know what it means"
he replied "like when you hurt here (and touched his lymph nodes), only it's down here (and touched his abdomen"
(i looked up ganglia online and it loosely means cystic tumor... somehow i don't think it translates quite the same)

his next best guess typing in words to an online czech to english translating program was "scarlet fever", but i'm pretty sure it's not that either.

i called the student health center before i came to campus and they told me "if you're not an actual rutgers student we don't take you"... i passed that info on to christine, who made calls and straightened them out while i took marek to walgreens.

once there, he was overwhelmed by the selection and asked if we could talk to someone... the pharmacist on duty's best suggestion was tylenol and see a doctor, so we got tylenol and i explained it to him so that hopefully that would deal with the pain. then, after talking to christine and finding out which person is the magic person in the health center and what are the magic words to make her admit REU students, i got marek an appointment for 10am tomorrow.

i really hope it's not appendicitis.. that would suck... to have your appendix out while on summer travels in a country you've never been in before. he made it seem like "yes it hurts and i need to get it fixed, but i could go another day or two just fine i think"... i hope that that's accurate.

anyhow, conclusion -- it's hard to be sick when you're not in your own country and i feel bad for him -- hopefully it's not appendicitis, and hopefully they'll be able to phrase things to marek and vice versa so that they can figure out exactly what needs to be done.

we shall see.