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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Medic!

Joan on Saltydog was so jealous of Dave's tour of the nearby Navy hospital clinic yesterday that she felt the need to make a trip herself today.  Their refrigerator has a countertop door with a hydraulic piston that helps support the weight when you open and close it.  Unfortunately the piston is failing and hence the door slams shut with its full weight.  Joan managed to smash the middle finger of her right hand in the door.  Dave and Melissa happened to be nearby when it happened.  Steve, Joan's husband, was up at the marina office at the time.  Joan went almost immediately into a bit of shock.  So Dave calmly got her sat down while Melissa ran for the medical kit from Apsaras.  It was immediately apparent she was going to need stiches.  Saltydog plans to leave tomorrow for a 5 day journey to Costa Rica.  So even if the wound hadn't been so deep she still needed stiches because on a boat that is being tossed around in the ocean swell you end up grabbing for hand holds all the time - and she would surely have been reopening the wound for days.

Melissa wrapped up the wound nice and tight so it stopped bleeding.  Joan was pale and shaky and hadn't eaten lunch. So oddly enough we all headed up to the restaurant for lunch before Joan went to the hospital.  She perked up a bit with some food and beer.  Then the same marina guy that took Dave and Melissa yesterday, his name is Memo, took Joan and Steve over to the clinic.  This time Memo was able to stay with them to translate as Joan's doctor didn't speak any English.  While Dave's wound was deeper and larger, at least it was a relatively clean cut.  Joan's injury was much more painful as her finger was essentially all smashed.  But fortunately not broken.  Joan got three stiches to match Dave's three stiches.

The question will be whether Saltydog can depart as planned tomorrow based on how she is doing in the morning and she doesn't want to go if the waves are going to toss them around too much.

Meanwhile, Melissa and Dave headed into town to do some shopping.  We had figured on purchasing the same antibiotics for her to save them a trip into town since we were going anyway.  At the Walmart, Melissa went to the pharmacy with Dave's prescription which they happily filled again.  Ok, so what's to keep people from just filling prescriptions repeatedly?  And what if they were like for some serious narcotics or something?  The prescription paperwork here comes in carbon copy duplicate.  Melissa thought this odd since the pharmacy yesterday gave her back both copies when she filled the prescription.  So why the two copies?  Well, Walmart appears to be a bit better organized as they kept the top copy this time.  Ahhh.....

Interestingly, we carry some high tech antibiotics - Cipro and Zithromax aboard Apsaras.  When Dave got his prescription yesterday, Melissa considered just giving him one of the ones we already had.  But she couldn't for the life of her remember which one to give him.  One is for anaerobic bacteria and the other for aerobic bacteria (one grows in an oxygen environment the other without oxygen), but she couldn't for the life of her remember which was which.  So she just went ahead and filled the prescription the doctor gave her.  Meanwhile, she emailed her sister in law - Kari - who is a pharmacist to ask which was which so she would know for future.  Kari replied that while the Zithromax might have worked, the Dicloxacilina was actually much better for staff infections - which is the most likely one to get on your skin.  So the Dicloxacilina cost $7 US dollars.  The high tech ones cost a hundred.  Hmmm.  What does this say about American medical costs and whether we could lower them if we just prescribed cheaper drugs?

Anyway, we figured we should have some Dicloxacilina aboard in addition to the high tech ones - hence Melissa bought an extra box at the Walmart.  This is another oddity.  In the US when you fill a prescription they give you precisely the number of pills prescribed.  The doctor had prescribed the antibiotic every 8 hours for 5 days - a total of 15 pills.  But they sell them in boxes of 12.  So Melissa had to buy two boxes yesterday - a total of 24 pills.  Hence when she bought two boxes again today - the amount allowed by the prescription - she then had a total of 48 pills.  When what's needed is 15 - hence we now have three courses of antibiotics.  One for Dave, one for Joan, plus a spare.

When we finished up at the Walmart, we ran into Steve who was carrying a big bag of drugs.  Ok dude, we tried to save you the trip!  Turned out the doctor had prescribed for Joan the same antibiotic (as we predicted) but had also prescribed an anti swelling medication because of the smashed finger, plus something to protect her stomach from the pain pills as she has stomach issues.  Oh well.  We tried.

For dinner we headed over to Playa Linda - a nearby beach where we had heard from other cruisers there was a restaurant with a pool that was nice attached to a hotel.  We grabbed a cab and headed over.  It was dark though and we weren't certain where we were going.  We spotted a hotel and pulled in.  Seemed ok.  We stat down and ordered drinks, and later dinner as well.  The drinks were all fine.  The food though was not so good.  Joan and Melissa had ordered the garlic shrimp.  What showed up was whole shrimp - heads and all, that were so overcooked we couldn't extract the meat from the shell.  Dave had the breaded shrimp which wasn't any good either.  Steve had shrimp tacos that were ok.  We began to wonder if we'd inadvertently wandered into the wrong place.  Sure enough a little internet research later shows there is a big hotel - probably further down the road.  Oops.  We had also heard that the hotel would bring you back to the marina.  So we asked for "returno".  Yes, the waiter said they would take us.  Here's the vehicle that showed up:

The whole way back to the marina - which fortunately was like a mile - all of us are thinking this is going to result in yet another trip to the Navy hospital.  But fortunately we made it safely.

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