Medicada

Domingo 03 - Sábado 09 Noviembre   This was Carmen's birthday week, and as usual (as she recalls) it turned out to be a bad week for her. The dizziness she had suffered has not gone away. Monday morning she woke up with a puffed up left arm, sore and red around the elbow. Fortunately, we already had a family doctor's appointment that day. Dr Rendon examined the swollen arm, which had no apparent insect/spider bites nor abrasions – simply no problem visible from the outside. He gave her antibiotics for the infection in the arm, and more meds to control the vertigo, dizziness. On wednesday Carmen had her six month appointment with the rheumatologist in Orizaba. Dra Estevez felt the arm was a complication due to scleroderma. She wrote out ongoing prescriptions for the year. Included was a course of a powerful antihistamine for the swelling affecting circulation for the inner ear, which is probably causing the vertigo. She gave us a referral slip to take to the Cordaba central IMSS facility, for an appointment with an otorrinolaringologo (ear, nose & throat) doctor there. Soonest this doctor could see Carmen is 19 noviembre. Meanwhile, a medicada (medicated)dosed up Carmen can seldom stay awake, and has napped a lot this week.

Our flower starts man, Carmelo, has been here several more times. Carmen worked hard at potting everything up, with most of the acquistions hanging either on the north end of the front porch, or in shallow planters (the succulents) going up on the terraza in shallow planters. Up there, we noticed that our little potted payaya tree, which we started from a sprouted seed found in a fruit, while it's only about a yard tall, is already starting to form real bark on the truck near the base, and has the smallest of fruits developing near the top.  Whether these will actually ripen into something edible, we're waiting to see.  We're running out of garden space for plants we actually want to put in the ground, so we think we'll have José Luís come back for a day or two, after the rainy season finally passes, and do a bit more work for us, including laying a pathway thru the north side of our front yard. We ordered the additonal 54 adoquines (concrete pavers) when we drove into Cordoba monday. We will then remove the tiny bit of grass we have and let it all become a flower garden. It seems the passers-by enjoy our flowers almost as much as we do.

When we went to Orizaba on wednesday, we visited the espuma (foam rubber) shop that we had found way back when we thought we'd need a mattress built for us. Parking spots are at a premium on the narrow streets of old Orizaba, but luck was with us, and we found a spot only two blocks away. We need a foam cushion made for the bench seat in the closet area Dan built in our bedroom. The ownership had apparently changed from father to son, and he no longer will make finished items. He recommended a few tapicería (upholstery) shops a few blocks away, but we never found them. Looks like Carmen will have this task – shouldn't be much different from how she made the futon cover. We'll buy just the piece of foam when we next have a chance.

Next we drove to the big Plaza Valle shopping mall which we had heard was in Orizaba, but had yet not seen it. The parking area was enclosed and gated. We drove up to the entrance and while Dan was studying it to figure it out, a person the next gate over told us to just push the button and take the ticket and drive on in. There were no explanatory words or symbols on the ticket machine. We walked thru the mall, a location for many expensive stores (Liverpool, Sanborns and the like) and a multiplex cinema. Back to our car, we now had to figure out how to exit. The bars across the gates are of course all down. We drove up and put our ticket in the most obvious slot, but the gate would not come up, and the ticket was ejected back out of the machine. There was no slot to put in any money. Meanwhile other cars were exiting as the bars raised and lowered. Hmm. We tried another gate. Still no luck. We backed out of the gated exit area to watch what others were doing to get the gate to raise. It looked like we were doing it right. Finally Dan walked back into the mall and asked a fellow near the door how the ticket could be used to exit. He was directed to a little vending machine under the stairs where he could put the ticket in, put coins in a slot, and receive a validation stamp on the ticket. We assume that there might be a way to get one's ticket validated if one were to make a purchase at one of the bigger stores, but otherwise the parking cost MX$10 per hour. As we drove out we decided we will never have a need to go there again – not our style or budget, thank you.

We had a late lunch at the Chinese buffet restaurant near Chedraui grocery store. We park in the store's sizeable underground parking lot. After lunch, Dan did buy a couple items there. Home before dark. The remainder of the week was pretty low key, with Carmen catching up on reading and a lot of meds-induced napping. Saturday was a busy day, with the frontgate buzzer ringing at least a dozen times as various itinerant vendors and others made their presence known.

So far, we have mostly been putting in temperature and currency equivalents when we post someting here about the weather or costs. As we get more accustomed to thinking in Metric, Celsius and Pesos, we'll probably do this less, so we have included some tools at the bottom of this page you can view to convert some numbers to make better sense of what we are experiencing.