Because I have people who love me and know that I never want to go to the doctor or deal with my health at all and because they are willing to gang up on me and bug me until I do, I spent the last 2 days getting my heart and lungs checked out at a first rate hospital here in Mérida. I got a recommendation and saw an excellent cardiologist who speaks fluent English. I do know that when it is something stressful like my health, I really need to hear and ask questions in my native language.

I have had a battery of tests and lots of live, color images of my heart doing its thing as well as a stress test with me huffing and puffing on a treadmill. Luckily, Mimi got to see most of the live heart pictures, I was laying on my side facing the other way for most of it. It's just TMI, I'm not fond of pictures of my insides.

Some of what he told me I already knew:

- I need to lose weight
- Smoking for almost 50 years was not a good idea
- I need to get more exercise
- I have COPD of some type and severity yet unknown

Some of it was new and not good news:

- I seem to have lost my long time low blood pressure. There is thickening of the walls of my heart which is usually caused by high blood pressure. When he tested it the first day it was high and I was shocked. I was also really scared and perhaps that increased it a little but, you can't really fake these tests. The next day it was down enough to be in the high normal range. The problem is that 'normal' for me has always been at the bottom of the normal range so... I have to face the fact that my blood pressure is now also a problem.

Some of it was good news:

I was really frightened that the higher blood pressure meant a blockage of some sort but my heart looks fine, no obstructions and it's beating away pretty good for a fat old lady.

I return tomorrow to see him with the results of the laundry list of blood and urine tests and he will give me some prescriptions, some guidelines, and lay it all out for me. Of course, I'll also fax my family medical guru, Country, the tests and scripts and results of everything so she can give me her opinions too.

I'm very impressed with the facilities and with my doctor. I'm relieved that my heart is holding up. Getting old is the shits!

For those interested in costs and such, I may be able to use my insurance in the future but this time I think I would have had to get pre-approval so I paid it out of pocket. I may see if I can submit the bills and get reimbursed, why not try? I've had a long list of blood tests, some urine tests, a stress EKG, an ultrasound ecocardiogram (I'm translating the name, it was Ecocardiograma Doppler Color Computarizado in Spanish) and several hours with the Cardiologist. My total bill including the 15% tax was $473.38 US at todays conversion rate.

As near as I can tell, all of the equipment was new and top of the line. I'll find out more when I run it by Country. The Hospital is new and very nice. I walked in with an appointment yesterday with a friend's internist. She listened carefully to me and said that she wanted me to see a specialist, a cardiologist. She spent some time on the phone finding the one she wanted and making sure he was fluent in English. I went upstairs to his office and was seen in about 10 min. He spent an hour at least with me yesterday. Today, I walked in and was seen immediately for the blood work then taken to the heart lab. The doctor was there and spent several more hours with us doing the tests. There is no comparison in the comfort, kindness and willingness to really listen and spend as much time as needed between this and my experiences with hospitals and doctors in the US.

So, that's where it all is and I'm really over talking about this. I felt I should though - partly to get my friends off my back - and partly because it is one of the things that people who move to Mexico want to know about.

I had lots of unrelated pictures to put in this post, distractions from the ugly details, but Blogger will not let me upload them.

... and Thanks Marlene, Country, Kathe and mostly Mimi. I know you are right.

The architect sent me some pics of progress on the house. The walls are higher and some electrical and plumbing work has been done. I am really anxious to get back over there, it makes me nervous not to be around when all this is going on.

But, until today I really didn't feel well enough to even try and organize myself to go. Mimi saved me! Really! She figured it out. She went online and found all of the problems I'm having listed as side effects of the antibiotic I was taking, Bactrin Septra, which is a sulfa drug. Insomnia, lethargy, arrhythmia, difficulty breathing, depression... about the only thing I didn't have were hallucinations. I'm pretty sure the dolphin talking to me on the deck was real.

I'd finished 5 days in a row of it and the cough is pretty much gone so I stopped taking it yesterday. Last night was the first night I've slept normally in a week. What a joy. I feel really good today, rested and alert. I'm telling ya, Mimi saved me! I have to remember now that sulpha drugs and I don't mix well.

We're off to Playa soon to pay the car registration, get Chica's thyroid pills, and stop at a couple of RV beaches along the way to visit some friends. Tonight is the eclipse, don't forget. We may actually hit the road tomorrow for Merida. I'm so happy to feel better I can't describe it. I was getting a little scared, probably part of that was the insomnia and the arrhythmia. I'm taking the chest xray with me to Merida and I'll go in and get a full check up and let that doctor read it.

I'm on to Plan B.

Plan A of ignoring the chest gunk and thinking I was getting better only worked for a few days and then I got worse.

So, Saturday I started taking the antibiotics again and that evening I went and got a chest xray. You won't believe how easy this is down here. I walked into the Hospiten (private hospital in Playa del Carmen) at about 6:30pm with no appointment and told them I wanted a chest xray to be read by my doctor. I filled out a short form, waited a minute or two and was taken back to a very modern xray and cat scan facility. I put on the usual paper gown, they took one picture, I waited while they checked to see if it was good, got dressed, was handed my xray in an envelope and went back to the lobby. It was that fast. I got my bill which was $330 pesos (about $30us), paid it and we were out the door in about a half hour.

Never, never look at your own xray if you don't know what you are looking at. They are spooky. I kind of hate seeing my insides anyway but this was creepy. First, I was all 'look at all that black, why is it all black?' Then, I spotted some white and that freaked me out even more. I put it back in the envelope and I'm not looking at it again.

I do feel better, just not great. So, Saturday night after we got home we went to Tulum to dinner with our friends Paula and Sandy. We all decided to go to the Argentine restaurant. All of us had been there before but either we'd never been for dinner or they have about doubled their prices for high season. I'm just not going to pay $250 pesos ($23.25us) for a steak dinner in Mexico at a nondescript restaurant in Tulum. Not and sit in plastic chairs next to the sidewalk while a soccer game plays on TV behind me. We waffled around and finally ordered mostly appetizers and pasta. I wasn't even thrilled with those, lesson learned. Don't assume that a place that is good and reasonable in October will be the same in February.

Tonight we had a lot of fun and a wonderful dinner at the home of 2 gay guys we just met. They own a 4 unit house here and have been coming here for years but we'd never met them. Last week a maid that used to work for me asked me to translate for her because her new employers didn't speak Spanish and she doesn't speak English. That's how I met these guys. It's all working out well and the best part is we really like them and hope to see a lot more of them.

While at the dinner party tonight, someone suggested that my getting this chest thing here every year could be mold in the AC. I'm going to check on it although I don't get it whenever I'm here but I do seem to get it once every year. We sleep with the AC on because I thought it would help dry out my lungs and because with 3 dogs on the bed it gets hot. I think I started getting sick while we were driving over here from Merida this time so it probably isn't related.

We've also been having a lot of problems with our satellite internet. First we got fap'd because our neighbors didn't realize they meter your downloads and they were using their slingbox in Canada to watch TV. We got that straightened out, they felt horrible but they didn't know. They were really nice and brought up a bottle of rum, love that!

But, now that we aren't fap'd, we are still dropping the connection every minute or so. The wind has been blowing a little but I don't think this has happened before with this much wind. I don't know. It's very frustrating as you have to wait for everything until the connection comes back up and then you get one page and it goes down again.

I'm sure it is going to take me forever to post this...

Cuba's latest favorite spot in the RV. She's a funny dog.

As we started driving over to Akumal, my throat started hurting and my chest filled up with crud and by the time we were here I was sick. It seems I get one of these chest colds every year, and at about the same time. I wonder if winter is programmed in my body and it doesn't care if it is 80° and sunny, it is time for a cold.

So, I've laid around a lot this past week. I did go to the doctor on the 2nd day as I didn't do that last year and got yelled at for almost getting pnuemonia. He gave me antibiotics and special cough expectorant stuff and told me to get a chest xray.

I haven't really done anything he said. I took one antibiotic, forgot the second one so didn't take any more. I tried the cough stuff once, thought the old stuff I already had was better so stopped taking that too. I'm not about to get a chest xray either. Years ago my friend Candy, who happened to be a doctor, told me that by the time anything shows up on a chest xray, you're dead anyway. So I figure if that's true why ruin what could be my last days? If nothing is there, why have the xray?

In spite of all this lack of cooperation, I'm getting better. I'm much better in fact. I still have a cough at night but it's not so bad and anyway that old cough syrup is some great stuff.

My get well regime is to just go to bed a lot and sleep as late as I can. Maybe I'm on to something.

Saturday night, Theresa and I met at the Plaza Grande to watch the parade. I had this great idea to park my jeep out at the Fiesta Americana on the far edge of the centro. I was afraid that if could get into a parking lot closer in, they would close the streets and I wouldn't be able to get out again. I pulled into the lot just before 5pm and by the time I'd taken the escalator up to the street, it was closed off! I got a cab and we seemed to zoom across intersections just as they were putting the cones up to close the street.

We sat in the plaza and talked and then cruised the food stalls. I love the marquesitos (a crepe filled with gouda cheese) and the corn on a stick covered with cream, cheese, chili and lime.

There was a great discussion on another ex-pat blog recently about hot dogs and the ways they are served in Latin America, not to mention their seeming obsession with them.

I'm not all that big a hot dog fan on a good day, I do like to have one after shopping at CostCo, but it would never occur to me to buy them for a party treat or to deep fat fry them and serve them like little flowers on top of french fries. Here they are though, in all their hotdoggity glory.

Yes, the pictures are larger if you click them so you can really see their almost pornographic detail.

Sadly, I got better pictures of the hot dogs than the floats. We were mashed behind huge crowds of people and even a couple of chain link fences in some areas. We walked around and found an area where at least there weren't fences.

The fence is there to control access to the paid seating. I may have to spring for that one year and actually see the entire parade.

This is the second time I've been there for Carnaval and mostly seen the tops of floats and the bouncy feather headdresses of the dancers. Theresa and I were joking that we could tell what kind of dancers they were by the way their feathers wiggled.

While almost none of my pictures are in focus, I'm rather fond of a couple of them. I really like the way this girl looks in the middle of all the lights.

Or these coliseum beauties.

There were several representations of the Coliseum, it is one of the other newly designated 7 Wonders of the World. It seemed a lot more popular than some of the lesser known Wonders, or perhaps those were harder to make out of cardboard and colored paper on a flat bed truck?

We did see some Chinese looking feather headdresses (see, we're experts on dancer's feather hats) so they may have been part of the Great Wall of China.

Mainly, we were looking over people's heads a lot until we finally decided to just go and sit down in the plaza. We were comfortable, and we could see just as much. It does help that the average height down here is pretty short so even Theresa could see over most men's heads.

The cuteness quota was more than filled by lots of little charmers in costume. This little ratito was especially cute.

After the last float, we sat and talked for a few minutes and then a veritable army of street cleaners appeared and began to sweep. Apparently they were going to sweep every street before they were reopened for traffic. What a city!

Theresa was going to walk home and I was still a little dubious, I asked her if she was sure it was safe. She laughed at me and said "yes, this is Mérida."

I fully intended to get a cab but I couldn't find one and I ended up walking back to the hotel for the jeep. It was farther than I've walked in a long time, I think quitting smoking (and yes, I still haven't smoked) has helped.

Because I walked around a bit looking for a cab, I ended up walking about 16 long blocks - at midnight through the center of a huge city of over 1 million people. I was a little on guard, it's just my nature, but I never felt the least bit in danger.

There were parts where there were people on the street walking as well, they were all friendly and mostly family groups. There were parts that were pretty empty with only the occasional drunk on a corner, even then there was no menace.

I'm sure there are parts of the city where you could get yourself in trouble quickly but I am really enthralled with the safe feel of this city and the people who live here.

By the way, I'm not a Mexican apologist, this is not true in other cities in Mexico just as it isn't true in most cities in the US. That it is true of Mérida is one of the reasons I love this city so much.

¡Hola internet! What a week. I'm here in Mérida, Mimi went to Cancun to pick up her brother at the airport and then to Akumal for the week. I took a week of Spanish classes which started at 9am waaaay across the city. I am not a morning person, I had to get up at 7:30am to get to class on time. I came home and slept a couple of days but I'm very short of sleep right now.

Also, it is Carnival. Mérida has one of the largest celebrations of Carnival in Latin America. It started Wednesday with the Burning of Bad Moods, yesterday was the parade of the children and tonight was the first of the major parades. The theme this year is the Year of Marvels, because this year Chichen Itza was named as one of the 7 Marvels of the World and Chichen Itza is in the same state, Yucatán. I didn't go... but I watched it live on TV, does that work?

My favorite group were the DIF Adultos Mayores which is a group of, shall we say, persons of a certain age. They were spectacular, suspend your biases for a minute and imagine troops of women who are all over 60 and are dressed in the sexy outfits you see on Mardi Gras floats, who dance down the street in unison with perfect rhythm. They put the hip action in the salsa, they had the moves and the outfits and the will. It looked like a few of them were lacking a bit of endurance and the heels were not as high but they worked it all the way down that long boulevard.

After the parade, the local channel went to one of the many stages along the route where bands were performing. I don't know why they picked the one they did but it was definitely not the best of the lot. After the first band, a guy came out in a full Zorro outfit (I may be the only person still living that remembers the TV show Zorro) with the black mask, the cape and everything. Under his name it said impersonator y cantante, impersonator and singer. His first song was 'Wooly Bully' which I might also be the only person alive who remembers all the words. He sang it in Spanish but there is no missing that tune and that refrain. I should have changed the channel then but no, I waited until he started his next song which just might have been a big hit for Donnie and Marie. At that point, I switched to the national channel and got lost in a telenovela. I'll have to blog sometime about the prime time soaps here, telenovelas, they are fantastic!

I dropped by the house a couple times after class and I was happy to see the walls already going up for the 2nd floor that we are adding. It's daunting, the amount of work that remains but I am still excited by the process and the visible results.