A Colombian hospital

I have been sick for over a week now, with some strange icky feeling in my stomach that makes me want to throw up when I eat. Like a good American who has been trained to avoid clinics and hospitals due to incredibly high medical costs, I decided to try and wait out the illness and just hope it went away. Finally on Tuesday I said screw it....I had had enough and it was time to make my first trip to a foreign hospital!

I arrived at the Javeriana's hospital at 10am to a room full of sick people who had been waiting for hours already. It took me close to an hour to just fill out the papers, get myself on the list, and pay for the consult, then they told me it would be another 2 hours before I'd be able to see a doctor.

"Two hours" slowly dragged into three and a half hours, and finally at 2:30pm I had my meeting, with a doctor who looked like she was 20. Probably a recent graduate of the University....

I had to get a blood test, and not until AFTER they had taken my blood did they tell me that I could not leave that area until my test results came back, which would be ANOTHER 2 HOURS. But after I found out that it only cost 30,000 pesos (like $17USD) I was like "Take all the blood you want for that price!!!" (It would have cost me hundreds in the US).

After getting my results back, my doctor put a paper in front of me with random words and numbers on it and proceeded to tell me that I have an infection and that I have to take 2 different types of pills for it. But not really sure where the infection is or where it came from....

-6.5 hours total from arrival to departure
-$35 total for the consultation and the blood test
-a very lacking explanation about what is going on in my stomach

In the US I would have paid a GREAT deal more, but I would have been in and out in 1.5 hours, knowing exactly what was wrong with me.... Oh the joys of learning about the world....