You Just Never Know...

…how your day’s gonna go. Wednesday, we left the house with four medical appointments planned. For some reason, traffic was much heavier and I arrived late to therapy, the first appointment. I really rushed through my exercises to make it in time to take my latest x-rays of the leg. After getting those, I ran (okay, hobbled quickly) down to the doctor’s office to find that he’d cancelled appointments due to an emergency surgery. Well, that’s understandable, I just wish I’d known that before the couple of hours of rushing around to make it there.

We had lunch and made it just in time to my dentist’s appointment, where she is replacing the crown that broke in a top molar. This is a procedure that would take an afternoon in the US, but is scheduled to take 4 visits here. Well, it WAS scheduled to take that, until, for the second appointment in a row, the little thing they put in my tooth to make the crown stay in place, broke again. We’re up to six appointments now.

It turns out that Sara needed us to run an errand while we were out, and it seemed we’d have the time now that the dentist’s appointment was abruptly ended. We plowed through traffic but only got a few miles in an hour, and arrived too late to complete the errand. What a day! Rushing here, there, and everywhere, mostly to no avail.

The next morning we got up as normal, and headed back out for physical therapy. I have to admit that I was dreading it, because the cold weather means I’m in a lot of pain before I even arrive. About halfway there, we heard a loud clunking noise and pulled over. It seems that the CV joint we’d just had replaced, led to a bolt that wasn’t quite tight enough, and the axle of our front wheel came loose. (No ugly comments if that makes no sense—that’s my female interpretation of what happened.) Thank God, we were in one of the very few places where traffic was not super-congested, and where there is a whole lane on the side of the road that’s safe to pull into.

Ken was just starting to figure out what the problem was when a man pulled over. This is typical of our experience with Paraguayans--always willing to lend a hand. The guy happened to be passing through in his work truck, and lives only a couple of blocks from where we’d broken down. He told Ken that he knew an honest, inexpensive mechanic that lived nearby. They walked to the mechanic’s house, the guy bought Ken a bag of empanadas for us, and they talked about why we’re in Paraguay all the way there and back. God’s good about arranging our days, huh? The car fix cost us about $10, I got out of therapy, and Ken made a new friend.

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