by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Super Adventure Life
The flight was long..I wasn’t really able to get much sleep…I don’t think I slept very much for a week actually.
But I finally landed and caught a cab to my mom’s place. My mom was very happy to see me and I was glad to be with her.
When I was at the airport a man mentioned that I should look up someone in Chicago that treats this sort of thing. Chicago is a major place for many things, someone has to know about it. I looked on line and found a specialist who is the director of the Rush Hospital Infectious Disease Center.
I called the next day and got an appointment the next day. The doctor called me back actually which I found really amazing. He was very nice and interested in my case.
My mom and I drove into the city the next day and the doctor confirmed that it was indeed Leish, but we had to get it tested and the next appointment for testing was in a week. He took a picture of it and sent me on my way.
That night my mom started to complain of pains on her side. She said that she might need to go to the hospital so we called the ambulance. That night she was admitted into the hospital.
For the next few days they ran test after test and in the end they sent her home because they just weren’t sure what the problem was.
Everyday I was holding space for my mom and also for Rob who has to take a bus and a train everyday round trip 3 hours to get his treatment. It’s been hard being away from Rob during all of this. I get emotional and sad and it’s not helpful for him…
My mom is home now, feeling better and we are working on a healthy way of eating and living.
Rob has 8 more days of treatment and is feeling tired.
I got tested last week and I find out what species of Leish I have on Thursday. My lesion is healing, which could be a good thing or not depending on what type of Leish I have. Basically if I have Mexicana it will heal on it’s own and I won’t need treatment and if I have Braziliana then I will need treatment. Rob has been getting treatment for it even though they don’t know what kind he has, but in America the CDC won’t release the medication unless the result comes back positive for the Brazillian species.
I have been up and down and have been very thankful for the love and support of all of my friends and family and Rob’s friends and family. I feel like we are supported and loved by so many.
Now all I have to do is start taking care of myself…It’s been easy to put all of my love and focus into Rob and my mom, but now it is time to turn within and start my own healing process….
by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Blog
This air flight was non-eventful and long, we watched movies and slept.
When it came time to go to Customs the agent asked me what I was doing in London and I told him the truth. I got shuffled through and asked a whole lot more questions and basically they decided that because I did not have the right visa they did not want to allow me entrance into the UK.
The thing is…you don’t need a visa if you are from the US. Basically they didn’t want me to get treatment at the Tropical Disease Hospital because I am not a British National. They said if I applied for a visa, and proved I would have enough money to pay for treatmentand accommodation then they would let me back in.
They were nice enough to let me spend the night with Rob at his mom’s house and then get on a plane to Chicago to my mom’s house the next morning.
It was a beautiful night with Rob…I wanted to remember everything about him and hold him all night long…
When the morning came we got ready and his mom and he dropped me off at the airport. I felt like we were just going to be away from each other for a short time and this wasn’t a forever good bye, just a for a little while…
by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Blog
We had contacted this family before we went to the resort and they were sad that we had another obligation, but they were thrilled to know we could now come and would be assisting them on their land.
They were a family of 7 and 3 dogs. The children were home schooled and the father worked in web and graphic design.
The place they lived used to be a rustic resort with restaurant, but they were winding down the business and now they were just living there as a family.
A typical day would be waking up at 7:30am. Sweeping the Outpost, cleaning the bathrooms, raking the leaves on the paths and then having breakfast,cleaning up after breakfast then doing various duties like cutting, digging or planting flowers, helping with home schooling the kids or looking after the 1 year old baby Jack.
We would then have lunch, clean up after lunch and have the rest of the day to do our own work.
Some days we would have to work until later if they had a flower order that needed processing, but sometimes the family would go out to stay in town and we would have the place to ourselves for the weekend.
There were other helpers that would come and go but we remained there for about 3 months. We would take trips into the city and stay over night, mostly to just get away and have a nice warm shower. (Our bathtub and swimming hole was the creek and most of the time it was nice, but sometimes you really miss having a warm shower…)
We came to love that family like our own, but after 8 years they were done with the jungle life and we were basically there to help them with the transition. The day before they left the dad said to Rob that he should get his nose looked at. He had had sore on it for a couple of months and it hadn’t gone away. He mentioned that it might be Leishmaniasis.
The transition of the family left us with our own piece of land most days. We couldn’t really leave for a month because the new owners didn’t have anyone else to stay if we left. There was a man that came that knew a lot about the trees and plants of the area. He was going to be a worker for the new people moving in. One day he mentioned to look out for a bug called Chagas, aka the kissing bug. The very next day we were getting up for the day and I was handing Rob a shirt from next to our bed and I saw it there. We captured it and killed it but kept it just in case…later that day the neighbor came by and said that we could go to see a doctor she knew in the city who would work with payments, so we were able to work out leaving to go to the doctor for the day. He basically said we both had Leish and that we probably should worry about the Chaga, many of the Chagas bugs are not infected and we weren’t presenting with the symptoms of it. But he did want to treat us for the Leish. He gave us topical Antimony injections in our lesions that day.
The next day when we woke up I looked over at Rob who’s face was swollen and eyes puffy. The new owners were coming later in the day but I was freaked out and want to get him to the doctors as soon as we could get there. We ended up stopping at the neighbors house before we went to the doctors and she gave us some cleansing things to do to help us clear out our bodies and when we finally got on the road again we met the new owners on the road and they gave us some money to get everything we needed and then they told us that we should stay at their resort and get the wounds tested the next day.
They brought us out to their very fancy resort and we were treated to the Honeymoon Suite. The next day they lent us the car and we were able to go to the doctor, we got our wounds tested and the results came back positive for Leishmaniasis and negative for Chagas. We heard about a specialist in Belize city, so the day after that we said good bye to the Creek and were on our way to Belize city.
During all this time Rob’s mom wanted to fly us home to London. We weren’t sure if it was the best option, but when we found out that the best treatment could be found there we said yes. We wanted to go see the specialist first to just make sure and he said yes, we should go to London right away.
We told Rob’s mom that night and we were on a flight the next morning.
by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Super Adventure Life
The resort was a bird sanctuary. Many people would come there from all over the world to take pictures of these beautiful exotic birds. They gave our own cabana with a beautiful white cover and white drapes on windows. It had been something I had been dreaming about during our grungy camping days and here it was showing up in our lives…How does it get any better than that?
The next day we started our work. Rob was asked to help with the Organic farm they wanted to start and also helping with food preparation in the kitchen. I was helping with cleaning out the cabanas and doing laundry.
The people who ran this place had a string of people who were not good workers, so their hopes for us were somewhat low. They gave me a job of cleaning out this massive space without any assistance or guidance as to how they wanted it done. It took the whole day pretty much and after I was done I was pretty sure that I had made a mistake in choosing this life…
Each day I was to clean out another room and do more laundry. I was increasingly becoming more sad because what I really wanted to be doing was workshops or teleclasses. I wanted to be doing healing and coaching sessions with people, but I was here doing house cleaning. Rob enjoyed the farm work and the helping in the kitchen, but the days were long, we would start at 6:30am and not finish until 11pm after dinner clean up. Eventually we realized that this was not the place for us and I found us another place to volunteer close to the Guatemala border.
by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Blog
The next day we caught a boat to Belize city.
We found a clean and safe place to stay and worked on finding our next destination. I found a Russian family on a farm outside of Belize city that was looking for volunteers. We got the address and the next day we were on a bus to the farm.
They had lived on the farm for about 2 years, but the place itself was very rustic. Very little running water and no sinks. We did have an inside sleeping space that we shared with a very bossy and demanding 12 year old. It seems his Mom left him there with this family for a couple of months while she went back to Russia with her new husband…
We were glad to have a bed, but when we started to get itchy we found out that our bed was covered in tiny little ants. These ants we found out are more like mites and they leave their saliva on your skin and it causes an itch that stays with you for weeks…
Each day we would wake up and do what ever we could to help on the farm. Rob was great at using his machete to chop down tall grasses and clear the land. I would help out with digging up potatoes and cleaning up. Each day was very hot and tiring, but Rob was glad to be working the land and I was glad to be there with him doing what I could.
The rules of Woofing is that you work for food and lodging, but the family didn’t really want to feed us…so we had to go into town to get food and that was a big struggle in and of itself. We had to hitch hike in and then take a long bus ride and then be there in town, which is dirty, loud and stressful…by the time we got back we would be very tired.
One day we were hitching into town and we got picked up by this man who said that he was looking for people to help him at his resort that his wife and he run. We told him we could help him and he was over joyed. We got his number and scheduled to come the next day.
We said good bye to our Russian family and we were on our way to our new destination.
