Doctors and Taxi Rides

There is a doctor who comes to town every couple of months who has an excellent reputation for helping people with fibromyalgia and other fun and interesting ailments.  I decided I'd give him a try.  To give you just about as much background as I have, Dr. Cedeno is an M.D. who also has extensive training in Eastern medicine.  He tends to use the acupressure-style of treatments.

After they took did my intake and got all kinds of info from me, his assistant did a little blood stick and put the slide in a microscope that puts the results on a computer screen.  It turns out I had a bunch of parasites in my blood--ooh, not fun.  I decided I would definitely go with a parasite treatment and got a fun hour of intravenous drip and I was on my way for the day.  Actually, none of this is at all relevant to the story except as background information but if you know me even a little bit, you know how much I love a story, with all its minute details, right?

When I'd gone to the place where Dr. Cedeno practices when he's in town, I needed to take a taxi because it was a couple of miles out of town.  The first day my taxi driver knew exactly where I wanted to go when I told him I was going to Lueva.  It's apparently well-known locally.

The following day I needed to get a few things from the department store, go to the bank, stop back by my place to drop stuff off, and then go to Lueva.  I caught a cab right outside the store and asked to go to the bank first of all.  There's only one in town so that shouldn't have been much of a challenge--even I knew he was driving around the general neighborhood until he found it.  If they used meters rather than flat rates I would have thought he was trying to get extra money out of me.  After that, I asked him to take me home to drop off ,my groceries (and money) and he actually didn't know where my street was--it's the main street going through town.  Finally, when I told him I wanted to go to Lueva he was totally blank.  We were already driving away from my house so when we saw a couple of taxis by the side of the road waiting for fares I had my driver stop and I asked one of them if he knew where Lueva was.  Of course he did.  He had to tell my driver how to get there.  I guess clueless cab drivers abound, even is little bitty Cotacachi.

Once I got there and was getting ready for the Dr. to come in, I happened to notice a bathroom scale.  I figured, what the heck?  I'd check it out.  After all, it might not even be anywhere near accurate.  I'm going to hope it is because according to that, I've lost about 20 pounds!  How in the world did I do that?  No doubt part of it is that I haven't eaten anything processed since I got here and walking all over the place can't be hurting either.  When I was done seeing the Dr. I asked the woman who owns the place if she had any idea if the scale is accurate or not and she was of the opinion that it is.  I think I'll choose to believe that, too.