{"id":285,"date":"2012-10-20T20:26:01","date_gmt":"2012-10-20T20:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jfmac.local\/~jf\/wordpress\/?p=285"},"modified":"2012-10-20T20:26:01","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T20:26:01","slug":"back-to-istanbul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/?p=285","title":{"rendered":"Turkey time again!"},"content":{"rendered":"

To recap three years worth<\/a> of posts about me and health …<\/p>\n

Before 2009 I was more or less a health system dropout<\/em>.\u00a0 Then in 2009 I had issues with my heart.\u00a0 I went to Turkey and got my heart fixed, then I came back to Reno and soon was again … a health system dropout.<\/p>\n

Reno Heart Physicians (RHP<\/em>) will write prescriptions for only one year, so I have had to return to them twice in the intervening years.\u00a0 They charge a good chunk more more each year – $250, $290, $310.\u00a0 Costs keep rising, and since they are a for-profit company that means charging more money to sick people because god forbid they should cut into their profit margins … and there you have the American health care system in a nutshell.<\/p>\n

Each time I’ve visited the doctor she says I really<\/em> should get an echocardiogram. Since that would be $900 off my credit card, I’ve declined.\u00a0 Please just thump me and listen to your stethoscope and make the best judgement you can – you know, like they did before echocardiograms.<\/p>\n

So now here we are, summer of 2012, my meds are running out and it’s time for a visit to RHP.\u00a0 I keep thinking about that echocardiogram and the general notion of having better information on the state of my health.<\/p>\n

Now, the other piece of the narrative is that when I wrote my Turkey doctor an update email in 2010, I complained to him about the $900 echo,<\/em> he cleverly told me to come back to Istanbul and he’ll do it for free!<\/p>\n

So … after my mandatory period of stewing about this without doing anything about it, I finally write an email to Dr Cicek.\u00a0 He says groovy let’s do it (I paraphrase…) and hands me off to the International Relations folks to handle the details.\u00a0 Within a couple of weeks we have it all ironed out and I have my reservation to leave SFO on October 16 and return on the 29th.\u00a0 The extra flight from Reno to a real airport is always annoying, so this time I’m squeezing in a Martha-visit at both ends by driving to visit her then flying from San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Also, a completely un health-related event was that planning for this trip caused me to actually pull the trigger on getting an iPhone<\/em>.\u00a0 I had already done exhaustive research on smartphones twice over the last 2-3 years, so I’ve front-loaded all my usual decision stress and dithering time.\u00a0 I’m well past the two-year contract on my little dumbphone, so this was a simple matter of going to the Apple store and buying it and picking a plan.\u00a0 So easy once I decided to do it!<\/p>\n

It was all a little too sudden. I had a mere two days to get used to my new phone before heading off into the wild blue and turning off my brand new cell phone service.\u00a0 But the iPad had trained me on most of its quirks, so it was no big deal.\u00a0\u00a0 It worked out quite well.\u00a0 I was able to leave my camera at home, as well as the camera battery charger, and the dumbphone battery charger, because the iPhone and the iPad share the same charger.\u00a0 Excellent!<\/p>\n

I am not excited about this trip.\u00a0 I don’t really want to do it, I’d rather be cruising around the west in the ole van, doing some version of my beloved Fall Colors Tour.\u00a0 But I’ve built it up in my mind as something I really must do, so here I preparing to go to spend two weeks in Istanbul …
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Getting There (Oct 17)<\/a><\/h3>Leave Reno on Monday, drive to San Rafael, spend the night at Martha’s.<\/p>\n

Hang with her and Tyler all day Tuesday.\u00a0 I talk her into driving me to the airport, so late afternoon we drop the van off at the Marin Airporter<\/strong> lot ($4\/day) so it will be there when I get back, and off we go to the airport.\u00a0 I still have a bad attitude about the whole thing.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Munich Airport<\/div><\/div>\n

Pretty easy flight, leave SFO at 9pm on Tuesday, Munich Airport mid-afternoon Wednesday (lost nine hours), finally arrive Istanbul midnight on Wednesday (lose one more hour).\u00a0 Fifteen hours of flying, two hours of waiting and ten hours of time change comes to 17 hours of actual time and 27 hours of clock time.\u00a0 Erhan picked me up and drove me to the hospital, just like two years ago!\u00a0 Pretty much everybody who was at the hospital three years ago is still there now.\u00a0 Not much job mobility in Turkey I guess.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
fancy hotel at hospital. All downhill from here.<\/div><\/div>\n

One thing that is different from two years ago is that there is a hotel at the hospital – the Titanic Comfort Hotel<\/strong> :)))\u00a0 The name is not meant to imply that the comfort provided is titanic<\/em>, rather there is a chain of hotels named Titanic<\/em>, some of which are very big! The little boutique hotels in their chain are called comfort<\/em> hotels.\u00a0 It’s a cozy little two story place, maybe 40 rooms, about 100 yards from the hospital.\u00a0 I don’t know if they chose the name with knowledge of our English association with the doomed ocean liner, but Titanic it is!<\/p>\n

Doctor Day – Thursday<\/a><\/h3>Asleep 1:30am-ish, awakened 8:30 for the medical marathon I came here for.<\/p>\n

This was a very long day of shuttling from doctor to doctor.\u00a0 More or less in order, here’s my stops:<\/p>\n