September 19, 2006

This morning we woke up early again and went to the hospital by 9. I started off on the first floor with Ionut. This was my first time with him and usually it’s Ionut and George, but George wasn’t there. I didn’t think about it a whole lot while I was in the room, but later on when someone asked about it and I said he wasn’t there we started wondering whether he’d died. We found out later that he did. It’s funny, because normally when someone dies it’s a horribly sad thing. But with these kids, a lot of the time I have to say I’m almost happy that they’ve passed away. I mean, especially for kids like George where there’s no hope of him getting any better and where he’s just in pain all day and can’t even move. I’m so sure that he’s much happier right now that why in the world would I be sad. To explain a little more about Ionut and George, they’re babies with Hydrocephaly. That means they have water on the brain and basically their heads just get bigger and bigger until they die. It’s quite shocking when you first walk in and see them because their heads really are huge, but you get used to it and just love them the same as any child. After a little while Ionut fell asleep so I went up to the 7th floor to see if I could be with Octavian. When I got there there were a few nurses in the room, so I hung outside the room until there was only one left. Then I came in and sat down. She started talking to me and I pretended I knew what she was saying and I was just like “Da, da.” Well, eventually she finished feeding him and I could see that she wanted me to sit down next to him on the crib and hold one hand under his head and use the other hand to pat his back. She said a TON more though and I was a little worried because I was afraid maybe there was something important I was supposed to know. Especially since he had an oxygen mask attached to his face which was not, when she left, attached to the tube that the oxygen comes out of and the whole time I was wondering if he should be attached to it. So I just kept watching him to make sure he looked all right! After a little while he fell asleep too, so I told the nurse I was leaving (to make sure she knew no one was in there so maybe she’d check on him and attach it if it needed to be attached) and then went down to where Iulia was. Melissa was with her and she’d just gotten the pressure increased on the machine she’s attached to so she was “crying” again. It was so sad because we just couldn’t get her to stop crying no matter what we did and we knew she was hurting. This went on for maybe an hour until finally we made a discovery. We started singing “Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree” to her and she stopped crying! She just stared at us!!! So the whole rest of the time we sang to her. At the beginning we just sang those types of song ooover and oooover before branching out into some camp songs, some Disney song and then even just some regular old popular music. Sometimes we’d use hand motions and sometimes we were just too tired to think of random hand motions for songs that didn’t always include them. But I do think it helped when there were hand motions. Toward the end she did start falling asleep though, so that was fabulous. By the time we left we’d successfully gotten her to sleep!!! After leaving the orphanage the gypsy kids came and mauled us again. Then we had some time in the apartment before going over to Podul to work a little more on the “Mapping the City” project. Basically we talked a bunch and then worked on marking some maps of Iasi that Bri scanned for us. The rest of my apartment left while I waited for Holly who is spending the week at our apartment. Before we left, Marina asked if we could take some of her wet clothes over to our apartment to rewash them because their washer broke when her clothes were in it. Well, let me just say, that was a toooough walk home. Not only did Holly have like ALL her stuff with her, and not only was I carrying two VERY heavy bags of wet clothes, but we were carrying 3 scrub tops with wet “Y”s painted on them, and a very awkward map. Then, on top of it all, right as we’re leaving Podul, one of the stray dogs started following us because he was attracted to Marina’s wet clothes. We joked a little about throwing some of them to him and just being like “sorry Marina, we threw some of your clothes to the street dogs.” It was funny because the dog followed us all the way from Podul to Scala and at the beginning we were kind of scared of him and like “go away doggy” but by the end we were like “aww, I’m sorry, bye bye little doggy, I love you!” It was cute too because whenever we’d rest from carrying all the stuff (which was a lot) he’d just lay down on the ground next to us and wait. I almost hoped he’d be outside our door this morning, but he was gone.