Praise item:

-Jon received a $1000 scholarship for the Spring Semester :)

Boom Baby! I'z gotz my drivers a-license :D Maybe Tel-Aviv this weekend? NO Haifa!? NO Ashdod!! (all beaches btw).

It's too cold to swim (I would probably swim though)

-Jon

Electricity and Anemia.

Hello, Blog Followers. Kasey here.

Thought it was about time for at least a teeny update.

School is going well for me. I've gotten into the groove of things and REALLY enjoy teaching.

Everything in our house has a fine layer of dirt on it at the moment, because when the guys who wired the electricity in our house originally set it up, they decided that the 4 apartments on our floor... well, obviously we don't need electricity enough for 4 apartments, but instead we can share one breaker that's meant for one apartment. Smart, huh?

Mr. Ross (superintendent) just found out about this and immediately got the electric company to come back in and fix it. They've spent the last two days lining the corners of our ceilings with tracks for the wiring. Mr. Ross came in today, said it was unacceptable, and now they have to put it in the walls. There's a giant chunk of stone cut out of one of our walls, and dirt everywhere. They're going to take probably about a week to finish it now. *sigh*

So that's the electrical side of things.

Saturday I came down with what felt like a very bad cold. On Friday we went out with some friends and wandered around the Old City and Ben Yehuda (a street near the Old City). By the end of the day I had an extremely bad headache. We got home after dark, and found that one of our volunteer couples had to move into our building immediately -- problems with the landlords and their papers -- so we rushed around packing their house up and moving them down. After that we went to the girls' apartment and all sat around drinking tea and talking. Jon and I went to Anna's apartment (Anna is our new awesome friend who just got here) for a little while, and then went home and to bed. My headache had subsided with the tea but came back as soon as we left.

In my experience, sleep fixes everything, so I expected to be all better on Saturday morning. Except I woke up with what seemed like a very bad cold with a headache, and that induced a migraine. I had to skip work and tried to sleep it off. Sunday I felt a little worse, and Monday I threw up first thing in the morning.

When I still wasn't any better today, Jon decided to take me to the doctor's. The doctor noticed right away that there was something very wrong, and he did some basic blood work to test my hemoglobin and my white blood cell count. My blood pressure was already extremely low. When they tried to draw blood from a vein in my right arm, they couldn't find the vein, even after some poking around. That's not totally unusual for me, so I didn't find it weird. But when they found a large vein and tapped into it... the vein filled up half a vial and then quit. Which I DO think is weird.

Turns out I have a white blood cell count of 7000. I can't remember my hemoglobin, but apparently it wasn't good. Apparently I'm extremely anemic and have a viral infection. The doctor gave me two injections, some iron pills, and a couple other pills for the infection. Woot woot. He also told me I HAVE to eat red meat.

Just so we're clear, my doctors have told me to eat lots of salt and red meat. I would laugh in your faces if the anemia didn't make me so tired.

So hopefully the injections will help me feel good enough tomorrow to go into work.

On a better note, Jon just found out he got a 95% on his final history paper from last semester!!! :D YEY!