While the health care debate rages at home I am pursuing health and well-being over here in Ukraine. All I want is to be pain free without taking lots of ibuprofin.
The search took me first to a massage therapist who recommends a hot sauna. It's effective and the cold pool is especially stimulating. Then I moved on to a neurologist who practicies accupuncture. He uses long sharp needles to make my muscles relax. Some people fall asleep during the 20 minutes they have pins poking out of them. My muscles may have relaxed, but it didn't really make me feel cosy enough to take a nap.
This neurologist works in a rather nice facility; it's called the Chernobyl hospital. It has some nice up to date machinery. After a few treatments of acupuncture he did an x-ray. The printer wasn't working, but I saw the x-ray on the computer screen, and I was properly impressed with the quality of the picture. His recommendation after the x-ray was leech therapy. I don't have any pictures of my own to post here, I may borrow some online if I need graphic aides.
"Why leeches?" I asked. Well, leeches bite a hole in your skin, (my back) and suck blood. They are also called blood suckers, or they are called horse leeches. The saliva from a leech works as a painkiller, it also has therapeutic anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant properties. (Because of this, the wounds continue to bleed all day!)
After the leech takes in 10 to 15 ml of blood it gets full and stops working. He used about 5 on me. When they are done working they are simply disposed of. But, he told me, leeches have become quite expensive compared to what they were before, so some people opt to take them home and keep them in a jar of water where they remain alive (water has to be changed every 3 days), in a few months the leeches can be used again.
Well, they still only cost 9 hriven a piece, so I don't think I'll start keeping leaches around as pets.
This is a kitchen scale with chaff on it. The chaff doesn't weigh anything, but I spent several minutes picking it out of my homemade granola the other day...I do this every day, because I bought the cheapest oatmeal in the store. Angela told me not to collect a week's worth of it to weigh, is tempting though!
There are apples everywhere this time of year, and everybody likes to give us a bag of apples to carry home! In this case I was more interested in the basket than the apples!
So when you have apples you can't just let them sit around and get old, but I'm hard pressed to eat even one a day sometimes...I just don't have that much time to sit around and chew, so what to do? We did press 8 liters of apple juice here:
We want to dry them and make apple chips or apple flakes? This is just half that we have sliced, should take a few days to dry them on a low flame, then if we're lucky someone will give us some more, because this is fun! :)
This is our friend Anya, we met her in a little shop where we'd go when we needed macaroni and stuff like that. She was always very helpful and gradually we became friends.
There's little dots on my map from lots of far away places, so I'm curious...who are you? How did you find me? Do you keep coming back? and what do YOU think?
