New Year's Day

Last night was wild! Wild AND crazy! Holy cow! You would NOT believe how we celebrated the new year last night. Okay, first we had dinner - baked chicken, salad, and tiaramasu (or however you spell it). I know - crazy! Over the top. Then, we back to our room for about a half hour. The neighbors knocked at our door and asked us to go play cards down in the hospital with the patients who are too sick to come upstairs. Wowza! How could we refuse?! Fun AND charity. Can't beat it. So, we down to play three rounds of BlackJack. The excitement was beyond belief...people were out of control. When we were done with cards we came back to our apartment to watch a movie. Okay, cover ears and eyes here...we watched "Shrek." Yep, living the high life!! When it was over at 10, we went to bed. Can you believe our wildness? Who knew it could get so crazy in Tijuana?!
At midnight, however, the noise from all the fireworks woke me up so I went out to check it out. It was pretty cool (no sarcasm here). The sky was lit up with constant color...it didn't stop til after 1 a.m. Pretty neat. Although I didn't hear any gunfire (in all the commotion, I'm not sure I could pick it out vs. fireworks going off), the neighbor (a Vietnam vet) said he heard a few shots. I trust his ears with that kind of stuff. He lived with it for four years.
After we slept in (have to recover after such a wild night), we got up to get treatment. The clinic is closed today so we had to go to downstairs to the hospital (I'm going to post pictures in a little bit so you can get a better idea). We haven't been here, so the nurses don't know us or what John "prefers." They started to get him set up. They started injecting the saline solution to clean out the IV and he promptly starting screaming. Nice. There are some seriously sick people down there and he's screaming his fool head off. I tried to hush him and it didn't work. The nurse, who doesn't speak English, stopped pushing the saline. She jiggled the IV around a bit (that went over like a lead balloon) and tried again. Mistake! She was insisting in pushing the saline when I noticed his skin was bubbling. I asked her to stop ("Alto, por favor!"). No response, she pushed, he screamed. "Alto! Por Favor!" No response. Everything escalated a little..."Stop! Now!" and I grabbed her arm. Not a good idea when someone has a needle stuck in the arm of your kid. She wasn't happy with me. I apologized and told her we would skip treatment today. When she investigated further, we found out the IV had gotten itself removed from John's vein and was just laying under his skin. That's why it hurt so much when she injected the saline. Even now, describing it to you, makes me nauseous. Yuck. So, the IV was removed, John dried his tears, grabbed his toys and left. We'll have to have the IV replaced tomorrow (he is NOT looking forward to that), but at least we'll have Elias, the amazingly gentle nurse.
The neighbor guy was really sweet - he brought a hugmongous "Cars" pen over for John to do his homework with. That was really nice.
To answer some of the questions in the "comments:" Yes, you can write us. Please do!! The address is International BioCare Hospital/Clinic, PO Box 431880 San Ysidro, CA 92143-1880. People have been getting letters from the Midwest and it seems to take about four days for mail to get here. Not bad. Amy and Linda - nice job on using a blog for the first time! We really appreciate it. John really, really enjoys reading the comments everyone sends. Please continue. It really makes his day. Thank you for thinking of us in your very busy days.
Up next: Photos of the Place