Personalized Medicine

What, you might ask, is my husband doing with an IV attached in a garden in Istanbul?  In the photo, you'll see our psychiatrist friend Cengiz, his nephew Onur, and his son Safuk.  It actually started back in Charleston, when he had tooth pain and went to see a dentist who gave him some pain pills and told him it would get better spontaneously.  What this dentist forgot to say was that the pain pills would put him in la la land and as long as he took them, he wouldn't care where he was or what happened.  As I was beginning to worry about very rapid onset Alzheimer's Disease brought on by the sudden change of venue, I also noticed that the right side of his face was getting bigger and redder.  Luckily for Jeff (or Cef as he spells it in Turkey), I work in a hospital, so he was whisked down to ENT where they declared an abscess and prescribed oral antibiotics with frequent returns.  A note about antibiotics in Turkey: they are actually quite easy to obtain, available at any pharmacy without prescription!  In Cef's case, the oral antibiotics didn't work, so two days later he had a procedure to drain the abscess with a new prescription for IV antibiotics.  Nurhayat, the psychiatric nurse here at the Hacettepe, got him started, but he was not going to miss the weekend trip to Istanbul, so with drips and lines on board we forged ahead to Istanbul, trusting his care to Cengiz (shown holding the bag, so to speak), his wife Emine (a child psychiatrist), and their friends and relatives in Istanbul.  Cengiz managed 3 successful infusions, before we had to resort to a hospital nurse to reinsert the IV line.  It finally got to be too much trouble, so he's now back on oral antibiotics and the infection is nearly gone.  Hurray for personalized medicine (even if delivered by a psychiatrist)!!