I've been MIA on my blog for a few days.  For the past few months I've been battling a series of UTIs. That's a urinary tract infection for those of you not in the know. A UTI is no fun. No fun at all. It requires a trip to the doctor's and a round of antibiotics to cure.

Only I've had three of them in three months. This, of course, shouldn't happen.

The result is that for the last three months I've spent large chunks of time feeling generally tired and morose and familiarizing myself with every toilet on the ACS campus. Needless to say, neither one of these pursuits are how I really want to spent my time.

Then this past week my series of UTIs morphed into kidney pain/bladder problems. <em>Awesome</em>. Well, or not.

I took Friday off of school. Then I took Monday off of school. I've never-ever taken two sick days off in a row. I've never needed to. That is until this past week when I really needed to.

Then over the course of Friday and Monday I saw: the school doctor, a general practitioner, a gynecologist and four different urologists at four different clinics/hospitals/medical centers. I started small at my local clinic Greenberg in Mladost by the high school, then I went to Pirogov, next I headed over to a specialized clinic for urology and I topped the whole thing off with a visit to Takuda.

Between visits to the gynecologist and the urologists, I was also introduced to   the ultrasound machine. Holy smokes, those things are amazing (and so are the people who can read them). The nice thing about Bulgaria is that at then end of each encounter with the ultrasound machine I got a little take away--something to remember the visit by. Yes, I've got pictures of organs I've never seen before nor ever felt the need to have pictures of but they are all mine.

Anyhow, back to the serious stuff. The ultrasounds revealed that currently I have an enlarged bladder. This is probably due to the fact that I've had three drug-resistant urinary tract infections and now I find myself caught in a horrible cycle were in all likelihood now my enlarged bladder is causing my current UTI. As a result, some tests are being run. Ideally these tests will reveal which bacteria have made themselves at home in my kidney/bladder/urinary tract and which antibiotics will successfully evict this hearty-bacteria from my body.

So am I better? Well, not really. But it sure helps to know what is going on.

Oh and stay tuned for my reviews of the various medical centers I've visited thus far in Sofia. If nothing else this whole thing has been an adventure and there's plenty to write about.