Week 5

My appointment on Monday was at 12:15 so I got up at around 8 to have enough time to each breakfast and get ready because Nick was going to pick me up at 11:30. I ate breakfast with my host mom and went back upstairs to finish getting ready. Because of the cast, I was confined to a wardrobe of sweatpants and I wore a workout shirt because I knew I was going to sweat when I started to crutch because in Vienna I sweat a lot using those crutches. Crutches are a total workout! I made my way down all the flights of stairs and crutched outside to the end of the walkway and into the street because I wanted to be ready to go when Nick came to pick me up. I was waiting outside for a little while when an older gray van turned onto my street. As the van approached I saw Nick’s face over the wheel and he gave me a little wave. He pulled up beside me and as soon as he got out of the car, his first words were, “Whoa what happened to you?!” I laughed and started to tell him the story as he opened the passenger door for me and helped me get in. This was the first time I had ever really talked to Nick since I had had very little interaction with him before but he was super easy to talk to so it wasn’t awkward at all and I knew we were going to become good friends. Once we got to the hospital, the Universitätsklinikum Bonn also known as the Uniklinik, there was no parking available anywhere near the building we had to go to, the Chirurgisches Zentrum. This hospital is MASSIVE and super spread out so Nick drove around for a while trying to find a parking spot nearby. There was literally nothing so he started to drive further away and as he got further away I began to get really nervous about the distance. I was still awful on the crutches and super slow so any kind of distance was super daunting. He found a parking space about a quarter of a mile away from where we needed to go and I felt my heart sink but I was determined to try to get there in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s just say Nick as the patience of a saint. My body was still pretty sore from Vienna and the arch of my left foot hurt from landing hard since I wasn’t using the crutches properly. I kept having to take breaks and it was getting closer and closer to the time of my appointment and we were still pretty far away. I was already sweating and slightly out of breath.