By the time the next ambulance arrived, I told Dillon, who had willingly stayed there all day, to go home to his host family. I was shocked he even stayed that long, I’m not sure I would’ve continued to embark on a hectic journey with a stranger if I had the choice. At this point, the medicine from nearly 10 hours before had worn off and as they lifted me into the next gurney, I screamed so loudly out of pure agony that I scared myself. That brief feeling of calmness in the ER quickly returned to its original qualm, and they pushed me into a newer and nicer ambulance with another nurse that also spoke minimal English, and also wore white scrubs. It felt like any movie that portrays going to heaven, where you see lots of light as people dressed in white take you away.

 

They rushed me into the Sistina ER, where there was air conditioning (a luxury in Macedonia) and all of the walls around me were as white as everyone's face after seeing me fall. It felt much cleaner there, but at the same time I was almost more scared as they left me alone between a new set of curtains, now actually strapped onto a cold metal table that was supposedly supporting my back. They stuck me in an MRI, and I remember tears rolling down my face as the pain medication was just a memory now. The MRI the techs asked me why I was in pain and why I was crying. I wanted to scream before even attempting to explain to them that this was my third hospital in 12 hours and that it was hard for me to admit that I was scared out of my mind.

 

By the end of the MRI, I was in a private room, after they stripped me of my clothes by dramatically cutting me out of them. I was put into a hospital gown and given some water, finally taken out of the weighted pads they dressed me in originally. Before I could try to fall asleep, Teta Julija made sure I had my phone plugged in, some food shoved down my throat, and made a call to my mom to ensure that everything was running smoothly (or as smoothly as it could). But, they really love to keep secrets from you in the Macedonian hospitals. So the next person to walk into my room was a doctor (apparently a cousin of my step-grandma) who to my surprise said that I needed to have emergency surgery the next day. Caught off guard, I refused the signing of any papers, particularly because they were in Cyrillic (the alphabet Macedonian is written in) and I didn't know what they said. I refused upwards of three times to sign before they got irritated of me throwing a fit, just wanting both parents to be there before making any big decisions.

 

It’s safe to say that I lacked the ability to sleep that night, laying in a cold bed alone, in a hospital where I could barely communicate with anyone, and they could barely communicate with me. I didn’t know what to expect or what would come next, so I started to make phone calls because I honestly wasn’t sure of how positive we were that surgery would be successful, if I had to have it there. I touched base with best friends, my sister, my family, anyone that I knew I wanted to hear the voices of. I did this until I slowly drifted into a painfully exhausted sleep.