And even more from Mazatlan

Well, I’m finally over the illness. I have been fighting with Montezuma’s revenge for 6 days. Nasty. It relaxed yesterday morning and I was able to eat a little. When the vegi man came by in his truck I grabbed a bunch of fresh off the tree bananas and ravished them. Soooo hungry. And I wanted to eat something that is recommended for the revenge. Also, I had a honey and peanut butter samich. Honey is well know as an anti-bacterial. Going back thousands of years (you should know that).

Yesterday was the first day since last Wednesday that I felt well enough to ride my bike so I took the opportunity to enjoy the beach. The two miles into a fresh breeze was soothing. A little hard on me, but I felt better after the ride.

When I got to the turn around I saw, again, all those yellow and black dogs hanging around. I did find out that in Mexico, very few own dogs or cats. They are here, but as feral. The thing that’s impressive is that these feral dogs just hang out around humans…they aren’t running from them. I’ve not seen one of these dogs bark, snap or even look afraid like most dogs do in the states. They are non-territorial here. They don’t come if you entreat them but they accept a scratch if they are near or wander by your outstretched hand. I’ve seen them all over Mexico, not just here.

One of them, just hangin’:

‘Place holder for picture of Mexican dog’

Here’s what I’ve learned. Mexicans do not mistreat these animals. They are allowed to live their lives in peace. Peaceful treatment leads to peaceful animals. They do have to scavenge for food, but many here will drop them something now and again. I never saw a fat dog, but never skin and bones either. Sometimes I saw them actively playing with children on the beach. But when the people would leave, the dogs would stay.

I’m impressed with that. What nice people. And it implies that we in the states are doing it soooo wrong.

Today I went into town to attend to my appointment with a skin doctor. First I stopped at a X-ray place to have my hand X-rayed since it’s been giving me trouble ever since May ’05 when I hammered it with a 5 pound hammer. I thought I had an axial break…those take a long time to heal. The cost was $20 bucks or so. I took the shots over to the skin doc and she says that the bones are fine. Nothing on the X-rays. So I’m confused and she gives me a reference to a hand doc. See it’s been 10 months and it still gets puffy and I can’t use it to grip. Sometimes it hurts to bend or make a fist.

After discussing the hand, we start the surgery for the cysts and skin tags I want removed. Along with a mole or two that have gotten to big over the years. She does put on gloves this time but no mask. She jabs me with a needle for the topical and uses her rusty…I mean ‘trusty’ scalpel to whack out the cyst I had. Then she moves to the other one on my chest and I get a few more jabs of the needle. Hmm, when she starts cutting? That hurts. So I complain a little and she jabs me more with the topical. Cuts again, still hurts. This happened 5 times before she finally had enough of the topical anesthesia injected. But really, not that bad. Did feel like a rusty scalpel though, before the topical started working. I found out later that there is a huge illegal drug copying syndicate in Mexico that bottles water in drug bottles that look ligit. Even doctors buy them. I think that was what she had, or a watered down version of the drug.

So now I have my thingys done and get on back to the RV. Five, six days from now I can get the stitches removed. I’m happy I had it done down here because I saved around $700 (ignoring the cost to get here, but I would have come anyway) and it needed to be done. Always felt she knew what she was doing. We had trouble communicating once in a while but I always got what she was telling me eventually. I hadn’t thought about the stitches before so I might be here in Mazatlan for a little longer then I thought. Maybe a week more. Then I’d like to head south to Teacapan’.