So I fail at posting on here, hopefully I'll get better as time goes on and I get more information :)
Here is an update of what has been happening with the Peace Corps since I made the first post :) God has been doing some amazing things, so hopefully I'll be able to express those accurately, if my human words fail, just know that God is awesome and has been blessing me through this entire process and I can't wait to see what he continues to do through it!!!!!!
About a week after the last post I received my medical packet in the mail. There were a ton of forms that needed to be filled out by a dentist, eye doctor, and physician. To look at all of them, it was overwhelming, so I decided to tackle them one appointment at a time. I decided to tackle the dentist first because it can take a long time to get in there.
This is one point where God was super awesome!!!!!! I was reading the packet and it said there are some dentists who have agreed to provide the dental appointment for free to people volunteering to go into the Peace Corps. I looked them up online and it just so happened that their was a dentist in Midland that would do this, and at the time I was working at SVSU, so it would be a 15 minute drive to go to the office. So I decided to give them a call. I called on a Thursday and they gave me an appointment the next Tuesday. Definitely a better timeframe than what I was expecting!!!! So I went there for my appointment and they did the panoramic, 4 bitewings, and filled out the paperwork for free, and I was in the office for less than 45 minutes total. They were so efficient and so nice, I walked out of the office blessed by how kind they were and what they did for me. I'm not sure exactly how much it would have been, but they told me that each bitewing is normally $50, so that part alone would have been $200 let alone the panoramic x-ray and the exam to fill out the paper work. God was so awesome to provide Dr. Mead and his office and their extreme generosity!!!!!!
I decided to tackle the eye appointment next, putting off the medical exam that was 6+ pages. One day I decided to check out a bunch of eye places as I hadn't had a new pair of glasses for 9ish years and now needed to get two pairs. I went to 5 places in one day and got price estimates from each place. At one place, it was going to be around $450 for two pairs, at another place it was going to be $350-$500 for two pairs, etc... I was getting pretty disappointed and was wondering what I was going to do because I couldn't afford to pay that much at the time. Then I was driving and saw this place that said glasses and contacts, so I decide to get an estimate from them. I went in and they gave me an estimate of $215 for two pairs. This was about half of what the other places were going to charge me and my dad's insurance would cover about half of it. I talked it over with my dad that night and we decided that I should go with America's Best. I made the appointment on a Monday and they got me in on Thursday. It was so amazing to be gotten in so quickly once again. The tricky part was that while I was getting estimates from all of these places I tried glasses on at each place. I never noticed this before, but apparently my eyes are really close to my nose because when I put adult glasses on my face, my eyes are in the corner and the glasses stick about an inch off each side of my face. So I went in to the appointment dreading to have to choose two pairs of glasses. They were really nice though and we ended up finding two pairs of kids glasses that looked alright, one of them happened to be High School Musical though... My only fear was that my students would have the same glasses as me, which would either make me cool in their eyes, or they would wonder why their teacher shops in the kids section... Anyways I ordered them on a Thursday with the promise of 7-10 business days, knowing that the last planned day for me to be in Saginaw was the following Friday, 6 business days away. Don't worry, God is awesome and at approximately 3:00 on my last day of working at SVSU my phone rang and it was America's best saying my glasses were in, I immediately went and picked them up and have been wearing them ever since. I will admit, I'm still not used to seeing myself in them, I think the combination of new haircut and new glasses for the first time in 8 years is a little too much, and this is after having them for over two weeks.
The final appointment was the one that I was dreading the most, the physical exam. Lets just say that I wasn't a big fan of the idea of them checking every part of my body twice, plus getting shots and bloodwork and who knows what else. I finally decided that I really just needed to get it done before too much time had passed and student teaching started. My mom was really nice and made me an appointment at the clinic that she works at for the day before I started going into meetings for student teaching. The day of the appointment came and I went in and lets just say an hour and a half later I came out with completed paperwork, 3 shots, a TB test, and two holes where they tried to draw blood before they realized they didn't have the right vials and I needed to go to the hospital to get my blood drawn. I left the clinic and went straight to the hospital and got my bloodwork done so I wouldn't have to worry about anything except getting the test results back from everything. By Friday of that week, all of the test results were in and I was able to pick them up and make one final check that my name and social security number was on every single page I was submitting and that all of the boxes were checked and lines were filled out. When I was interviewed, they said the main reason that people's departure is delayed is because their medical paperwork has to be sent back or more has to be requested several times because they didn't check it thoroughly before sending it in. I'm really hoping that I got everything checked over and that it will go through the first time.
I sent it in this week, and they said it takes up to a month to process everything, so we'll see how long it really takes. Everytime they have given me a date for something so far they have met it in about half the time... I'll try to take time to write another post soon updating my student teaching and how that is going, as well as what I find out from the Peace Corps after they receive my paperwork :)
Sorry this is so long, a lot has happened in the almost two months since I last posted, hopefully I'll get more consistent so their will be more shorter posts and less books disguised as blog entried :)
