The place we stayed in Vienna happened to be within easy walking distance of Belvedere Palace so we spent the evening walking the beautiful grounds.
The next morning we went to the ultra-cool Vienna train station. It is a model of efficiency and modern architecture. Vienna was recently named the most "liveable" city in the world (beating out Singapore) based on many things including its public transportation system.
We used Uber to travel to our Airbnb and then later Merritt discovered there was a subway stop nearby and rode it into downtown Frankfurt where he took some photos of some of the cool architecture the city has to offer.
The is still an "old city" part of Frankfurt which we suspect must have been restored after the war which has some interesting architectural details in their own right.
On Sunday we went took an Uber to church and attended the International English speaking congregation in Frankfurt. It was nice to sing the hymns and listen to church in our native language. While we were there we met many senior couples who serve in the area office in Frankfurt (the office building is on the same grounds as the church). The first couple we met were the Selvedges who are from Hyde Park Utah and had heard that a senior couple from Serbia might be visiting that day. Afterward, they were nice enough to invite us over for lunch and we had a good visit.
Another senior missionary picked us up (Elder Loftus) the next morning and drove us to Bad Nauheim which is about 30 minutes north of Frankfurt. We arrived on Monday, Sep 9th expecting to have surgery on the following Wednesday. Unfortunately, the surgery was delayed for a full week so we had some extra time to see the sights in this small town. For a small town, it really has some interesting history. For starters, while Elvis Pressley served in the military he was based in nearby Friedburg. During that time his family and friends rented out a whole floor of a hotel in Bad Nauheim which is shown below. There is a memorial to Elvis on the corner and since it was recently his birthday several people had come to leave flowers. Elvis released an album around that time and used photos taken of him in Bad Nauheim on the cover.
Bad Nauheim has been a place for healing for hundreds of years with people traveling to spend time here to bathe in the waters and breath the healthy air. Because of this many hospitals have been built here. So many in fact that there are "Klinik Route" signs that will take you past most of the important hospitals one of which is the Kerckhoff Heart and Lung Klinik where Merritt was to get his surgery. There is a very large park near the center of town. Our Airbnb was on one side and the hospital was on the other side. Below are some photos of the park and buildings nearby.
The park has a fairly large lake which was very beautiful with the cool September weather.
One of the lovely European churches in Bad Nauheim.
This is the main church in town with its stone steeple.
This is a smaller church that we walked by often on the way to our Airbnb.
This is the Sprudelhoff which housed many different bathhouses. They are empty now and used for public events such as craft fairs etc.
In Bad Nauheim, the water had a 4% salt content. To be able to extract the salt from the water more efficiently they built these very large evaporation towers where the water was pumped to the top then trickled downward over mats made of willow branches (or something similar) which resulted in a lot of evaporation. The water was then pumped through 3 more similar towers which resulted in raising the salt content in the water to 15%. The water was then evaporated using heat and the salt left behind was then collected bagged and sold.
Here is one of the evaporation towers.
The pumping of the water was facilitated using this water wheel powered by a stream that runs through the town.
About 100 yards away is another evaporation tower. There are four in total.
It was found that breathing the humid salty air near the towers was good for your health. They have several cabanas and lawn chair near this tower so people can enjoy the fresh air. It is also noticeably cooler near these towers due to the evaporation of the water taking the heat out of the air. The last of these towers is built so it has a hollow area in the center where you can go. It is called the "inhalatoriam" and has an even higher humidity and salt content. It smells like you are on the sea coast when you are near these towers.
One day Merritt took a walk and wound up at a cafe that overlooks the town. It is not very big but due to the concentration of health workers has an above-average economy with many nice homes and business in town.
We paid a visit to the city library (Heather loves libraries as much as Merritt loves public transportation). Outside they had these cute mosaics that kids could climb on.
Heather had brought our Zendoodle pens and books with us on our mission so that when we had some "downtime" we could do some Zendoodling. Well, we finally got some "downtime" and enjoyed expressing our creativity with some fancy doodling.
The next week finally rolled around and Merritt got checked into the hospital on Tuesday, Sep 17. They did several tests to make sure his body was ready for surgery the next day, including getting new CT scans.
Merritt had his surgery the next morning. The surgery lasted about one hour and afterward he was put into the recovery room. The hospital was supposed to call Heather who was waiting at home but after she didn't hear anything by 3:00 pm she decided to walk over and see how things were going. When she got to the room Merritt still wasn't there and the nurse told her to it would be about an hour as he was still in recovery. When they brought Merritt up she was waiting there and took this photo.
After 3 days everything looked good and they took the chest tube out. Merritt's surgery was dual-port VATS (video assisted thoracic surgery), the "port" where the chest tube is located was used for the video camera while the larger slit above was used for manipulating tools to complete the surgery on the lung.
After the tube was removed Merritt felt quite a bit better, he stayed in the hospital two more days and was released on Sunday, September 22nd.
One week later he went back and had the stitches removed and had a chance to talk to the doctor about the surgery.
The doctor confirmed that as they had seen in the CT scan there was a large hematoma on the lung. They also found that the bleeding from this site had caused the lung to bond with the rib cage in this location with an area about the size of a large postage stamp. This condition was like a walking time bomb just waiting for some physical exertion to cause it from detaching which could happen when he was stretching his ribcage and making sudden motions (using a pull-down lat machine at the gym or hitting a tennis serve). Once it detached it would cause a tear in the lung resulting in a collapsed lung. The doctor dissected the lung from the rib cage and noted that there was quite a bit of scar tissue in this area which is consistent with this being the leakage site for the prior pneumothorax events. The doctor then used a linear cutting tool to remove the damaged part of the lung and then staple the lung shut using many tiny titanium staples. They also took a small section off the top of the lung where the CT scan showed some scars. Then to top things off they performed mechanical pleurodesis where they damage the lining of the rib cage wall causing it to bleed then the inflated lung "bonds" to the lung. This allows the rib cage to act as a giant patch over the lung so it can not leak in the future. The pleurodesis was limited to the top half of the lung.
This same weekend the YSA's in our mission held their fall conference at Plitvice Lakes. We had planned quite a bit of the conference and initially thought we could get Merritt's surgery completed and then recover enough to be able to participate. Obviously, that was very optimistic planning. We did receive this photo from the Serbian contigent as they drove to Zagreb. We still wanted to be involved with the event so we asked them to send more photos and we made one last YSA slide show. Click here to see.
One benefit of the delay in the surgery was that we were able to attend the open house of the Frankfurt Temple. We attended with many of the senior couples from the Frankfurt area. Afterward, we got this photo in the visitor's center. It was a great way to cap off our mission. We will be officially released on October 4th.
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