OK so I know I’ve taken a little hiatus from writing lately, my apologies. My good friend Amy came to visit for a week so we went traveling through Italy, Germany, and Austria…and not to mention I’ve been sick for three weeks with an evil cold/cough that doesn’t seem to want to evacuate my body. So during one of my past hacking fits Frank decided that he couldn’t stand it any longer and that he’s bringing me to a doctor. I don’t have insurance here or anything, but Frank does, so we think maybe someone will sympathize and give us a break.
So we look up a doctor for general medicine online and find there is one just in town that has a consultation hour from 5-6 where you don’t need an appointment. We take the bus into town, walk up a few flights of stairs into this tiny little apartment with a private practice. We are greeted by the receptionist with a roll of the eyes and then she firmly says “no” as she peers over her glasses when she finds out I don’t have insurance; but the doctor comes out and starts asking what the problem is. Of course I have little idea of what is being said, so I just sit there trying to look like I need help. They tell us to go sit and wait and they will figure something out in a few minutes.
Cut to an hour and half later, where Frank and I are still sitting in the waiting room, seeing patient after patient walk in the door and be seen. We are just about to call it quits when the lovely secretary comes over to us and gestures to us that the doctor will see us now. So Frank and I walk into the doctor’s office and he starts feeling my lymph nodes and looking down my throat. Pretty standard I think. He doesn’t take my blood pressure, temperature, health history, or anything else which I found strange. He tells me to sit down on a chair and he comes over with what looks like a golden pen. He takes my hand and starts-no joke-STABBING the pen into my thumb, just on my cuticle…which by the way, if you’ve never experienced HURTS LIKE HELL. Then he stabs the other thumb and leaves a throbbing red indentation when he’s finished. Then he tells Frank to tell me to swallow. Uh what? Apparently it was supposed to help my throat.
Then it only gets worse. He proceeds to dig his fingers into my back, my stomach, the underside of my wrist to which I thought my vein was going to burst from the pressure…and then he moved to my ears. At first it felt like he was just doing a pressure point on my ear which wasn’t so bad, but then he started just wiggling my ears like crazy and then it felt like he was going to rip them off!! He told Frank to tell me to breathe, and asked if I could breathe easier. I thought, yeah, breathing doesn’t hurt anymore, but my f-ing cuticles and ears are throbbing with pain!!!
Then he said my sickness was not severe and that I should come back if it gets any worse. Whatever happened to listening to my lungs with a stethoscope?
Frank said it reminded him of the time his friend Jake was visiting him in Graz, Austria and needed to see a doctor. The doctor that time was very helpful, but had some weird practices. The first thing he did was put a plastic bowl over his head that was chained to the wall. The bowl had a bunch of red lights in the inside which basically made him sweat a lot. Frank peeked into the next room and there was a guy just staring at a red light with a fog machine blowing fog into his face. Let’s just say doctor visits here aren’t the same as back home.
