Hospital

This week the teaching fellows were given another two days off of school (Tuesday and Thursday) to finally obtain chest x-rays and tuberculosis tests. A clean bill of health is needed to acquire a Greek residence permit.

One of the teachers I work with emailed me and said, "Have fun on your field trip, Claire," when I told her I wouldn't be coming to class Tuesday.

And a field trip it was! The hospital, near the city center, has a beautiful exterior. 

The inside wasn't so nice, but I guess most hospitals aren't exactly places you want to hang out in.

Strange Woman who called herself a Surgeon

The paint on the off-white walls was peeling, you could see the concrete through some of the beige linoleum floor, fluorescent lights flickered. I sat in a tacky orange chair, in a row like those you find in airports, and attempted to get some reading done. 

In my grade ten class, we're reading "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. In the first chapter we meet Ashima, an Indian woman who has moved with her husband (by arranged marriage) to Cambridge, Mass., where he will pursue his career as a Professor. Ashima is pregnant. When she is rushed to the hospital to give birth, Lahiri describes Ashima's view of hospitals. "Ashima thinks it's strange that her child will be born in a place most people enter either to suffer or to die," (4).

Not that I was about to give birth this week, but looking around the νοσοκομείο, (Noso-comeo- this explains why infections you get from the hospital are called "nosocomial infections,") I too felt how death pervades hospitals. Besides the teaching fellows, everyone in the hospital was so old.  I saw quite a few people, rolled by on gurneys, with tubes attached to clear bags of liquid sticking into various parts of their bodies. They looked like they weren't going to be around for much longer. We don't see this in our everyday, which makes it all the more sad when we do.

People kept giving us Americans funny looks because we were all so young and vibrant and LOUD. Once again, we were out of place. Ashima also says, of being a foreigner, that it's a little like being pregnant: "For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continous feeling out of sorts." (49). Word. I'm two months in to life in Greece, and although I'm getting to know my way around, I feel totally pregnant.... I mean, foreign. And this feeling can really weigh down on me, at times. I'm trying to learn the language, but right now I'm still at the point where I can't make out anything anyone says to me but for a single word here and there. I always end up stammering, "Sig noh mee, Milate Agglika?" (Excuse me, do you speak English). And I feel defeated whenever I do. 

Because my last name comes first alphabetically in the teaching fellows group, I was first up for the chest x-ray. It went like this:

A sexy blonde nurse in knee high black boots calls out my name and brings me into a large room, shutting the dungeon-like blue door behind her."Take off your clothes," she barks at me. I'm confused - this is an x-ray, which penetrates through my skin, so shouldn't it penetrate through cotton as well? Also, I don't know which clothes she's talking about. She motions to my shirt, so I unbutton my sweater and lift my T-shirt over my head. I ask if I should also take off my bra. 

Yup.

I'm not particularly modest about my body - I go to the pool two or three times a week and shower completely naked with a bunch of old Greek women. But this was unexpected. No gown, no nothing. Now, completely topless, I have to walk a good fifteen feet across the room over to a strange silver machine. Luckily at this point the only other person in the room is the female nurse. Two of the other female fellows had three male doctors hangin out just lookin at charts while they had to strut their stuff on over to the x-ray. 

Doctor in Greek is γιατρός.

There was no heavy, lead coat to protect the body from the x-ray's harmful radiation. Just me and the cold metal machine. I was told to press my body into it and wait. It made a strange, spaceshippy noise, and then the nurse told me I was done. I walked back across the room and clothed.

Then we made our way over to the TB test:

A young male nurse asks me a bunch of questions and tells me to sit on the bench. A very fat old doctor comes in. They get the needle but realize there isn't enough liquid, so the older doctor goes to get more liquid while the young nurse interrogates me about what I'm doing in Greece while rubbing alcohol all over my forearm. The fat doctor returns, needle in hand. I look away.

The second time I got Gardisil (HPV vaccine, incredibly painful shot), I complained to the nurse about how it was going to hurt. She told me the best thing to do to beat the pain was to take a really deep breath and just breath it out hard and steady as the needle goes in so that your muscles dont tense up. I've been using this trick for all vaccinations since. Not in Greece, though. They tell you to take shallow breaths - to pant, essentially. 

So the needle goes in, and it's fine, like a little pinch.......... until ten seconds later, when the needle's still in, and the nurse is wiggling the needle around in my arm. I'm not sure why he did this. It was pretty freakin unpleasant. By fifteen seconds I was practically yelling at him to take it out.

However, apparently this experience was a vast improvement from two years ago, when Whitney (one of the fellows) was studying abroad here. When she came to get her TB test, the doctor was, yes, smoking, as he administered the shot.

Speaking of smoking, when we went to a second set of doctors to have our chest x-rays approved, the doctors asked me if I smoked. I replied no, believing this was a standard question. But then I discovered that none of the other fellows had been asked if they smoked. I asked the doctor if my x-ray looks as if I smoked, and he nodded. When I persisted that I didn't smoke, (those of you who know me, which is probably anyone reading this blog, know that I don't smoke), he smiled and kinda laughed. "You're young," he said. "There's plenty of time to quit."

Fun facts:
The most important figure in Ancient Greek medicine, Hippocrates (the "Father of Medicine") did a lot of important work regarding the thoracic cavity. He was the first documented chest surgeon, and his findings are still valid. He also brought the categorization of illness into acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic about. He developed the Hippocratic Oath for physicians, which is still in use today, an oath taken by doctors who swear to practice medicine ethically.
NOTE* Hippocrates is not the same as

hyp·o·crite,  

a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religiousbeliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actuallypossess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

This word comes from the ancient Greek hypokrites  "stage actor, pretender, dissembler."

We also have the day off tomorrow and next Monday for elections, so I'm headed to Budapest tomorrow morning. Reports to come soon.