30
March
2006
We bought new kitchen furniture. One of my nurses casually mentioned that her cousins were moving to France for good and were selling all their furniture and I suddenly became interested. She told me they still had a bedroom and a kitchen set available and at the word “kitchen” a few switches went “on” in my head.
You see, we live in a 4-roomed appartment in the middle of a medium sized city. With our salaries we wouldn’t have been able to afford it without a huge mortgage and selling our first born (come to think of it maybe the second, too). Fortunately my parents bought a house not long before I graduated and told their freshly engaged daughter “The two of you should move here from Timisoara if you marry. We’ll give you the appartment!” We lived at that time in a 2-roomed ratcage so this was heavenly music to our ears. We had the wedding, sold the ratcage and moved. Turns out they ..erm.. forgot to mention my sister will be living with us too. “Only temporarily”they said.
Now, let’s be clear here. I love my sis to pieces (Hi, D!) and I’d give her a kidney and a lung if she needed them. But just imagine two newlyweds and an opinionated teenager, thrown together, with the teenager feeling her teritory was invaded and the young couple transitioning from sweet solitude to living with someone thay cannot control and cannot escape from .. and neither of parties knowing how long this situation will last. Let’s just say there was a lot less fooling around and a lot more fighting (although not between the opposite sexes) than you’d expect from your first two years of marriage.
Eventually things started to work out, after my parents started to build an extension to their house for li’l sis and living together turned into long periods of more-or-less getting along interrupted by short periods of cursing and hissing. We somehow managed to have a baby, which she’s in love with (and the feelings are mutual as far as I know) , she graduated from highschool and went to University in Bucharest. We meet a few times a year and now that the living-together factor is out, we are able to enjoy meeting each other and actually look forward to it. Thank God, as she seems more and more to grow into a person I like to be friends with. But I digress.
The furniture of our appartment was bought by my parents, some of it while they weren’t even thinking of having us , so it’s a mixture of the ’70s and the ’80s with a bit of the ’90s thrown in . The tiles in the bathrooms and kitchen are the same as when they bought the appartment in ‘91. The painting was changed once (in ‘95? ‘96?). We didn’t had the money to renovate all at once so we went with the Christine approach -a new furniture in this room ,a new painting in the same room a year after, not much logic involved.
Sooo.. kitchen furniture. Ours was a disaster, communist low quality at its finest (Americans, think Formica manufactured by drunk workers). Doorknobs were missing, doors were falling out, cupboard backs were separating from the rest of the cupboard walls and going on spiritual journeys to find their hidden wood-ness. Robi kept on repairing it, but we knew we needed a new one. We looked here and there but what we saw was either too pricy or too reminding of the looks or quality of what we had at home (much like the reason for the fidelity of the cheapskates, somebody suggests).
But the more Dana (the nurse ) was telling me about the one they were selling, the more I liked it. No using, wood, no ornaments, no glass involved. I asked for the price - 6 millions. (around 200$). That, my friends, is low even by Romanian standards.
*I’ll tell you the rest soon but the kid’s up so duty calls*
Posted: housewrecking
29
March
2006
So, yesterday saw me posting about the joys of working in healthcare here. Today let’s turn the table and talk about being a patient.
Theoretically healthcare is free in Ro, payed for by substracting a percentage of each working citizen’s salary. Practically most of the money doesn’t get where it should but dissapears misteriously into the black hole that is the State Healthcare Insurrance . The rest is used mainly to pay salaries (our hospital for example has too few docs, nurses, cleaning ladies and paramedical professionists but instead a huge birocratic apparatus, a few kitchens, cleaners, pharmacies, a small army of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, pig farm workers, drivers, informaticians and elevator operators. But no security - I presume they want us to taste the adrenaline. Heh.) Almost no renovation is made except for the case when financing comes from outer sources. Almost no new equipment is being purchased, except for the case of a mutually beneficial agreement between some big gun in the management and a firm, this leading usually to insanely inflated prices for the equipment and a sudden financial situation improvement for the aforementioned management member.
Bribing is implicit, occurs on all levels and is taylored for each member of the staff that you, as a patient, get in contact with. You give a chocolate to the cleaning lady to get a new nightgown, to get your sheets changed, to have your kid’s or your sick grandmother’s butt wiped. You give a coffee pack or a box of chocolates to the nurse so she’ll remember to give you the injection, have your admittance papers done in time or change your IV drip when it’s empty. The docs get usually money (in the proverbial envelope) or fancy liquor bottles for checking up on you, admitting you in the hospital, granting you sick leave days, delivering your baby, performing surgery on you or generally giving a damn. As a psychologist I’m offered money, chocolate, coffee, tobacco, cheese, eggs, milk, flower bouquets, flowers in pots and kitschy decorative objects. I refuse the envelope, but I don’t expect you to believe me . After all, I’m the exception, not the norm.
So as a patient you’re usually coming to the hospital from your family doc. You’re confused if you’re coming for the first time. You find some nurses and ask for information. Then a few phases will occurl:
phase a) Nurses ignore you while continuing their chatting/coffee drinking/ cigarette smoking
phase b) They notice after a while that you’re still there, give you the annoyed look (y’all romanians know what I’m talking about) and look at the papers
phase c version1) They tell you to go elsewhere even if you came to the right place (the hot potato technique or as it is known over here patient ping-pong)
phase c version 2)They tell you you came to the right place but you don’t have the right papers and need to go back to your family doc/ employer/etc and get them
phase c version 3) They yell at you for coming too early/too late to be consulted
phase c version 4) They tell you you’re at the right place, at the right time, with the right papers so WAIT.
phase d) after you finally get to version 4 of the previous phase, you usually spend at least an hour (if you’re lucky) waiting on the corridor in front of the doc’s room. While doing that you chat, socialize, discuss politics, economics and your illness with the other waiting patients if you feel like it. If not, you admire the variety of the cracks in the walls and read carefully the ads for medication displayed on the corridor. You walk a lot. You tend to feel sicker than when you got to the hospital.
phase e) you get to see the doc. This phase usually takes about 1/20 of the time needed for the other phases.
Posted: hospital
28
March
2006
In the comment to yesterday’s post, Romerican presumes I’m using cliches from Moartea domnului Lazarescu. Dude, I wish I was. Fact is, the film doesn’t exagerate too much. After all I work in an insanely overcrowded hospital (think wards where 2 people are put in one bed sometimes, without having any desire to be put so), I have more or less 4 times the recommended number of patients for clinical psychologists, I work in a small dark building with dangerously cracked walls, water dripping on the floor during rain in 3 different points and defect sanitary installations and I’m sometimes simmultaneously yelled at totally contradictory things by psychiatrists and the authorities. All this fun for 170$/month.
I’m not pitying myself though. I’m just drinking lots of coffee and preparing to leave as soon as I can afford to open a private practice.
Posted: hospital
27
March
2006
Monday is my smelliest day of the week. Why, you ask? Well, mostly because 90 % of my patients smell funky- and on Mondays I have LOTS of patients. It usually goes like this:
7:00 - I wake up, cuddle with Robi, go back to semi-sleep, trying to squeeze a morsel of Sunday into the dreaded uglyness I see starting.
7:05 - I wake up again, conscience winning over lazyness
7:15 - I’m somewhat dressed, bobbing between the putting on of the various pieces of clothing. I go to the bathroom.
7:30 - I emerge out of the bathroom, still in a zombie-ish state. I fix myself a quick breakfast while watching the news on our very own Romanian CNN, called RealitateaTV.
7:45 I realize I have 15 minutes to walk 2,5 km so I better get going.
8:15 I arrive at work( late, but so what), get a glimpse at the horde of patients waiting in the hall and decide I’m not ready to face them. I enter the nurses’ room. My nurses, God bless them, are waiting for me with a big mug of coffee. I catch on the latest news of their lovelife and hospital gossip.
8:35 Having extracted enough strength from the coffee mug, I put on the coat and storm out of the nurses’room, muttering a “which of you arrived first for psychological testing, please come with me” while entering my room.
Somewhere in the first half hour of testing my nostrils come alive and start frenetically moving, trying to identify the source of the sudden nausea that’s taking over me. The brain remembers quickly what’s happening and commands the nose to shut down and leave all the breathing to the mouth. During the next 5 hours, the nose sometimes forgets the command, this leading to the worsening of aforementioned nausea. At 12-ish the horde is usually gone so I get to disinfect hands, wash them with soap just to be sure and then get the heck out of the room to my nurses who, without even asking why I look pale and drained, fix me my second cup of coffee. I rejoin humanity.
You might think I’m exagerating. I wish I was. Fact is, most of my patients are a) poor b) living very far from a source of running water (think villages in the middle of mountains) c)alcoholic d)a combination of a), b) and c). So while I don’t like the funk, at least I understand why it happens. Bad thing is, knowledge was never a cure for nausea. Just ask the intelectual preggos.
Posted: hospital
25
March
2006
Back in the ’90s when I used to go to the disco, this guy wouldn’t have gotten the blink of an eye. Actually he might have scored with some Snap! loving chick. The fashions of those years still make me cringe.
There were three main groups which hated each other’s guts: the rockers, the rappers and the Depeche Mode fans (aka “Depesari” here in Ro). The rockers, to which I belonged, sported long hair, angry facial expressions, denim or leather jackets, black T-Shirts, lots of chains and the names of their favourite bands on their jeans, written with marker (or ballpen, but that wasn’t so cool). They listened to bands varying from Guns N’Roses, Metallica, Nirvana, Skid Row (on the softer side) to Sepultura and Cannibal Corpse (on the angrier side). They moshed, headbanged and drank like coyotes and tended to get wasted by midnight.
The rappers listened to Snap!, Vanilla Ice (oh yes, Vanilla Ice. He was BIG), MC Hammer and Dr.Alban. They wore extra-large pants with the crotch part dangling somewhere around their knees (like you could fool someone you had jewels that big), jackets 5 sizes over the fitting one, partially shaved eyebrows and flattop hair (if you wanted to be extra-cool, you shaved patterns in the laterals and back of it). And they danced mostly like the kid in the video.
As for the Depeche Mode fans? They were somewhere in the middle. Simple black or white t-shirts, sporting the image of the band or a rose . They listened to DM, The Cure and a various assortment of new-wave bands. Tended to keep a lower profile and were probably the ancestors of the goth of today. That’s all I know about them.
Posted: chestii
24
March
2006
……never ever ever try to wipe your kid’s behind while his/her hands are not fully occupied with something and/or the toilet paper isn’t within half a meter. The kid WILL reach there, trust me.
Posted: Timi
24
March
2006
Friday’s usually the quietest day at work, there are ocasions when I don’t get any patients until I go home. Not today. A woman with schizophrenia came to be examined, and one of the diagnostics on her handicap papers made me scratch my head. That little lady recently had surgery for clitoridian carcinoma extraction. Meaning she had an operated cancer tumor on her you-know-what. I never thought somebody could have a tumor THERE. I mean brests - oh well, the joys of womanhood. Cervixes. Lungs - for the smoker in you. Bowels - all those Es. But the li’l pink guy can also get it? I feel rather unsafe now.
In other news, the husband is entering a 3d graphic contest where he has to imagine and draw the court of a Frog King. We’re low on ideas about how to depict them. I’m thinking about knightly jousts in front of the King, Queen and the rest of the posse, Rob (the husband) is more into science fiction so he probably leans towards cyber frogs fighting with lightsabers while raging meteorites fly in the backgroung. The keyword is compromise so we might settle for knightly frogs riding meteorites. I’ll keep you updated.
Posted: hospital
