29
June
2006
Timi’s sick with fever - the kindergarten’s token snotty brat passed a virus to her. I could strangle a certain mommy that brought said snotty brat with 39,0 into the community, saying that “nah, she’s not infectious” and leaving the germ spitter with eleven kids for eight hours. Way to go, Einstein.
I started running this week. The legs hurt like hell but tasting the endorphine rush that comes after the effort is well worth it.
Mia went on vacation for a month so I’m left with with both mine and her patients. I don’t complain though - lots of true psychotics and savage murderers are coming my way to be examined / profiled/ expertised and my inner forensic psychologist is somersaulting with joy. Since Monday I had started taking cases from Sancta Sanctorum, the closed part of the ward, where dracones sunt.
And there they were, all dying to meet me:
The “former emissary of Romania at the United Nations”, persecuted by the government because of what he knows, influencing his thoughts and poisoning him with active zinc (isn’t that the main ingredient in acne creams?) in the eye, which poisoning he only escaped by having a doc injecting a tumor in said eye. “The tumor protects me now”, whispered he;
A slim teenager who didn’t trust me one bit, because she couldn’t read my thoughts like she was able to do with everybody else;
A sad lady who felt at fault for everything and less worthy than a dust bunny (so said the voices, which knew what they were saying, for the voices must be obeyed). She had to be longly and painfully convinced to swallow her medication;
and a cleaning lady who didn’t want to let me in when I came there in the morning, because I wasn’t wearing a white uniform and I had pigtails. The look on her face when a nurse jumped her sorry ass for not believing me when I said who I was could easily be chosen as the flagship of Kodak moments.
Posted: Timi, hospital
22
June
2006
Talking to an epileptic patient today, he being one meter from me:
“So what medicine do you have prescribed for your condition?”
“Epilepsy”
(smiling) “Sir, that’s the name of your illness .. I was asking for the medicine’s name”
“Yeah, epilepsy.”
“Listen, I’m fairly sure there’s no medicine named like that. May I see the pills’foil?”
He pulls out the foil.
“See? That’s not Epilepsy, it’s Finlepsin.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you the whole time.”
To my defense, the two sound incredibly alike and the guy had false teeth . But still, I might have scored some idiot points in a certain patient’s mind. And in yours too now, gentle readers.
Posted: hospital
20
June
2006
Today our toilet (located conveniently in my cabinet) was out of order. The closest usable restroom was in the cabinet of a neurologist, nicknamed “the Locust” and renowned for her bad reaction at people, other than patients or superiors, entering her realm.
This wasn’t much of a problem until noon, when I really needed to go - ahem- check my makeup. But where? I couldn’t leave my cabinet for too long, since hordes of patients were on the hall waiting, so the loos situated further were out of the question. The only remaining were the Locust’s and our patients’ toilet. Which was out of the question because .. eww.
I went in front of the ambulatoriu and waited for a while, enjoying the warm day and looking as innocent and carefree as possible. And in less than five minutes, the Locust comes out too shouting to the maintenance guys to find her a plumber to fix her sink. They tell her where she can find him (she isn’t too loved by them either) and she goes on search for the guy. Immediately after her comes out her male nurse, who goes to his maintenance pals to smoke a cigarette. All’s clear, she has no patients left.
Figuring out this is a now-or-never type situation, I enter her cabinet (which is OPEN, people!) enter restroom and come out in less than a minute. I’m back to my cabinet before her nurse’s cigarette is half smoked.
Hello, my name is Andrea and I’m a pee terrorist.
Posted: hospital
15
June
2006
The newest winner in the “You think your life sucks? Try mine” category - Gipsy woman, 13 kids, all over 18 years old - 1 severely handicapped, 1 in jail for murder, 10 unemployed and one working. Husband dead, sole income is the oligophrenic kid’s handicap money.
Folowing Brian Molko’s appearence at my hospital, I spotted today Orlando Bloom - in his teen years, pushing an old lady’s wheelchair. Cute as a button. I should have brought the camera, dammit.
As for the pup, he was brought into my cabinet by Dana A - apparently she followed a lady into our yard. We gave her food, water and she slept for a while on my shoe, rendering me incapable to move because I didn’t want to wake her. We tried to find her a home but nobody wanted her because she was female ( Nobody’s willingly spaying/neutering their pets over here because that’s considered cruel. However the resulting pups / kittens are burried alive or sent to sail on the nearest river without any remorse. Drives me bonkers.) In the end, while I was away, Dana put her out the gate of the hospital. I searched for her when I went home but I saw no black furred, white pawed little creature.
Tomorrow is my better half (otherwise known as Robi)’s birthday. Any ideas for gifts?
Posted: hospital, chestii
9
June
2006
Starting this week I have a new responsability - I examine the army recruits that were found suspect of some mental disturbance. You see, army service is and was mandatory in Romania - and will be, but only until the end of the year when we join the EU and it becomes optional.
The Romanian Army service, in its actual state, is a tragicomical thing. They don’t have enough money to equip the recruits well, the rations could be sometimes be mistaken for dog food (stray dog, not Paris’s chihuahua) and psychotic sargeants run rampant. Suicides due to the harshness of recruit life are fairly common (one of my highschool classmates ended his life this way) and tales of severe beating,toilet cleaning with the toothbrush and incarceration in standing position for days aren’t even met with a raised eyebrow. Naturally, everybody tries to escape recruitment.
This being Romania, if you know the right persons, have enough money or a relative in the countryside that provides you with calves, pigs and fat geese, avoiding the service is easy. You just pay a visit, slip an envelope or drive a mooing pick-up to a certain adress. The trouble begins when you’re not provided with any of the above ways of escaping and you still don’t feel like joining the forces - in which case you have to either leave the country or fake an ilness. This, my friends, is where I come in.
I didn’t have a lot of new patients from them - maybe 5-6 the whole week. They ranged from the tatooed ghetto type to the mellow moderately retarded. Today’s guy wasn’t any of the above - he was instead Placebo’s lead singer . No, really. Somewhere in a village in the Carpathian Mountains, while hunting for bald groundhogs, Brian Molko’s dad had a brief affair with one of the local beauties. That, or we have a cloning facility nearby. As for the appearance - Girlishly styled, jet black hair? Check. Blue-black nail polish, chipped on the edges? Check. Melodious, androgin-sounding voice? Check, check, check.
He was sane - well, as sane as Brian Molko could find it fashionable to be. What made me chuckle was that even THE ANGST was there. Fangirls, you may start your hunting now.
Posted: hospital
7
June
2006
Yesterday the only people in the Ambulatoriu were me and Dana A- Adina called in sick and Dana B is on vacation. The lack of patient chatter was almost eerie , and the grim windy weather just added to the general depressing tone of things.
Nowadays I’m rarely moved by patients’looks or stories. Adriana, she of the broken wings, was possibly the only exception for the last month. It’s a thing of survival in the end, the other options being giving in to mental disease or drinking, or both. Oh, and there is always dehumanisation - treating patients like objects, not really listening to what they say, trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible, after slapping a diagnose on their back. I’m close to that sometimes - with really badly smelling patients, on very busy days or when everybody from the bosses to the Handicap Comission are out to get me. But I’m not there yet, and I hope I won’t ever get to that point.
I had not one, not two but three patients that made me cringe and thank God for favouring me and my household with generally good health . One was a a small teen that used her left hand for pointing on the Raven test, her right hand tucked under her blouse. “Left-handed and a bit shy” I thought, smiling at her determination to get as many pages solutioned correctly as possible. Her mom came in when she finished the test and demanded her to take out the hand and show it to me, although I didn’t ask to. It wasn’t a hand anymore - it was some sort of a claw, fingers fused together with less falanges than there should have been. A surgery in a Cluj Napoca clinic that went horribly wrong. Moderate mental retard from the general anesthetic, same surgery.
Second was a 25 years old from the mountains, with Little’s disease . The boy was curved, his whole spine arched into a question mark. He walked with a stick. His mom showed clear signs of depression - her husband was unemployed and generally useless around the house, she was sick and unemployed. I wanted to pay a cab for her to go to the Handicap Comission, though she didn’t need it in the end . Looked at them when they left - the frail mom helping the even more frail boy.
The third? A severely depressed gipsy woman who’s 8 years old died of cancer. She cried a good part of the examination. I think I had something in my eye at one point, when she showed me the picture of her boy in the coffin. Or maybe I’m alergic to something, dunno.
Posted: hospital
3
June
2006
In my last entry Dana B was miserable and alone. Well, what do you know, she’s getting married in two weeks.
Thursday evening she came to my appartment with her beau, looking grim and desperate, and asked me to lend her a million lei (about 30 bucks). I gave it to her, without asking what it was for - although from her face you would suppose the reason was either a back-alley abortion or the hiring of an undertaker to get rid of some unlucky pedestrian’s body that Mircea smashed.
So Friday morning I go to work, expecting to see a hopeless nurse sobbing on her cold chair. No crying nurses found I - instead there were my two lasses, drinking their coffees, smoking like chimneys and jollyly cursing the non-desperate’s father. What happened? The beau didn’t go - it seems that the burden was too heavy for poor Mircea’s heart. Instead, he proposed in front of her parents, which she and them gladly accepted. The father casually told them not to expect any form of monetary aid for the shindig - hence they opted for a very small wedding with only a handful of guests.
She and Mircea came yesterday evening to show me their weddingrings (beautiful) and to tell me what they needed the money for (Mircea’s passport ). Since there’s no going back to Italy in the immediate future (or so they say now) they want to repay me soon. I told them to take their time.
Posted: hospital
