Britain-Care (Part I)

It’s all about expectations.

If you fall running in Central Park you expect to go to an emergency room and get treated NOW.  And if it’s broken and you need surgery you want to get it done NOW, by a hand surgeon who has mended the fingers of Yo-Yo Ma.  And because it’s almost Christmas break you need to get the cast on and then off so you can make your flight and your trip and by the way I’m training for a half marathon so when can I run again?

Switch to London.  You’re running on the canal between Maida Vale and Notting Hill and you trip on uneven pavement.  You go to one hospital and get x-rays.  And then you wait.  And they transfer you to a new hospital.  But the tech systems are down so they can’t get the x-rays from the first hospital so you wait and get a second set of x-rays which is OK, because it’s better than the first.

Then they put a big cast all the way to your elbow because you have to see a specialist and he can’t see you until tomorrow.

And so tomorrow arrives but you don’t know whether to eat or not because you don’t know if you are getting surgery or not.  So you don’t eat and you meet in the morning with a 30-ish looking hand surgeon who goes by the name Mr. O’toole. 

So I ask him, sheepishly, “but you are a doctor.” 

“Yes, I went to university,” he replies.

“I realize that, but they call you Mister and your card says Mister, not Doctor, so you passed all the exams, right?”

He doesn’t understand the question.

The room is part office, part operating room.  He hasn’t heard of us or seen an x-ray, we could be coming there for an in-grown for all he knows.  Resting on his desk is a tall clear glass of yellow brown liquid (he claims it's tea) and we hand him our disc of x-rays and he says, “Oh yea, this needs surgery.”

He tells us a lot about what will go on in the “operating theatre” and you might want earphones because the drilling is loud and the pins in the finger, etc.

When Jill asks when she can run again the doctor says, “Well, unofficially, two weeks.  I mean, I am a runner too, but a doctor would say to wait a month.”

Umm???

Then the fun begins and he gives us a code, we then call the insurance company and they give us a code and then we call his secretary.  And he warns us, “It might ring for five or ten minutes, but she’ll pick up, eventually.  We're very busy.”

And she does and we give her our code and she tells us to come back in 3 hours for surgery.

Fingers crossed, at least the ones that aren’t broken.