A Saturday in a German ER

The phone rang. The head character of the day could not move. Literally. He was lying on the floor at his current workplace, aching with pains in his lower back and that to the point of tears. After having made the necessary moves to even reach the phone to call his boss to tell her about his situation of not being able to stay any longer at work, he got hold of me and after several minutes of tries, I got hold of the heroes of today: Saint Michael and the Portuguese Version of Super Mario. One of them with a car, the other with his passing card into the work building where today's central figure was lying on the basement floor where we were intended to pick him up.

Said and done, the male heros of the day helped carrying him to the car and we went to the ER at the local hospital. After having crossed the main gate entrance to the hospital grounds we were explicitly driving around to find the clear obvious sign for the Emergency Room Entrance. To our astonishment, there was not one single of them on the way, passing some curves and other signs, a cafeteria and so forth.

If a pregnant woman would come in to give birth, the baby would be out even before having reached the entrance doors!!! Unbelievable.

One of the male heroes of today and myself, after having parked the car with the head person of today waiting in there, hurried to the main entrance and reception to find out where exactly the entrance to emergency situations may be. Very rightly the accurate Lady there answered "Please go along this corridor here and then the stairs to the first floor. There is the reception for the emergency situations for "Kassenpatienten" - Insurance patients". On the FIRST FLOOR??? Whoever in this world would think of having a reception UPSTAIRS? More rightly for someone coming in with the ambulance they had one downstairs, too (!!!), so since the victim of today could not move on his own and Hero No 1 was very direct to make sure that the personnel got this information they offered to us to move the car directly to the ambulance entrance and for the "victim" to be put on a krankenbed, a hospital bed.

No matter what, we learned the lesson in case you should at some point be bleeding, one should phone a krankenwagen - ambulance - because if you would be taken there by car, you would most probably bleed to death before even FINDING the correct entrance...

Next station: in a short corridor at the ER. Nurses and doctors passed by. One came at some point to ask for the insurance card and then came back to return it. No thank you, no "it may take some time" or even a friendly comment. Nothing. We understood that we had arrived in a bad timing - it was the german lunch break time. Nurses and doctors eased their way into the little room which we understood to be their pause/break/private room. As each and every one of them passed by, nobody even bothered to say a little "hello" or gave a smile in order to exchange some in our sense "normal basics" of friendly communication.

The best came after having waited for around forty-five minutes and that was the ONLY human acquaintance of communication met after the insurance card had been returned to us and just before our doctor arrived:

A nurse approached us with a passing patient on a hospital bed, catching us having some Studentenfutter (Raisin and nuts) at the hour of around 13h30 since none of us had really had anything more than an apple to eat until then... "Was machen Sie???? ESSEN IST NICHT ERLAUBT IN DIE NOTAUFNAHME!!!!!!!... Nun,JETZT ist es ZU SPÄÄÄT..." (What are you doing??? EATING IS NOT ALLOWED HERE IN THE ER!!!... Well, NOW it is already TOO LATE...) Of course, all that was said was said with such an intention of degradation. How about approaching somebody with a more gentler tone? Is there an unwritten law in this world that one is not allowed to eat ANYTHING in an ER? Yes, we do understand if one is to have an operation then it is obviously different... Mamma Mia. There we were wondering wtf we were doing at a place where nobody says hello in more than an hour or even just giving us one little piece of information like "You will have to wait some time now..." Is this too much to expect? A nurse who obviously not was at all on our case and not even possessed even an inch of social skills - especially for an emergency room - approaching us in this way. If her aggravation had to do with that it was because we are foreigners we will never find out, however, it did come to our mind...

Soon after this, a young friendly orthopedic doctor came to us to make sure of what had happened and where in the back the pain was exactly. I was there as an extra interpreter just to make sure that there where no language barrier in the understanding even though the victim of the day understands good german just perfectly. She went to the X-rays with him in order to find out if it was something like the most serious cases like Bandscheibenvorfall (=herniated disc).

When he came back, he was a bit (or actually quite a bit) groggy from some true painkillers. I was informed that he had none of the things before mentioned as far as she could see, however, she prescribed to go to the house doctor again on Monday for further treatment and deciding on what has to be done next, giving us enough painkillers to last the weekend.

One of the things that has to be credited is that we only needed two hours there, as a whole. This is impressive since in an emergency room you never really know how long it may take...

In order to end this coverage on a smiling note there is something yet to be told. While with the doctors and nurses in the X-ray room prepared for it, one of the nurses smiled and showed the head person of the day a metal cover in the resemblance of two ice cream spoons.

As he did not understand what the nurse had ment with what he should do with them, she ultimately took action herself, placing them around the most sacred place of a man as protection during the screening. Fabulous. Our visit of the day could not have ended on a more smiley and groggy note... Let us hope there will not be more of these!