Dawn

Dawn

Thursday, June 27, 2013

After the Triumph of the Columbus museum yesterday morning, I met that other impostor, Disaster, in the evening. A lady friend rang to ask if I could take her to the Urxencias department of the hospital, as she was worried about a pain that had already lingered for a week. So I picked her up at 4 and set out on a 5-hour saga of tedium. Or, rather, I would've done if I hadn't thought to take a book, a Prospect magazine and an iPod Shuffle full of podcasts. Well, I'm almost an old hand now. I've been to the Urxencias before with my daughters, albeit usually in the middle of the night, when some rancid shellfish has taken painful possession of their guts.

The waiting room was virtually full, with around 40 people sitting around on hard chairs or in wheelchairs. At times, this fell to around 25, as people left to have one test or another. Most interesting was a family of 4, dressed in gypsy style and doing the slightly outlandish things gypsies are noted for. I was a tad worried about this as one of the things said about them is that the entire family comes to join the patient and then harangues and threatens the medical staff until a cure is effected. Or the patient dies and all hell breaks loose. Happily, this wasn't the case here. The only real distraction was provided by the succession of people who, on entering the toilets, naturally flicked a switch on the wall just outside, plunging us all into darkness. But, by the 20th time, this had long ceased to be amusing.

At 8 o'clock, someone came to say I was allowed to sit with the lady in question. Apparently some surgeon she knew had pulled a string or two. I found her in a bed in one of 2 wide corridors, down the sides of which were numbered Boxes (bays with curtains) into which the arrivals were taken and assessed. This was a little disconcerting as the only other use of Box in Spain I know is the cubicle where you jet-clean your car. Anyway, there were 30 to 40 of these bays and parallel to most of the was a patient in or on a bed, waiting for results. One, however, looked very dead, possibly accounting for the 2 people standing by her bed, filling in forms. And the wailing my friend had heard earlier.

The place was certainly busy but, ironically perhaps, there was no urgency. Virtually all the staff were in white, so it was hard to tell doctor from nurse from cleaner. The only clue was the stethoscopes worn by some. Frankly, it looked like organised chaos but this could be a very wrong impression. It was certainly impressive that the test results for everyone were available in real time, even if the taking of several tests meant you could be lying on your corridor bed - more accurately your gurney - for 5 hours or more. Or you could get get lucky and be out after only an hour or two. Which was the case with my daughters at 3am and 5am.

My tentative conclusion was that the Urxencias facility was being (ab)used by some people who weren't really very sick and that the staff were accepting of this. In other words, people were going to the hospital instead of to a GP. A doctor friend endorsed this observation this evening, telling me it was done to save all the time waiting, first, to see a doctor and, then, to see a specialist or hospital follow-up. When I asked whether the staff ever turned anyone away for presenting with a trivial complaint, she said No. Because the WHO had pronounced that an emergency is whatever a patient thinks is an emergency. (Rather as a work of art these days is whatever anyone considers to be art.) All that said, I can't help wondering whether the UK NHS would tolerate what they consider to be abuse. So, I will now send this to a lovely doctor friend of my younger daughter in the UK and see what she has to say.

Meanwhile, for those who want to review the work of the guy who really does believe Columbus was born in Pontevedra, click here.

Finally . . . I say that I had to face Disaster yesterday but it was nothing to compare with what happened to the latest of only 8 White-throated Needle-tails seen in the UK in the last 170 years. Whilst being watched by 40 enthralled 'twitchers' on the island of Harris in the Orkneys, it flew into the blades of a wind turbine. You may be the fastest bird in the world but this counts for nowt when you come up against one of these subsidised monsters.

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