As if the challenges of language, traffic oddities, customs and currency weren't enough, I had to add adventures in medical care to my list of Traumatic Life Events.
Let me begin by saying that I am so happy to have military medical care, and that we've been blessed for the most part with excellent providers. Hiyevah, our little community is gradually transitioning to close down, and so for some issues we are sent "on the economy" to German doctors. I can't even describe how different it is! For example, I went to an endocrinologist who wanted to do a scan - so she grabbed her machine and did it! No referral to a lab, no separate appointment, no lab tech - just "Pleez ligh down now and be vehly still." Blood work? No problem - right in the office. These things I like.
And thennnn we have The Orthopedic. "Vee do ex-hlays now. You vill take off please your clozzinks and valk down zis hall mit me."
Oh, yeah.
No hospital gown, no changing booth, no sheet, no drape, just me and my panties and three x-ray technicians whose combined age does not come close to equalling mine, and who were probably (as I would have at their age) begging the Lord above not to ever let them disintegrate into looking like that cottage-cheese covered, basset-hound resembling old American lady who fought the gravity and the gravity won.
They rolled me over, they stood me up, they walked me back and forth across some sort of gait-measurer, as I pretended, like any good European, that they weren't seeing things that would frighten a grown man. (There's a good reason for candlelight and the fact that vision declines in one's 50s, or I wouldn't have gotten married.)
Humiliation 1 Me 0.
So today I went to the dermatologist on our army post, and the first thing his capable assistant did was give me the cutest little blue paper drape thingy to put on for my exam. I could have kissed her. I cannot tell you how close I came to PUTTING IT IN MY PURSE AND TAKING IT WITH ME when I left.
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