A bit of rigmarole and palaver

I recently visited the doctor. This wouldn’t normally provide the most scintillating of conversation topics; but then again, visiting a doctor in a place like Bishkek is far from a standard, run-of-the-mill hospital visit.

One doesn’t truly learn to appreciate living in lesser developed countries (am I starting to sound like an Orientalist yet?) until it comes time to deal with the typical and ever-present bureaucratic rigmarole of everyday living. In other words, the things most of us take for granted, such as healthcare. I’ve found that some of the starkest differences are to be found in three areas: hospitals, post offices and internet cafes. For me anyway, these have been the scenes of some of the most frustrating, enervating moments, though in retrospect I do laugh from to time. I suppose I can laugh as long as I survive.

Advances? What medical advances?

Hospital visits have been a constant feature of my excursions abroad over the past few years. Having blood drawn in Nigeria has to be considered an early highlight. Honestly, what was there to worry about, I’m sure the needles were perfectly clean. In retrospect, and this is really a non-story, but I can hardly recall why I was having blood drawn in the first place. I never got ill there, and my more memorable experience was the clichéd one straight out of every other Colin Thubron book: visiting a dentist who didn’t use anesthesia. Luckily for me, I was merely an observer whilst my poor friend had to go through the torture of having a cracked tooth repaired. At least it only cost her $2.

In most ways, Riga is a thoroughly modern, well-developed city, and its private clinics are extremely clean, efficient and well-run. But though the doctors all spoke passable English, their credentials and expertise were of a more dubious nature. Since my days in Spain, I’ve been suffering from a mysterious foot ailment, and the Latvian doctors sounded like quacks when it came time to recommending treatment. My favourite diagnosis came from a doctor who suspected my birthmark – measuring 1 x 3 inches on my lower leg – was causing nerve damage and thus the pain in the base of my big toe. Other remedies were equally as hopeless but I did get immense joy from visiting the underground bunker-like x-ray clinic on numerous occasions, which undoubtedly exposed me to the former Soviet Union’s highest quality radiation, not to mention rendering me infertile.

[Though saying all this, it was Spanish doctors who misdiagnosed the broken bone in my foot in the first place, so perhaps ‘Western’ standards of healthcare aren’t so good after all.]

I’m not finished yet: after my cracked rib experience, I decided to spend a lovely spring Saturday afternoon at a Latvian state hospital on the fringes of Riga. My friend Michael came along with me, ostensibly for his moral support and sang froid, since he didn’t speak enough Russian and/or Latvian to serve as an adequate translator for the barking, un-customer-service oriented Natashas who run these places. At times it felt like we were in a Stanley Kubrick film: the long, deserted, seemingly never-ending ghostly corridors with flickering red lights could have been straight out of The Shining. A pity about the lack of music. I was again exposed to yet more high-grade enriched uranium and plutonium, but at least this time I had more than just my hands to protect my important bits.

There’s surely a reason that hospitals have separate bins for waste. One would assume that some materials are more hazardous than others. But not here: one whopping container for everything – Coke cans, asshole gloves, syringes, containers of bile, blood-stained sheets, dismembered carcasses, human fingers, etc. Slightly disturbing to say the least.

Whilst I was waiting for my x-ray results in a small room, there was an old woman laying on a gurney a few feet away from me. I had assumed she was sleeping, but she didn’t appear to be breathing. She sat there for about an hour before the doctors came in and confirmed my fast-growing suspicions, pulling the sheet up and over her head, and wheeling her out. Michael, who had been ordered to wait for me in the waiting room, later told me that upon seeing her being wheeled out, a man who might have been her husband or a relative, broke down in tears. He tried to get closer to the woman, only for the morally insouciant doctors to forcibly restrain him, push him away and excoriate him for being so obtuse. Their message: it’s death old man, get over it! We don’t do compassion in Eastern Europe!

Yet again I digress. Back to the present day

As I was saying, I visited the doctor the other day. I’ve long had a propensity for ear infections, though otherwise the state of my immune system is okay. I suspected I had another one, for I was having some pain my left ear. Visiting the doctor is hardly ever fun, so immediately I thought of what a headache it might prove to be. (a proverbial headache for a real earache: a decent trade off?)

Kole, (of the snowball in Kristen’s back fame), visited the doctor a few weeks ago, accompanied by Nargiza from the school, who served as translator. He had a mysterious eye socket complaint. The doctors told him that the problem was caused by the wind getting into his eye. And the solution? To put a boiled egg on his eye for 15 minutes every night.

My hopes were not high

I must first state that the hospital was in pretty decent condition, albeit with poor lighting. Nargiza had clearly done this many times before, deftly navigating our way through the hospital as if she ran the place. I was treated like a VIP: people dived out of our way as we marauded up stairs, scurried down corridors, Nargiza all the while shouting ‘foreigner!’ at anyone who dared to block our path.

The doctor was a pleasant enough chap. He took one quick look in my ear, asked my permission to dig the chunk of wax out of it and with a deft touch swooped in and plucked it out (if only I’d had my camera with me, it was a beaut). Now he could properly examine my ear. After a 2 second examination, he declared that my ear was fine and the pain – which had since spread to my jaw area and had got very bad – was caused by arthritis or a structural problem in my jaw.

And the solution? To put a boiled egg on my ear/jaw for 15 minutes every night. This has to be the default remedy for any ailment that can’t be determined within 2-3 seconds. I wonder if they have a day at medical school devoted solely to conning gullible foreigners into thinking that a boiled egg is the cure for all of life’s ills. I bet they even have a lecture entitled the ‘Boiled Egg as a Treatment for Anything’.

When I questioned his judgment to Nargiza afterwards, she told me that he is a good doctor (he was elderly). She told me that ‘the old doctors, they are good, smart, traditional, the new ones are too young, not experienced, they don’t know what they are doing’. Medicine is a very rigid discipline in Kyrgyzstan.

Some brief words on internet malarkey

As for the internet, always an unpleasant experience: power outages, frozen/crashing computers, awful Russian pop blaring, gangs of teenagers playing World of Warcraft or Doom or Grand Theft Auto IX: Kill all Hookers (or whatever it is the kids are playing these days), sticky keyboards, men looking at porn, prying eyes or, as is ever so common in Bishkek, heat pumping out of the ducts and sweltering you to death. I had a very surreal moment the other day, one that may actually paint me in a slightly negative light, but what do I care? Most places - shops, cafes, internet – have security guards permanently on duty. But whether these guards actually deter crime or would be of any use in preventing an attack is debatable.

Just a couple nights ago, at around 1am, I’m sat at a terminal with a friend on one side and a security guard on the other. Despite having some 25-odd terminals, I believe we are the only 3 people in there. I’m busily ‘shopping’ on Ameritrade, buying and selling various distressed banking stocks, all the while the guard is playing Solitaire. Every so often, he disappears for a few minutes, only to come back reeking of booze and cigarettes. This gets progressively worse and worse as the night drags on. It’s a particularly important day for me in the market, and so I’m waiting for the closing bell, which is at 2am local time. But the stench has gone from unpleasant to unbearable and I’m starting to gag: moving to another computer is out of the question, though I don’t know why. As I attempt to put up with the malodorous aromas wafting in my direction, a bizarre thought pops into my head: here I am buying and selling shares at $10 a pop, and this guy is sneaking off to down a shot of vodka or swig a bottle of beer, spending what little money he earns for quick and instant gratification. And is he even making $10 a day, I ask myself? As I’m frittering away $10 here and $10 there with nary a thought of how much that is to some people, he’s bleary-eyed, rapidly clicking away on his mouse, hardly knowing whether he’s coming or going. There is a certain absurdity in this, and it makes me feel a bit guilty. Yet I don’t know what the message is or what I am trying to say: fill in your own judgment/analysis here.

To make matters even worse, I sneak a peak at his computer and the poor guy hasn’t the faintest idea how to play Solitaire. It’s tragic. If he weren’t so drunk and smelly, maybe, just maybe I’d attempt to explain.

An irony to mull over: the Russian word for brave or courageous is СМЕЛЫЙ. That’s pronounced ‘smyelly’. I couldn’t make this up.