I rode in the back of a police car! I´ll explain.
A group of us went out Friday night, and on one of our walks from place to place, we encountered a sculpture of a tree that was absolutely begging for a group picture. So we climbed all over it (this is not the part where the police show up) and gathered around for a few shots and then were on our merry way. Merry kind of. As one of my friends was jumping down from the thing, her ring caught on the sculpture...and you can imagine what happened to her finger. Amazing, how an emergency situation was a better test of Spanish than anything we´ve had in school so far...
The emergency response was really good. I flagged down some Spaniards nearby who called the emergency number and helped us talked to the (four cars of) police that arrived quickly, then waited around until they got her in an ambulance. Since they wouldn't let me ride in the ambulance with her, I got to ride in the back of a cop car for the first time in my life. (A side note on cop cars--the back seats are hard, hard plastic and really uncomfortable. You do not want to ride in one.) They took us to the nearest public hospital.
Lesson number one: real doctors do not work on the weekends in Spain. That is rest time, not surgery time. There are nurses, interns, care aids, on duty, but no doctors.
So at this first hospital they put a temporary fix on the finger while they called around to find (a) a hospital with a specialist and (b) a hospital with a specialist on duty. Also, about 10 extra people came in and out of the room to glance at this rare injury that my friend had. I translated back and forth, mostly cuss words. They also kept telling us that we should have been at the hospital near where Joanna lives, which was on the other side of the city, but that they didn´t know if there was a specialist there. Eventually, they found a hospital that could help us.
Lesson number two: find your own way to the hospital.
They handed me the paperwork work and said ¨ok, go to Hospital de la Paz.¨ Right, and where is that? How do I get there? They looked at me like I was an idiot. ¨Take a taxi.¨ And if she faints in the taxi? If she starts bleeding again? My lifeguard certification is expired, people, I don´t remember what to do in this situation!!
Finally, we took a taxi to the other Hospital (with no medical emergencies), where they were waiting for us and we had no problem getting in. I hung around, translating, calling parents, making sure everything was ok, until 6 when the metros opened and I could go home and rest a bit. They told me they´d have to wait until morning (and by morning, they meant before 3 PM--Spanish morning) to do any surgery (see lesson number one).
Lesson number three: hospital visits. Only two at a time and they mean it.
First, we had to procure our visitors cards, which have barcodes on them. The barcodes are for scanning at the entrance to the wards, where you pass through a turnstyle, very much like riding the metro except that it´s to visit your loved one in the hospital. It counts how many times the code has been scanned and there are guards. You have to scan the card again to get back out so that someone else can use the code to get in.
Lesson number four: When they say floor 1, keep in mind that there are six floor 1´s.
But, once you figure it out, there is a very easy system of colored arrows directing you to the correct ward, so that you can get to the correct floor. On our first try, Andy and I ended up in cardiology in a room full of old men. Wrong first floor.
All that said, the system is complicated but the care is pretty good (except for that whole doctors really not working on weekends thing), according to most of the people that I've talked to. And it´s free for everyone in Spain. There are private hospitals here, for people who want to pay for them, but the public hospitals do just fine.
And one more thing...the siesta still reigns. According to my friend, they observe the rest time in the afternoon better than they do 2 AM.
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