Breathing Space

A pal had to go to accident and emergency yesterday. He was having trouble breathing and he suspected he had something lodged in his windpipe. He asked me to go as a translator. Perhaps his difficulty in breathing had clouded his judgement!

He was seen by a doctor inside about 15 minutes of arrival. He was taken to a cubicle with a bed after that first consultation. There were a couple of routine tests, blood samples, blood pressure, temperature and whatever it is they do when they put electrodes on your chest, hands and legs to get one of those wiggly line graphs. A few minutes later and he got a chest X-ray and then he was shifted onto an observation ward. Somebody came to do the blood pressure and temperature stuff again. This time they were a bit worried about the oxygen levels in his blood so they fastened him up to oxygen administered through one of those clip in the nostril jobs. Then it all slowed to a crawl.

The patient wasn't. He thought they were taking ages and not doing much. Impatient rather than patient. I thought it seemed pretty good. Presumably someone was looking at the various tests and deciding what to do. We'd been there about four hours, a bit less maybe, when I had to go to get to work. Before I went, they told me that my chum would be moved to a room and that they would have a look for the obstruction the next morning. I got a WhatsApp this morning from him to say that they'd taken some food out of his windpipe today.

The lunctime TV news reported that eight out of ten Spaniards are very happy with the service they get from the Spanish health system. Their main complaint is that the waiting times are too long between GP and specialist at around a month. I'd go along with the 80%.

Pooh!

The health people send you a little packet through the post. Inside there's a sort of flat tube with some liquid in it with a cap that incorporates a stick. You collect a sample of your own faeces (I decided not to use the simpler, better word). You open the tube to reveal the stick and then you stick the stick into the faeces sample a few times before sticking the stick back into the tube and sealing it all up. That provides whoever it is who deals with these things a sample to check to see if you possibly have gut cancer.

Once you have your sample you take it to the collection point, in my case the local health centre, and leave it in the "assigned urn" between designated hours. The sample gets analysed and they send you a letter if it's an all clear or make an appointment to see you if it's not.

Now there are certain Spanish words or phrases that just won't stick (sic). For instance there's a phrase that is to do with changing the subject that uses the name of the river that flows through Valladolid, the Pisuerga. Try as I might I can never remember the name of that damned river. Certain words become fashionable for a while - I still remember farrago of lies being used over and over again in a story about Harold Wilson and Marcia Falkender. I'd never heard the word before and I haven't heard it since but, at the time, it was everywhere. At the moment a verb that is being used regularly to do with the Catalan politicians in prison is acatar which means to respect, observe, comply with or defer to. I must have looked acatar up at least ten times and so far I still haven't internalised the meaning. On a much simpler scale the word for a notice or a sign - the written or printed announcement sort of notice/sign - is not a simple translation in Spanish - there are three or four words that are used to describe specific sorts of signs and there is a similar sort of sounding Spanish word - noticia - which has nothing at all to do with notices which is dead easy to trot out mistakenly.

So I go to the health centre with my pooh stick and I see no designated urn. I wander around a while sort of waving the green tube thing in the hope that someone will point me in the right direction. Nobody does so I queue at the reception desk. There are only a couple of people in front of me but the bloke on the computer takes an age to process anything - he must have trained in a Spanish bank. I stand and wait. It's frustrating because the answer will take two to three seconds. I see two other people, Spaniards, with their green tubes and I tell them I'm waiting to ask where the urn is. Eventually it's my turn, I ask and the receptionist nods his head at a yellow plastic container that's tucked behind the reception desk. It has no notice/sign on it. The receptionist is brusque in the extreme with his nodding and I'm not happy. I can't remember exactly what I said but the gist of it was that if somebody had the gumption to put a notice on the stupid yellow box then three people would not be standing around wasting their and his time. Except of course that I couldn't remember the right word for a notice and the whole righteous indignation thing fell apart.