On Monday I went to the local hospital to speak to a nutritionist and to get a dressing changed, and one of the nurses thought I looked so rough that she marched me down to Urgencias (A&E), where they did a few tests, kept an eye on me in observation for a while, and then admitted me onto the cancer ward. I spent the next three nights there. Basically, I was just a bit feverish and a bit dehydrated, but at one point the doctor used the words insuficiencia renal, which obviously translates as renal insufficiency—something kidney-related, though I didn’t know quite what. It certainly rattled a Spanish friend when I repeated the phrase to him. I'm not surprised. I looked up the translation, and “kidney failure” sounded quite bad. Apparently, there are stages, though, and dictionaries can be a little binary at times. It was just that my kidneys were a bit overstretched because I was vomiting repeatedly after the radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which, of course, doesn’t help with staying hydrated. Still, it made me think about the people who currently have my back.
When we first moved here, I had some hare-brained scheme for making a living. We'd realised though, even before the glaring holes and the daftness of the scheme didn't seem so glaring or so daft, that we’d need time for it to start producing money. Fortunately, Maggie is a properly trained and qualified teacher, and she was able to find work in a private school - in fact where she found the job is why we ended up in Alicante province and later why we moved to near the Portuguese border and down to Cartagena all the while maintaining the house here in Culebrón. In the first few months her wages kept us afloat as we very quickly used up all the money we’d brought with us from the UK on buying houses, re-registering cars, eating and whatnot. I was incredibly lucky, and I’ll be forever grateful for a couple of circumstances that led to me working for a business here in Pinoso called RusticOriginal.
Like all immigrants needing work, I was at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. Fortunately, my first employers were both mean and generous at the same time. I’d said, and it was my only condition for working for them, that I needed a legal contract. It has always been my one and only stipulation when taking on any work in Spain. Without fail, the employers have twisted the contract situation to suit their ends, but I have never worked without a contract, and that first job was no exception. Sometimes, always, the conditions haven’t been what they should be; usually, the pay rate has been altered, and the terms and conditions—the convenio—have never been adhered to, but there has always been a contract across the six different employers I worked for in Spain.
The reason I was so insistent on contracts was to guarantee healthcare. I’ve never been young in Spain, and I’ve always been aware of the frailty of the flesh, even when I seemed reasonably fit. Pay your Social Security on that contract, and you’re covered. Actually, I was lucky too. Some judges decided, just before I reached pensionable age, that a working day was a working day. If your contract was for three hours and you worked three hours, then you’d worked a day. Before that, a day was, say, eight hours, so if you worked four hours per day, you needed to work two days to clock up one full day. Changing the calculation to days instead of hours made a massive difference—not to my healthcare but to my Spanish pension.
Always working with a contract gave me enough recorded working years to be entitled to a portion of a full Spanish pension. I also receive a UK pension for the years I worked there. My “old age” pension is a combination of the UK one and the Spanish one, but the fact that I am a Spanish pensioner gives me certain rights that have proved very handy over the years for all sorts of bureaucratic reasons—from registering my income with the banks to prove I’m not laundering money to buying a car on finance to getting the subsidised IMSERSO holidays.
I reckon I’ve been in hospital six times in my life: three times in the UK and three times here. Like everyone else, I’ve had lots of other medical “interventions”—from peritonitis and a bleeding stomach to various cancer scares before this current, real, one. As I lay there, awake at 4 a.m. in a hospital bed, I thought of the effort and the cost that has gone into trying to stop me dying of throat cancer: the original referral and diagnosis, the radiotherapy and chemotherapy sessions, the ambulance rides to and from various hospitals, the plethora of drugs, the stuff that’s taken over from food, the clean pyjamas, and all sorts of health professionals talking to me and looking after me—all for nothing more than the requirement that I paid my contributions as part of that legal contract. Donnie Trump may think state healthcare makes us communists and, if he's right, and I've never heard him say anything that is truthful or right, then all I can say is: "Comrade: Let me hear them balalaikas ringing out".
