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| You can see she's sick. |
For the last couple of weeks, Edie has not been feeling well, maybe even as far back as when I returned from the states. It seemed to get better, and then there would be an episode where she had pain and discomfort in her stomach. But a couple of days ago, it started hurting almost constantly, and unrelentingly. She thought it might be just a bad case of indigestion, or maybe the stomach flu, which seems to be going around down here. On Thursday she spent most of the day in bed, and doing minor things around the boat, still expecting relief every time she went to the bathroom, which was several. Then on Friday she didn’t feel like even getting out of the bed, so I stayed around the boat most of the day volunteering to get her things, and food, or anything she wanted, and being generally inept. I did leave with Jose for a little while to look at a dingy that I had seen for sale. Our dingy is getting old, and I like to keep an eye out for a good deal, you know how I am, and a good dingy is important when you’re cruising, I’m naturally still thinking that we’re going to do that. But, I digress, anyway, when I returned back to the boat, she definitely was in pain, and very uncomfortable, worse than I had seen her before, so Jose and I went up to the cockpit and had a beer and talked for a little while. Jose’s little girl is coming this weekend, and he’s very excited. He got a divorce about a year ago, and his wife pretty much took everything and left him living with his parents and scrambling for a living. For the last too many months, he’s not had any contact with his wife or little girl, because she had disappeared and he didn’t know how to contact them. Anyway, for whatever reason, the ex-wife called him up, and he bought them tickets from Cabo, and he’s going to spend the entire weekend with his little girl. Unfortunately his ex will also be there, and he wanted my advice about how to handle the situation. He has a lot of respect for my maturity and judgment, so I shared with him some of my own stories, …..whoa, …. whoa, wait a minute, I was talking about Edie being sick. Anyway, when we finished our beer, I let him out with my security card. Don’t you think it’s unusual that you have to have a security card to get out of my marina? I understand that you should have a card to get in, but to lock you in until you have a card to get out makes no sense to me. I can’t imagine the thinking that went into that decision. Anyway when I got back to the boat I naturally checked on Edie because I could hear her moaning. I have learned in the past that when Edie says that she needs to go to the doctor, that the next thing I should do is get the car keys. Now, Edie has had two heart attacks, and in both causes, I would have guessed that she was just having a bad case of gas, and was in both cases totally surprised when the doctors immediately put her in the hospital. I have a tendency to learn from past experience, and immediately when into action. Here it was 6:30 PM, on a Friday, with Carnaval going full blast on the Malecon, where in the world was I going to find a doctor. But I pulled out my Club Crucerous Services Guide, this is a list of all types of services that a cruiser might need in the city of La Paz. If you want a plumber, an electrician, someone to polish your stainless steel or to make a new sail for your boat here’s the place to find them. There’s over twenty pages in these listings, and not only does it include the type of service you need, but which of the vendors have good experiences with cruisers and come recommended, but it also lets you know the ones that speak English. This is an invaluable resource to someone that does not know their way around La Paz, but people that have lived in La Paz for years use it too. Club Crucerous is very good in this type of stuff. I found the listing for hospitals, and by looking at the addresses, I realized that I did not know where any of them were located. From the listing, I could not tell whether they specialized in cardiac services or whether they were animal hospitals. All the names were in Spanish.. In the off chance that I might get a reasonably quick call back, I remembered a doctor that Edie had seen one time before when we first got down here. I gave him a call, and believe it or not, the doctor answered the phone himself. It turns out that he was still in the office and you won’t believe the next thing he told me. Now listen closely, because you will never hear these words spoken by a doctor in the United States of America. He said “Bring her over right now, I will see her immediately, or I will come to your boat myself”. It took me some time to catch my breath, and to understand what the man had said, but I also knew that as long as Edie had breath in her body, that she would insist on going to the office, and that’s what I told him. I let him know that we were about 30 minutes away. This was my day to take a shower, and I really needed one, but I knew that Edie needed me right now, so we went with dispatch to the doctor’s office. When we got there, we walked straight in, well as straight as she could walk, her stomach was still hurting, and the receptionist was expecting us, and showed us directly to the doctor’s office. There were no disclaimers that stated clearly that if you didn’t have the proper insurance that you would have to go somewhere else, no notices that any thing that goes wrong is not our fault and you can’t hold the doctor responsible for anything, no forms to fill out, none of that stuff. They didn’t even ask what her name was, before the doctor was doing an examination. After 10 or 15 minutes of probing, poking and asking questions as to what was her pain level, with zero being no pain, and a 10 being the equivalent to having you big toe squeezed in a vise, Edie and the doctor returned to where I was waiting in the doctor’s private office. In a voice that was very soft, kind, controlled, utterly comforting, being a strange combination of German and Spanish accent, Doctor Enrique Tuchmann, my new best friend, said the next thing that you again will never hear a doctor say in the United States of America, ” Your wife needs an immediate Ultrasound Examination, and I will either take you to the hospital, or you can follow me in your car.” What the hell was this man thinking? Does he not know how a doctor is supposed act. What does he mean he’s going to take her to the hospital? Doesn’t he understand that doctors do not do these things? At this step I was so befuddled that it was all I could do to keep up with the good doctor’s SUV threading itself though the throngs of people celebrating Carnaval. And it’s a good thing that the doctor was leading the way, because I would have never found the hospital on my own. In La Paz street signs are very rare, and most of the time you just have to guess where you are. The only way I every get around is to just to remember which way is back to the water. When we got to the hospital, the doctor led us in the front door, straight to the radiology department, where he personally contacted the attending specialist, and the two of them took Edie into the room with the table. I waited outside, and again no one gave me a clipboard with stacks of forms to fill out. No one asked to see my insurance card, and again, Edie was treated and the only paper work that was done was a prescription that the doctor filled out on the spot for the services he wanted, and on that form it asked for the name of the patient, and the doctor gave me the form and asked me to help him with her name, since as yet he didn’t know what it was.
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| Ahhhh, relief. |
After several minutes of waiting in the reception area, Dr. Tuchmann came out, and with a wry smile, he said that he had good news for me. They had determined that Edie did not require any type of surgery. Of course, my mind went into a tailspin, cause I had never even considered that that was a possibility. You got to understand, in my mind she still had a gas problem. He also told me that they had scanned all the other organs in the area, and everything looked good. The only problem as it turns out was that Edie had a rather badly inflamed bowel, and with a proper antibiotic, along with some several other things and pain medication that she should be fine in a matter of a few days. Boy was I relieved, and it took me several minutes to readjust to the reality of the situation. Here we were in a very modern and well equipped hospital, and my wife had just had a medical procedure that required the attendance of two doctors and several attendants and some major medical equipment. For the past three, count them THREE (3) hours, we had been personally attended to by Dr Tuchmann, who had missed his dinner, a trip to Carnaval, or whatever else he might have had planned for a beautiful Friday evening, and I was standing there without the ownership papers for the boat or anything else that I might have, that I could mortgage to pay the forth coming bills. Then it came, a hand written invoice from the hospital. When I looked it, it was a little better than what I expected. They were charging me a little over $1300 for an emergency ultrasound procedure. But wait a minute, we are in Mexico, why are they charging me dollars? I looked at the bill again, and it was not in dollars. It was in pesos, and the bill was a little over $1300 pesos. That’s only a little more than a hundred dollars in American money. I was able to pay the bill with a check card. Then it was doctor Tuchmann’s turn to give me a bill. His bill was $500. But that is also in pesos, which translates to about $40 in America. We walked next door to the Pharmacy and bought 5 different medicines recommended by Dr. Tuchmann, and the total bill for the entire night was about $200. Could you imagine having a similar night in Florida? First of all you couldn’t have a similar night in Florida. The doctor would not have been in his office at 6:30 PM, he would not have taken you personally to the hospital, and the hospital would not have attended to a non-life threatening treatment without an appointment. And if by miracles of miracles you could have had these things done that night it would have cost you $3000 in Florida. “VIVA LA MEXICAN MEDICAL SYSTEM”
Even as good as it turned out, Edie being Edie, was upset by all the money that she had cost us with her ailment, and continued to apologize long after we left the hospital and the lovely Dr. Tuchmann. I was very understanding, and in a most compassionate manner, assured it that it was alright, and all I wanted was for her to get better, and danged the price. However telling her this did little to comfort her guilt feeling, and I searched for just the right words to make her feel better about it. I tried to smile and assured her that “Shoot Honey, I just spent more than that servicing and changing the oil on the boat.” Sensing that I was getting through to her, I went on to say that, “but when I spend that much money on a lube job, I can be assured that engine can be run hard and long, and operate at the peak of its performance.”
I am pretty sure that she was amused by my comparison, but she didn’t say anything.
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