Everybody knows the public health service is slow. Really slow. So in April of last year, when I went to my doctor with a complaint about trouble swallowing—something my father with Parkinson’s had suffered from—I wasn’t surprised that the appointment she gave me with the specialist was for the following January, nine months later. Par for the course.
Someone else might have been distressed about the long wait, but not me. In fact, I was glad to displace my worry into a distant future. Doing so was easy since the doctor had pooh-poohed my concern about Parkinson’s, telling me that the disease isn’t hereditary. I had read the same thing, but I had also read that even so, the risk of developing Parkinson’s is double for people who have a parent with the disease. I didn’t mention this. Who am I to argue with a physician about medicine? As she had herself said on a different occasion, she was the doctor, not me. So after getting a grudging referral to the specialist, I didn’t give the appointment another thought. I forgot the word for having difficulty swallowing, and I didn’t bother to learn the Spanish word for throat specialist. I didn’t need to know it: when the time came to meet the specialist at the HUCA, the central hospital of Asturias, I would just follow the signs to the right service and then to the right door.
Nine months flew by. I was not plagued by difficulty swallowing, though around Christmas, a stressful season for many, I had a recurrence of my trouble and remembered my upcoming appointment. Although I had misplaced the paper with the date and time of the appointment, my phone alerted me a week in advance, and then, the day before the appointment, I got a call from the hospital seeking confirmation that I would be there. Apparently a lot of people do not keep their appointments but also do not bother to cancel. It’s all free, so patients pay no price for not showing up.
I told the woman on the phone that I would be at the appointment, at 9:40 a.m. She reminded me to use the machines in the reception area to get a ticket with a code for my turn to see the doctor. The ticket would tell me where to go. And sure enough, 15 minutes before my appointment, the machine read my health card and delivered a slip of paper with the block, the floor, and the waiting area number. An attendant told me how to get there. “Use the elevator, and it’s at the end of the passage. You want yellow,” she told me as I thanked her.
I took the stairs instead of the elevator. I arrived in three minutes. Eyeing the monitor for my appointment code, FVQ, I sat to wait.
The computer-generated codes at the government offices are a mystery to me. The codes appearing on the monitor that day were long numbers, short ones, combos of numbers and letters, or, like mine, three capital letters. Ten minutes passed, and though many dings alerted the waiting patients that new codes were up, very few of them were actually new. Most were repeats, already listed on the monitor and appearing a second or third time. Once the same code popped up five separate times over the course of several minutes. I supposed the doctors kept calling these patients because they knew the patients were in the hospital by virtue of the code they had obtained on arrival. Still, it was surprising that so few patients rose for their turn.
I gazed around the full waiting area. What a sorry looking lot! For a moment I wondered what I was doing in their company. Everyone seemed elderly, and several people were in wheelchairs. Beaten down, despairing, done for, too tired to protest the long wait or the impersonal system. Every so often a nurse appeared with medicine for a waiting patient. I didn’t know what troubles they were being tested or treated for, but I soon realized it was not strange for me to be among them: I was a brown wasp too, huddled in my chair, feeling the cold of winter, waiting to hear my doom.
Time ticked by. To the friend accompanying me I said that soon I would ask.
“Ask what?” he inquired. What good would that do? was the implication. “Such a terrible system,” he continued, “so slow. Room 43 keeps calling the same people who don’t appear, and here you are, still waiting.” He shook his head. I told myself, okay, just wait. But I decided that at 10:25 a.m., which would be an hour after getting my code and 45 minutes after my appointment time, I would inquire.
Fifteen minutes later, before I had a chance to reconsider, I stood abruptly and approached the desk. “Can you tell me how long the wait will be?”
“What?”
“I’ve been here for an hour.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
I didn’t know. “It’s about my throat,” I said, and the attendant asked for my ticket. She handed it back. I was in one department, she told me, but was supposed to be in a different one. She pointed at the ceiling. “Right overhead,” she said. “Up a floor,” she added.
Up a floor?
Of course! Up a floor! I had double-checked the block and the waiting area, verified that the walls were yellow, but I had not double-checked the floor! So off I hurried, my friend following as I called over my shoulder that I knew why I hadn’t been called and why all those other patients who had been called did not appear: They were in the wrong place! Like me!
Upstairs, my code was on the monitor—listed several times—and I went right in to see the doctor. “Where were you?” he asked in a friendly manner. “Lost?”
I confessed that I had indeed been lost. Then he inspected my esophagus, prescribed something to use or not as I liked, said if Parkinson’s concerned me, I could consult a neurologist, and then cheerily said goodbye. My friend and I found our way back past the bright confusion of doors, halls, alcoves, and blinking, dinging monitors, and out into the chill of the day. The cold was invigorating. I felt well-satisfied. The best news of the day was that I did not, after all, belong with those quiet, old, sickly patients in the first yellow alcove. I belonged on a higher level. I had no desire to see a neurologist. And surely no need. Obtaining and keeping my appointment had been a chore, but putting it behind me was a cinch.
