The Doctor

With the American Congress raging over health-care reform, I found it quite appropriate that one of my first tasks in Poland would bring me nose-to-nose with that creation of Satan himself: socialized medicine.  As a supporter of  some version of health-care reform (anything, really), I welcomed the chance to go all Michael Moore on the Poland health-care system.  Maybe I could do some research and let my good friend Barack (I did kinda work on his campaign) know how this social safety net really works.

So I ventured to the hospital, urine sample in hand (see post below) ready for my ABSOLUTELY FREE examination (well, excluding the 50 Grosze [15 cents] I paid for the piss cup).  We walk a couple of blocks and stop at this decrepit monstrosity of a building and I immediately realize why they couldn't afford to provide everyone with their own piss cup.  This place was a relic.  It was almost as if the powers that be decided that if this place could withstand the blitzkrieg, then it could withstand 70 more years of neglected repairs.  I ventured inside with trepidation...

We arrive on the 6th floor to some type of bio-bureaucratic hell.  A hallway that goes on forever with 50 closed doors on each side and 200 people sitting in benches on either wall, all clenching their own distinctive color of piss.  At various points one of the doors would open and some uni-browed sergeant-lady would yell some menacing polish phrase and everyone on the benches would stir ("There were 8 in the bed and the little one said...").  My translator and I took our place in line.

Eventually we made our way to the first door where I was asked to answer some questions (a task I repeated at every door).  And they were always the same: my name, my parents names, my mothers maiden name, my fathers middle name (seriously) and other ridiculous things.  In fact, I must have gone through 6 offices before they asked for any medical information.  But then I reached the "hearing" doctor.

When I walked in the lady (who told me she speaks well English) was wearing a head lamp the size of a basketball.  When she turned it on the room temperature increased by a couple ticks.  She then proceeds to use said head lamp, and a large funnel (think beer-bong) to look in my ears.  After melting my inner ear wax with her chapeau soleil she asked me (through the translator) to stand by the door and plug my right ear.  She stood about 20 feet away and told me that she would say some words softly and then ask me to repeat them.  She begins by making some unintelligible noise: "dun-da-dun."  I respond: "dun-da-dun."  Her next sound was: "horty".  I respond: "horty."  We went on like this for some time before I realized the old bat with "well english" was asking me to repeat various english numbers (read 'dun-da-dun' as 'twenty-one' and 'horty' as 'forty').  Nevertheless I passed the hearing exam with flying colors and went on the the eye doctor which wasn't without its own hysterics:

doctor: cover your right eye and read the highlighted numbers on the bottom line 
me: two-zero-four
doctor: now cover your left eye and read the line again
*doctor does not change highlighted numbers
me: two-zero-four.
doctor: great, you have perfect vision.

So I bounced between the various offices, answering identical questions and receiving various med-evil tests,  all the while feeling very much like Arlo Guthrie in "Alice's Resteraunt": "injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected."  Finally the translator informed me that there would be just one more test and that it would be a good one because she would get to see my naked.  And I had some mixed reactions to this, with one part of me feeling flattered that this gorgeous (like most of the girls here) polish girl wants to see me naked and the other part feeling pretty concerned that the combination of a cold room and an old polish man with latex gloves would leave my manhood lacking its usual robustness (ok, maybe not-so-usual).  So it was with some sense of relief that I learned that by naked she only meant the top half and that rather than asking me to cough, another old lady asked me to stand in front of some x-ray machine so they could scan my chest.  Regardless, I did my best to flex every sinewy muscle I had as the translator instructed me to contort my frame in various positions to get the best possible picture.  I thought that I had impressed the chick until she spent the rest of the walk home talking about her boyfriend, the police officer (who up to this point, she had not mentioned.)

In sum: Barack, please do not follow Poland's lead.  Unless of course you're looking to give every drug-addict a better opportunity at passing a government physical.  Which in turn would stimulate the economy by giving us non-drug users an opportunity to make some cash on the urine black market.  So on second thought...