polish doctors

Well, things are certainly speeding up now that the weather is good and we've had some time to feel out our travel buddies and plans. As always there's much to tell. I'll update a bit and make another more detailed post when i have time (when i go back to boring america). I'll explain my encounter with the Polish medical system in this post.

I got my friend Anna to take me to the doctor way back when my leg was infected. I was really dreading it, but actually with anna's help it was no worse than a trip to urgent care back home, with one exception. I went to the international student office to ask their recommendation where I could go and Ursula made a few calls and told me I could go to a place at 2pm when the doctor would be available and that somebody from the office could go with me. So I came back later and a nice young lady from the office went with me. The inside of the building looked really communist. Very institutional, old, bad colors, weird lighting. I don't really know how to describe it. We found the reception and they had us wait a while. Eventually somebody who worked there walked by and started talking to my interpreter friend for nearly 10 minutes. Then she turned to me and said "sorry, you will have to come back tomorrow before 12 to see the doctor." I was pondering how the hell so many words can be summarized so tersely.

The next day anna came with me. I didn't wanna fuck around so I whipped out my US passport to the receptionist the first chance I got. Apparently it helped because later anna told me it was much easier for me to see the doctor than she had ever seen. I walked up a lot of stairs and waited around in the hallway for 15 minutes to see the doctor. I took off my pants, she poked my wound asked two questions (through anna, which was a little awkward) as a nurse bandaged it then sat down to write a lot of things. It turns out that she gave me 4 prescriptions with some rather cryptic dosage instructions and told me to come back in a week. At the pharmacy down stairs I got 2 antibiotic pills and two ointments. They were just in a box like an OTC, and the pharmacist (after my request) wrote on the box with a pen a '1 x 2' or '1 x 3' apparently indicating the dose, but it still didn't seem so obvious if it meant 1 pill twice per day or once per day you take 2 pills. It turned out I had to take 1 pill every 12 hours, another pill every 24 hours, put on one cream in the morning and afternoon, and a different ointment every night. The night ointment was awful. I'm pretty sure it was a tube of tar. Four fucking medicines seemed a bit much. Back home I would have received one prescription I'm pretty sure. A few weeks later when i managed to get some internet access, I checked to see what the prescriptions were. One of the creams isn't approved for use in the US because it is essentially useless (resistance). Polish people are generally hypochondriacs and ask for a lot of medicines fairly often.

The next week on my appointment I took off my pants again and she looked at it and wrote me another prescription for one of the same pills and told me to come back again in 10 days. Goddammit! I was greatly improved and I didn't think i needed more antibiotics but it's important so i played along. The pills had given me some harsh diarrhea. After a few more days I got a horrible sore throat and my tongue turned black. It was a great pain to swallow. I was pretty scared, but then i vaguely remembered from microbiology class that 'hairy black tongue' was a side effect or long term antibiotic use. I was pretty angry. My leg seemed fine and it was really hell to live with this throat problem so i quit taking the pills and didn't go back to the doctor for my next appointment. After shitting hot snakes for about 3 weeks (NOT FUN) my bowels finally sorted themselves out and now I feel better than ever (except when I'm hung over).

The whole shebang cost about 60 bucks and i think i will get reimbursed if i ever make the time to do the paperwork, so I'm not so much worse for the wear.

Maybe I can talk about my how i resolved my computer problem in the next post...or maybe how I lost my dorm deposit, that's a good story.

One last bit of what I've been up to, I went to Prague and Slovenia for 10 days. It was such a great trip. I was really surprised by how amazing Slovenia is. It helped that I had a super cool guide to introduce me to her family and friends. Then i took a road trip to Budapest with a few friends the next weekend. Unfortunately i broke my second camera in Budapest somehow. I still have some photos, but I've got a backlog on my flickr site. I just uploaded some pics from home base, Wroclaw. I gotta run now, I'm heading for that body of water between Finland and USSR. peace