Tag Archives: Irish woman abroad

We are not alone

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These mornings it’s too hot to walk or run. I open the car door and the dog jumps onto the back seat. I drive a couple of kilometres up out of the fishbowl of the village, over the hill and down into the next valley. At this hour, the dog and I are the only domesticates. But we are not alone.
I head for the trail that runs west along the tributary, following it towards the point where it joins the great flow of the main river. The hills rear up all around – the bare grey bedrock, the golden sunburnt undergrowth, the twisted olive and almond trees. Above, like a cutout backdrop, the sky, so tangible in its blueness – surreal, unreal, real.

A rustle in the undergrowth and I catch a brief glimpse of a blackbird. A butterfly, statue-still on a dead leaf, flutters to life, suddenly surprising the dog. Sound and movement – the one indistinguishable from the other – reveals a snake, sluggishly departing the patch of path where it’s been indulging in a morning sun bath. It slithers up the hillside, its tail disappearing under an asparagus bush.

I leave the trail and descend to the riverbank. The dog, ahead of me, turns back and tilts her head, asking if are we going to swim or stay on the path. ‘Go on,’ I say, and I hear her splashing into the water even as I am still gingerly picking my way through the brambles, getting snagged on my shoulder and on my hip, and popping a couple of blackberries in my mouth.

I step out of my shoes and take my dress off over my head. As I step down, feeling the water on my toes, my eyes are drawn upwards to the towering hill on the other side of the river, beyond the narrow floodplain. I hear hooves on rock and see movement. I’m transported back more than twenty years to the Kivalliq, to an evening when I sat on an esker at dusk and heard a chorus of clicking behind me. Before I had a chance to turn around, I was engulfed in a sea of caribou – does and bucks and calves – their hooves click-click-clicking as they gently snorted and snuffled their way past me. I didn’t move for fear of frightening them. I sat and I saw and I heard and I smelled and I felt them. Now, on this little riverbank on the other side of the world, I hear the click of hoofs on rock as a small herd of four slender female deer and two calves high step up the hill.

I fully immerse myself in the warm water that is so refreshing after the heat of even this early hour. I cross the river, the dog swimming alongside or leaving me to swim alone, and coming back to me again. I hear a splash to my right but see nothing. I focus on that patch of river, treading water for twenty, thirty seconds. My concentration is rewarded. A 30 cm silver fish throws itself out of the water, for the briefest of moments suspended in the air, the sun reflecting on its glistening silver side. Then ‘splash’, it is gone. Another thirty seconds pass and it reappears – same arc, same glistening body, a few metres further along its journey.

The dog has had enough of swimming. She goes to the riverbank to torment frogs. I imagine them hiding in the rushes, laughing at her foolishness, laughing at their ability to hide from her. On mornings when the tide is high and the water comes up to the rushes, I hear one or two of them plop into the water. The dog never gives up. She also never catches one.

In addition to the frogs, she likes to vigorously roll around in the silt and sand on the riverbank, turning her white fur a dirty brown, gathering up a collection of grit to deposit in the house later.
When I finish swimming, I step into my shoes and walk for a while in just my swimsuit, drying off before I put my dress back on. There’s a pool of water under the bridge, close to where I’ve parked the car. I’ve seen this whole valley completely submerged but now, at the height of summer, the river has dried up, leaving pools of varying sizes and depths. This one by the bridge is the first and the biggest, occasionally reconnecting to the tributary when the tide is especially high.

I search for a stick to throw so the dog will go in for a final swim to wash off the grit. Before I throw the stick, the pool is still – not a ripple, not a breeze moves it. From the corner of my eye I catch a glimmer. I look down. A crab the size of a saucer, iridescent silver and blue, scuttles along amongst and finally disappears under a rock near my feet. I’ve seen surprisingly large fish in this pool, and snakes, and schools of smaller fish, but I’ve never seen a crab here before and I’ve certainly never imagined there would be one so big. I am in awe.

I throw the stick far out into the middle of the pool. The dog, delighted, swims out to retrieve it. When she brings it back, she drops it and walks away; it is her way of telling me she doesn’t want to play this game anymore. We get in the car and come home.

98. Boobs

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I’m sitting in the waiting room waiting for a mammogram. Just a routine one – my second. The first one was two years ago, when I turned 50. That and the first colon cancer screening. It’s good that we get tested for all these things but, once again, Spanish health care surprises me.

I see that the radiographer conducting the mammogram is the same man as last time. He’s about my age, has a harried look about him, but I think it’s just because of his unkempt hair. The first time, I found it odd that (a) it was a man and (b) there was no female nurse or assistant in the room. At least I had a little changing room where I could strip off in private, unlike the time I went to the hospital a few years ago and had to drop my trousers in front of two males doctors (again, no female members of staff present) like some supremely untalented Gypsy Rose Lee.

Last time I came for a mammogram, the radiographer conducted a jolly conversation with me about the state of Irish rugby (something about which I know absolutely nothing) while he placed each of my boobs on the machine and squished and squeezed them into position. I guess the surreality of it all took my mind off the physical and emotional discomfort!! I wonder what he’ll talk about this time? I’m next in line…I’ll soon find out.

PS…I’m home now. He discussed the time of the once daily bus to Sanlúcar. Now that’s a topic I know something about.

A life lesson learned

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The Spanish health care system has a pretty good reputation and most of my experiences with it confirm that. First of all, it’s free, which, coming from a country where a ten-minute consultation with your GP costs €70 for all but a minority, that’s a major bonus. Staff are generally caring and kind and referrals are reasonably prompt. In addition, prescription medications are heavily subsidized. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the health care system in my adopted country.

But…it’s different. The culture of care is unlike the one I grew up with and over the years I’ve had quite a few experiences that have jolted me because the processes and procedures are just…well…different.

Towards the end of last year I experienced a funny sensation in my left leg for a few weeks – pain in my calf, heaviness in my entire leg, occasional pins and needles throughout my leg. It’s something I’ve had on and off over the years and, being a bit of a hypochondriac, I always convince myself that I have deep vein thrombosis. But the pain always goes away before I do anything about it. This time, however, it lingered and, as the weekend approached, it worsened.

By midday on Saturday I’d convinced myself that I’d be dead by nightfall and I decided to go to the doctor. Being a Saturday, the health centre in the village was closed and I had to drive the 22km to the nearest 24-hour centre.

I was surprised to find the door to the health centre locked when I got there. A note stuck to the door had the centre’s phone number, so I called it. Before I had two words out, the grey metal door to my right opened and I was ushered in to the treatment room immediately behind the door. I tried to avert my gaze from the old man, shirt open, lying on the consulting table, being treated by a male member of staff. The woman who had opened the door to me turned out to be the doctor.

“Sit there,” she said, pointing to a chair only two metres from where the other patient was being treated. Shouldn’t he have some privacy, I thought. Shouldn’t I? I sat with my back to the man, trying not to listen as he was prepared for the ambulance that was to take him to the hospital, forty minutes away.

The doctor sat behind her desk and began her consultation with me. But before we got two sentences into it, there was another knock on the main door. The doctor opened the window beside her desk and shouted out, “Come in through the grey metal door.” There was no response, so she got up, walked around her desk, and let a middle-aged couple in. The treatment room was beginning to feel decidedly overcrowded.

The doctor directed the couple to the waiting room, but left the door between it and the treatment room open.

“I’ll have to see your leg,” she instructed me, after I had explained my symptoms and she’d asked me some preliminary questions.

With the door to the waiting room still open, the old man still on the treatment table and the male staff member beside him, and the grey door to the street now open to allow the ambulance crew in, I stood up, unbuckled my belt and dropped my jeans to the floor, my pink-knickered arse towards the old man. The doctor had a feel around my leg and asked me some more questions. She was sufficiently concerned to immediately send me to A&E at the big provincial hospital.

I didn’t want to go on my own, so I phoned a friend to ask if he’d drive me. Then I drove home, packed a few things in a bag, and was soon on the road to the hospital. The waiting room was large and airy and pretty comfortable as waiting rooms go, which was just as well, because I had a three hour wait.

Finally, my number appeared on the screen. I was to go to consultation room six. I walked into consultation room six to find a woman lying half-naked on the treatment table. “Go next door,” one of the staff told me. I went to consultation room seven and the woman sitting at the desk asked my name.

“You’re not Rosario?” she said, looking confused.

At that moment an extremely tall, very bald, bespectacled young doctor appeared at the door behind me.

“Martina?” he asked. “Ah, here you are. Follow me.”

I followed him to the other side of the corridor and into a large room that contained a number of beds. On one bed lay yet another old man, with his shirt open and his large belly on display. I tried to look anywhere but at the old man while the doctor consulted a computer and tried to find which room I was supposed to be in.

“Stay here,” he said and set off down the corridor, leaving me stranded. I looked at the television monitor and saw that I was assigned to both consultation rooms six and nine. Just then, the doctor popped his head out of room nine and indicated that I go there.

The brightly lit consultation room was cold enough that I commented on it to the young, dark-haired (and, admittedly, handsome) member of staff sitting behind the desk. The tall, bald doctor, whose white coat was askew and whose trousers didn’t reach to the top of his colourful socks, asked me where I’m from.

“Ireland,” I said.

“Ah, Holland,” he replied, a common mistake which must have something to do with the weird way I pronounce ‘ir’ in Spanish. I corrected him.

“Let’s do this in English, then,” he said, and switched to flawless English far superior to my Spanish.

I told him my symptoms and he asked me some further questions.

“I’m going to have to see it,” he said.

By now, the tall, bald doctor and the dark-haired, handsome doctor were both standing in front of me, as I sat on the consultation table. There didn’t seem to be anywhere for me to go to remove my trousers in a dignified manner, or a curtain to pull around to spare my blushes. I guessed I’d just have to get on with it.

With both men standing mere inches away from me and facing me, I removed my shoes and then my socks. A number of thoughts flashed through my head as I started to drop my trousers. 1. I haven’t shaved my legs in about two weeks. 2. I haven’t moisturized my legs in probably the same length of time. 3. Why am I wearing my mother’s hand-me-down knickers today? (Calm down…she hadn’t worn then…or so she swore to me)

With my trousers removed, I sat back on the table and the tall bald doctor proceeded to examine my hairy scaly left leg, pointing to a bruise on my thigh (I walked into the kitchen table) and another on my shin (an ungraceful scramble out of the dinghy). He talked his colleague through the examination and then used a very impressive hand-held ultrasound device that he plugged into his phone to look below the surface.

He assured me that all was fine. I didn’t have DVT, but I did have some damage to a surface vein. “Does that put me at greater risk of DVT?” I asked.

“Imagine your deep veins are the motorway,” he said, “going up to your heart and lungs. You have damaged a small country road. So, there’s not much to worry about. But, as you know, sometimes we get off the motorway and take a country road instead. So, yes, there’s a little risk.”

What a cool doctor. I felt sorry for him that he’d had to touch my troll-like leg. He’d asked me about my work and, as I got dressed – again, undignified and in front of the two of them, almost losing my balance as I put my right leg into my jeans – he gave me some sage advice. “Disco dance while you work. It’ll keep your legs moving.”

And that was it – undignified, lacking in privacy, lacking in an concerns about a woman patient stripping in a consultation room in front of two men and no female staff member present. I could have done anything to those two lovely doctors!

I returned home feeling reassured, and having learned some valuable lessons – disco dance while working and never, ever, leave my legs unshaved and unmoisturized again.