Call Me Federico Nightingale

A group of us went out for dinner at a nice restaurant near Passeig de Grac?a to celebrate finishing our third week. The place was a bit high scale for us, considering most of the places we've been frequenting give patrons napkins that most Americans would confuse with a transparent piece of wax paper, and this place BICE, had cloth napkins AND cloth tablecloths! The prices were high but it looked like it would be worth it.

Ken, one of my classmates, had reserved a table for 12, however, upon arrival, we only had 10. We asked the waiter to remove one of the small tables from the row so we could have one person at each end and four on either side. He was considerably put out by this request, but did comply.

Almost immediately upon arriving Sarah started feeling faint--and no, it wasn't the prices on the menu. Rachel escorted her downstairs and a few minutes later sent a waiter up to tell us that Sarah had passed out. Rachel had asked the staff to call an ambulance immediately. I rushed downstairs to assess the situation and was angered by the waiter who seemed obsessed with getting me a cab to take me to the hospital. I told him I didn't know yet and then he became even more annoyed that I was going to cancel my dinner order. Grrr.

The ambulance arrived in a matter of minutes but the restaurant manager (asshole) made them come in through the service entrance rather than the front door (past all the guests). The emergency medical techs (EMTs) went to work and quickly determined that Sarah's blood pressure had dropped rapidly and inexplicably was not coming back up. Thanks to the assistant restaurant manager who translated, we managed to communicate with the EMTs. The restaurant manager insisted that the EMTs move Sarah out of the ladies' room and into a hallway off of the kitchen to treat her. He then would only allow Rachel to follow, forcing me to wait for them to emerge from the building outside. The EMTs had parked their ambulance directly in front of the restaurant so, combined with my stalking angrily outside the door, several potential patrons walked hastily away and onto other restaurants on the block.

The EMTs finally escorted Sarah out of the building--again out the service entrance--and took her and Rachel to the ambulance. The assistant manager explained the details of their exam--Sarah's BP was still low and they wanted a doctor to examine her--and then she gave me directions and a map to the hospital. Rachel rode with Sarah in the ambulance and I set out on foot to find the hospital.

I was only eight or so blocks from the restaurant, but given that it started raining, I had been up since 6:00 AM, I hadn't eaten anything since 4:30 that afternoon, and it was approaching 11:30 PM, I suddenly realized that I was incredibly hungry. Regardless, I found my way through the rain to the mammoth hospital, crossed paths with a few winos who were quite willing to provide directions to the entrance for a donation—I passed on the offers, and found my way to the Admissions area.

Hospital emergency rooms in the U.S. can easily be mistaken for a satellite office for Hell's waiting room. Spanish ERs are remarkably similar in that respect. The combination of the droning hum of flickering flourescent lighting, the vomit dull-colored walls, the maze-like configuration of doors and hallways, and of course, the clerks who bear a striking resemblance to the undead. Then again, it was 11:40 PM on a Friday night, I can hardly expect to find the clean and brightly lit, cheerfully-staffed halls of the uptight yuppie neighborhood hospitals I'm used to in the suburbs of Boston, now should I? The one thing I was hoping for was an Admissions clerk who spoke some English. I wasn't so lucky.

After a 10-minute wait behind some people whose family member had died and they weren't sure if the deceased had been brought here, and a man who appeared to have his right thumb in a Ziploc bag in his left hand but was incredibly calm, I made my way to the counter. This admissions counter more closely resembled a bank in a bad neighborhood in Detroit—an ancient, bloodshot, baggy-eyed clerk perched on a stool in front of an ancient computer monitor with a keyboard whose letters were worn off, all situated behind a few inches of bulletproof glass and a NYC subway ticket window-quality microphone/PA system, complete with the little metal channel under the glass so that you could pass through your ID card and money, but nothing else. I tried my best combination of Spanish to describe Sarah and her condition:

"Hola, mi amiga era enfermo. Ella vino aqu? en ambulancia."
(My friend was sick, she came here by ambulance.)

"?Cu?l es su nombre?"
(What's her name?)

"Sarah *****"
(Sarah [last name])

"?Su relacionan?"
(Your relation?)

"Novio."
(Fiance) I figured I couldn't prove I was a blood relative, this was the next best thing.

"?D?nde es ella padres?"
(Where's her parents?)

"England, er, Inglaterra...somos profesores ingleses...?Est? ella aqu??"
(England...we're english teachers...is she here?)

"Deletree el nombre"
(Spell the name)

"Que? Lo siento, no entiendo"
(What? I'm sorry, I don't understand)

[motioning with a pen on paper] "Escribe su nombre"
(Write her name)

I write her name on my notepad and hold it up to the glass. He types it into the computer and starts whistling. That's when I noticed the puddle of blood on the counter to the left of my hand. I calmly withdraw my hand from the counter.

"Placa Tercer"
[In Catalan, not Spanish] (Third floor)

"Que? Donde? Repeatimente por favor"
(What? Where? Say that again please.)

[motions with three fingers and points up]

"Merci. Buon noche"
(Thanks, good night)

He looks at me confused that I've just said thanks in Catalan after asking questions in Spanish.

I go around the corner and wait at the elevator. In four minutes the doors cycle open and close three times, each time there's a gurney with some poor soul in worse medical distress than the last. Each time the doors open I see a team of doctors working feverishly who all stop momentarily to look at me in disgust because I've obviously interrupted the lift going to a floor where this patient can get the treatment he or she needs. After the doors close one last time I decide to look for the stairs when another elevator opens and I quickly glance to see if there's room. This time it's going down and with someone who is in no particular hurry.

I decide to take the stairs.

The stairwell looks like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with it's 1950s psychiatric hospital/institutional paint job and steep stairwells that were built long before anyone realized sick people might have to use them. I half expected a Spanish-version of Jack Nicholson's McMurphy come flying down the stairs at me. I made my way up and had to stop at each level to try and figure out which one was the third floor. A few flights up and I discovered that Sarah, with Rachel by her side, were in fact only two flights up from Admission but I had passed their floor because I thought I entered the building on the ground level (which was the ambulance bay, one level below where I started) when in fact I had come in on the Mezzanine level and there wasn't a first floor. I found them just in the nick of time because as I entered the hallway where Sarah was laying down, still looking pale but at least semi-conscious, the doctor had ordered them to the 7th floor for another test and observations.

My job, as assigned by Sarah who looked frightfully nervous, was to make her laugh. I did the best I could. We rode up to the 7th floor and met a nice woman doctor who spoke reasonably good English and explained the reason for Sarah's symptoms (which I will only say were not ultimately serious in nature). They kept her for another 45 minutes, checked her blood pressure and blood sugar, then she was released and advised to go home and sleep.

Rachel and I escorted Sarah back to her building and after managing to find the right key on Sarah's keychain, were horrified to discover that she lived in a flat on the fifth floor. In the U.S. that would mean five flights of stairs. Daunting to someone whose not had anything to eat in nearly nine hours and is coming down from an adrenaline rush. But alas, this is Spain, and therefore we had to walk up one flight to the lobby, then two flights to the Mezzanine, then five flights to Sarah's flat. We woke up her unpleasant hostess who refused to let Rachel and I sleep on the floor in Sarah's room, so once Sarah was safely in bed Rachel and I took our leave.

We found our way to a metro station at approximately 1:59 AM and caught trains in opposite directions, each headed to our respective hosts' flats. I arrived at Jordi and Yolanda's at 2:53 AM.

What a night...somehow, after all that, I wasn't really hungry, so I went directly to bed. I'm telling you, I can't wait to get back to school on Monday, where I can relax.