Adventures in the Greek Health Service

Zac has mentioned to me on a couple of occasions that he thinks he has an embarrassing childhood ailment. To which I have typically responded, “You can’t do! Doctors have checked you for that at every single checkup since you were born.”

Anywise, on arrival in Greece, and in the bosom of our family – my parents have a house in the Mani – I figure we might as well get to the, erm, bottom of it, just to reassure him.

My aunt is staying with my parents too, and she taught paediatric nursing, so she’s always been my go-to gal for childhood stuff.

“Zac thinks he has Embarrasssing Childhood Ailment,” I say. “Would you mind having a look?”

They disappear, for about 30 seconds.

“Yep,” Helen says. “He’s right.”

“Oh shit,” I say. “Sorry, darling.”

“I’ve been telling you that for FIVE YEARS,” Zac says.

“No you haven’t,” I say. “You’ve mentioned it TWICE.”

“I’ve mentioned it about TWO HUNDRED TIMES,” he says. “Since I was FIVE.”

“You mentioned it once when you were eight and once when you were ten,” I say.

The discussion is beginning to get heated when Auntie Helen interjects. “He needs to get it fixed. It should take a decent paediatric surgeon about 15 minutes.”

And so begins our odyssey through the Greek health service.

To say that now is not a good time to seek health care in Greece would be an understatement. The government is, effectively, bankrupt.

Like all public servants, doctors’ and nurses’ wages have been slashed. Further, even those reduced wages haven’t been paid for months in many hospitals.

With 13.5billion euros of further cuts coming in this month — in exchange for one hundred billion euros of mainly-German money to be given to, umm, mainly-German banks — and the economy contracting at at least 7% per year, it is not immediately obvious how, let alone when, they will be paid.

But… we need to get it fixed. And, as we are location independent, it’s either here or Bali.

Zac is currently supposed to go and see his father in Australia from Bali, and wants to be on peak form for his cousins, so I figure if we CAN get it fixed here he’ll be right as rain by the time he gets to Oz.

Our first port of call is the clinic in the beach town down the road. I find an English-speaking chap smoking out the back, who equips me with the Greek terms for Embarrassing Childhood Ailment and Embarrassing Medical Specialist, and tells us we need to talk to the Embarrassing Medical Specialist at the general hospital in the regional capital.

Zac plays on the beach, his elders read the newspapers in the sun, and I head to a rather charming seaside taverna with an absolutely dazzling view to adopt the furrowed brow and thousand yard stare of the digital nomad entirely reliant on really, really ropy internet.

Equipped with the relevant pieces of medical vocabulary, and the Greek for “Do you speak English?” I Skype call the hospital. The line sucks.

After about ten minutes of bellowing “EMBARRASING CHILDHOOD COMPLAINT” and “EMBARRASSING MEDICAL SPECIALIST” in Greek and English down a connection that continues to cut out, my fellow diners, for whom said charming seaside taverna is part of their holiday rather than part of normal life, are beginning to stare.

Right, I think. Let’s work out how much this is going to cost in Bali.

Google eventually leads me to a medical tourism site. According to this, 15 minutes of a surgeon’s time, plus theatre staff, plus anaesthetist, plus bed and nursing care during day surgery, will run you $15,000 in the US.

Or – and it is here that my head explodes – $4500 in Malaysia. (I could buy new tits and full-body lipo in Malaysia for $4500, plus or minus…)

I try and call Bali Sanglah General Hospital. Skype is not behaving, and anyway it’s late in Indonesia now. Amazingly, they have an email address. I fire off an email in rubbish Indonesian but do not hold my breath for a response.

My dad ambles over and takes a look at my expression. “How’s it going?” he says.

“Well, the internet thinks it’s going to cost $4500 in MALAYSIA and I can’t get through to the hospital,” I say. “Skype keeps cutting out.”

“$4500 in Malaysia?” he says. “That can’t be right.”

As British citizens in possession of a European Health Insurance Card (without which item no travel insurance will cover EU citizens in Europe), Zac and I are entitled to free emergency medical care in most of Europe.

But, whatever way you cut it, this is not a medical emergency.

And, with our government slashing our health service at the same time as cutting taxes for folk who earn over £100,000 per year – go figure — I don’t fancy my chances of getting an appointment in the UK, even if we were headed there.

In the good old days, you used to be able to leave the UK for, say, Australia or America, live there for a decade or two, work, acquire citizenship, pay taxes, and then return to the old country to do something expensive, like, y’know, having a baby or back surgery, on the good old NHS.

Understandably, they’re clamping down on this.

I try to work out how much it’s going to cost in Greece. Whatever way I slice the numbers, I’m looking at low four figures in Euros.

“Well,” says my dad cheerily. “Taki had to pay the surgeons there a thousand Euros cash to get surgery on his eye.”

“What?!” I say.

“Yep,” says my ma. “He’d injured it as a volunteer firefighter on the Friday, and he’d been told he needed microsurgery done that night to save his eye. They’d only do the surgery on the Monday otherwise.”

Ulp, think I.

“That’s hearsay, of course,” says my dad. “Village gossip…”

“Look,” says my ma, like me a product of a generation whose taxes, past and future, bought not only free healthcare from the cradle to the grave but free education all the way through to uni plus government support while there (you will note this was a period when our government was not fighting many stupid wars), “Let’s just go to the general hospital and find out.”

“Hello,” I say at reception, in my best pidgin Greek. “Do you speak English?”

It’s a small provincial hospital, catering to a town of 50,000 plus a vast network of smaller towns and villages scattered over hours and hours of mountains, so refreshingly free of the seething mass of drunks, junkies, stabbing victims and attendant police one can expect at a typical London hospital.

“Ah!” says the guy on reception, in English, eyeing Zac. “You rang yesterday!”

“Yes,” I say. I guess they don’t get many non-Greek speakers bellowing embarrassing medical terms down Skype.

“Third floor,” he says. “Embarrassing Medical Specialism. See the Embarrassing Medical Specialist and come back here.”

The ward seems clean and well-run. While one would be in no danger of mistaking it for a rest spa and it ain’t on the cutting edge of medical science, the beds have clean sheets and spangly icons over them, and, unlike at the London hospital where I delivered Zac, all the windows have glass in them (rather than, say, perspex patched with binbags).

We loiter around for fifteen minutes, find an English speaker to translate and see the specialist, who kicks me out of the room, examines Zac for all of 30 seconds and tells me, “He needs an operation.”

We make a date for tests and a second for the surgery. He writes it in his diary, and hands me a note to give to admissions.

I brace myself and head to accounts to find out the cost, where a 6-foot blonde named (yes, really!) Aphrodite tells me it’s 300 euros, but free with the European Health Insurance Card.

Holy cow! Strike one for the Greek health service! (It is, my dad figures, a result for the hospital as well, as the English health service will send them some real, proper money for it, eventually, with which they can perhaps pay a nurse or two.)

Sorted! I update Zac’s dad that the surgery’s definitely being done here, and over the intervening weeks we sort out flights from Bali to Oz, Oz to Malaysia, and Malaysia to Nepal.

The day of the tests dawns and Zac is impressively sanguine.

I’m rather dubious as there are rolling strikes across the country, Big Pharma may just have cut Greece off altogether, there have been riots in Athens and there’s some noise about a 48-hour electricity blackout due to a workers’ strike. But the hospital has a generator, right?!

We head to the third floor. They give us a piece of paper.

We take it down to Admissions. They direct us to another Admissions desk, where two ladies are sitting at one desk. Their job, in its entirety, appears to be to direct us to the desk opposite, where the man has a computer and a printer.

We queue. And queue some more. The chicks opposite sit there doing nothing. I bitch to Zac about the efficiency issues in evidence here, after two years of Germanic reform.

“Yes,” says the guy behind me, in flawless English. “I’m a doctor, and the system here is crazy.”

A burst of Greek from the guy behind the desk, and our new friend takes us through to Aphrodite’s department, where they stop what they are doing to take my bit of paper, Zac’s details and a copy of the EHIC card, print out a yellow slip, staple it to the paper and send us up to the third floor again.

In Embarrassing Medical Specialism, I chat to the new Embarrassing Medical Specialist, and we make a new friend, another English speaker.

“What’s he in for?” he asks.

I tell him. “I’m having my prostate done,” he says, which in many countries and most social situtations would count as TMI and, given my gender, is possibly still TMI even on an Embarrassing Medical Ward. “I live in Athens, but I’m getting it done here because my nephew’s an opthalmologist here.”

Two hours later, blood has been taken, Zac has peed in the relevant number of cups, and a nurse comes in with a small machine plus what look very much like electrodes and attach them to his body like something out of Marathon Man.

“What’s that?” asks Zac nervously.

“I think it’s an ECG machine,” I say. And, once again, my irrelevant degree in Latin, Ancient Greek and Philosophy comes in handy. “Kardiografiki?” I ask the nurse.

“Yes,” she says.

Zac giggles at the marks the suction cups leave on his chest. A printout emerges.

We wait around. The surgery patients are collected together and taken down for chest X-rays.

We go back up. Again, we are taken as a group down to see the anaesthesiologist.

Our friend with the prostate trouble translates. “And he needs to come to hospital at 4pm the day before for preparation for surgery…”

“WHAT?” I say.

Neither Zac nor I want him to spend the night on an adult ward if we can help it. Or any ward, for that matter.

“But the Embarrassing Medical Specialist said he could come in in the morning,” I say, “Provided he didn’t eat after 8pm and no water after midnight.”

Our friend seems unwilling to translate anything that disagrees with the authority in front of me. “Eight. Monday. Embarrassing Medical Specialist. No feeding eight, no water twelve,” I say, in pidgin Greek. “EIGHT! MONDAY! EMBARRASSING MEDICAL SPECIALIST!”

“Oh,” says the anaesthesiologist, a little sulkily, via the translator. “If the consultant says so… I’m only an anaesthesiologist.”

By lunchtime, we have a file of paperwork and X-rays and I am as unwillingly familiar with this Greek hospital as I am with the driving license division in Bali.

Zac’s surgery is scheduled for Monday, when it appears the Embarrassing Medical Specialist is going to knock out twelve surgeries between his morning and afternoon ward rounds.

There is talk of a general strike. But everyone here, it seems, is so committed to their work, their patients and their country that they’re going to continue to work without pay.

For a system that is, pretty well, broken, it doesn’t feel all that broken at all.

Because, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from trips to doctors on three continents, the caring professions care wherever you are. Particularly if you’re a child.