More Adventures in the Greek Health Service

We awake predawn on the day of Zac’s surgery, for the trip to the regional hospital. By 8am Zac has a new piece of paper, a new yellow slip and we are on the Embarrassing Medical Ward awaiting a bed.

And waiting.

And waiting.

I grab the Embarrassing Medical Specialist to confirm something about the operation.

“There may be a problem,” he says. “He may not have the surgery today. There is a problem with the anaesthesiologist. I’ll let you know in ten minutes.”

Fuck. This is catastrophic. I try and explain.

Zac and I fly to Bali from Istanbul in just over a week. Because I knew he was having his op in Greece, I’ve arranged for him to fly from Bali to Australia to see his dad, then back into Malaysia, whence we have flights booked to Nepal.

Our next chance to get this surgery done – and it needs to be done! — is either Nepal (eek!) or China (difficult). Or, of course, I can forfeit £1000+ worth of flights and persuade his dad to forfeit a similar Aussie dollar sum and not see his son.

“I’ll let you know,” the surgeon says, and disappears.

Time passes.

“But what IS the problem with the anaesthetist?” says my dad.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Nobody’s telling me anything but ‘wait’.”

An hour or so later, Zac is installed in a room with an elderly lady whose equally venerable companion is engaged in a heated debate with the nurses over the speed at which her saline drip should be running.

My Greek, I realise, runs to comprehending the phrase: “You have NO idea what you are talking about!”

Nurses come round. The lady’s sheets are changed. Drips are changed. A catheter goes into Zac’s arm for the anaesthetist.

Great! He’s having surgery after all.

Another nurse comes round. She takes Zac’s temperature and sets up a chart at the base of his bed.

Zac, who has stayed up till midnight hydrating and woken at 6am, snoozes gently.

Surgery is, we understand, scheduled for 11.

11am comes and goes. A priest comes and goes.

My parents alternate between napping and asking what’s going on and when the surgery will happen. I head to the nursing desk and receive the firm injunction “Perimenete” – “wait”.

By noon, Zac is fully awake, has not eaten for 16 hours and has had no fluids for twelve. I return to the nurses’ desk to try and establish when and if he will have surgery.

“Eleven,” I say, piteously, in pidgin Greek. “Eleven! No water!”

The nurse looks at me sympathetically. “Wait,” she injuncts. “The doctor will come.”

“What time? What time sugary?” I say, miming eating and drinking. “Eleven! No eat! No water! What time sugary?”

A chap of around 40, neat in a polo shirt and jeans, pops up besides me, smiling tentatively.

“Hello,” he says, brandishing a stack of paper. “I am conducting a satisfaction survey on the Regional General Hospital. How is your experience today?”

The top of my head blows off.

Greece has been in compulsory reform for over two years, doctors and nurses haven’t been paid for months, pharmacists are refusing to supply the government and… the Greek health service is funding this survey?

I take a deep breath and struggle to be polite.

“Well,” I say. “My experience would be better if I knew when my son would have his surgery. He is eleven. He hasn’t eaten since 8pm and he’s had no fluids since midnight. And I’d like to know what time he will have surgery. Or, if he can’t have surgery, at least he can have something to eat and drink and go home.”

“Ooh!” says my mum brightly. She has been studying Greek. “I’ll do the survey.”

“OK,” says the chap doubtfully. “Maybe I’ll come back later?”

I go on a wander round the ward to see if anyone knows what’s going on, and find our friend from Friday on his way out with his nephew, the same doctor we met on Friday.

“What’s happened?” I say. “Are they not doing surgery today?”

“They’re doing surgery,” he says. “But I have a pacemaker. And the battery is low. They don’t have the right battery here, so I need to go to Athens.”

“Oh,” I say, and begin to wonder what will happen if the Greek health service collapses altogether.

Will people’s pacemakers just run down? Will folk die for the want of a battery? For the want of electricity to fuel the operating theatres? Can this really happen?! In Europe?!

Outside of the developing world, it is only the US that lets its citizens die – even children! Imagine that! – if they don’t have the funds to pay for treatment, a concept that is profoundly, intensely shocking to most non-Americans.

The notion of folk dying because the GOVERNMENT can’t pay is absolutely incomprehensible to me. As, I guess, to most Greek doctors and nurses, which is why the health service carries on.

“What is the problem with the anaesthiologist?” I ask.

Like most Greeks, they are horribly, horribly embarrassed by the state of their nation.

“There is a sort of strike,” he says. “Some doctors are part-striking because the government owes them money.”

“Bad doctors,” says the nephew, who is a doctor. “Only bad doctors would do this.”

I don’t know. Of course doctors can’t let people die. But doctors, like the rest of Greece, have families to feed.

My mum is passing the time by puzzling out the customer satisfaction survey and practising her Greek on the elderly lady’s visitor.

“Are they your children?” she asks.

“No,” my mum says. “My daughter. My grandson.”

“Really!” says the venerable lady, who may, now I look at her closely, actually be only ten years older than my mother. “Young granny! Young granny!”

Damn! I think.

I HAVE to give up smoking.

Then, I think, oh well! At least I conceivably look young enough to be Zac’s sister…

Or maybe she needs her eyes testing.

Time passes.

By 2pm, Zac, who has been reading uncomplainingly, calmly observes that he is both hungry and thirsty. It’s 18 hours since he last ate, and 14 hours since he last consumed fluids, and his protective grandfather is hopping mad.

I return to the nursing desk. The sympathetic nurse suggests to the others that she phones down to surgery.

No, they tell her, that will cause trouble.

I guess the last thing surgeons need when juggling an industrial dispute and merging surgical lists is someone ringing down to find out when the next one’s due down.

I take a little recce down to surgery anyway. Men in scrubs are coming and going and there is heated conversation behind closed doors. Clearly something is happening.

I come back up.

It’s the man with the customer satisfaction survey!

He takes one look at my face. “Are you happy with the communications here?” he asks. “Are there any communications problems?”

“Well,” I say. “I don’t think there are communication problems. Everyone’s being very good, and there’s a nurse who speaks English. It’s just that no one here really knows what’s going on.”

“Let me see what I can find out for you,” he says.

He goes over to the nursing desk and asks them to phone down to surgery. The nurses yell at him. He disappears into an office.

The customer satisfaction survey man comes back, crestfallen. I don’t know if there is ever a good day to be running customer satisfaction surveys on the Greek health service, but today certainly isn’t it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Today is a very bad day. We have some problems with the anaesthesiologist, and some of the doctors are refusing to work. The doctor will be on the ward soon and then you will learn what’s going on.”

I pop to the bathroom. There’s a kerfuffle in the ward.

I hear my dad’s voice. “Where’s Theo?”

I emerge.

Out of nowhere, Zac is in a surgical gown, on a gurney, and ready to go! It’s going to happen!

And it might all be down to the customer satisfaction survey man!

I grab my bag and trot to the lift with Zac and the orderly.

Down we go.

“I’m really excited to find out what a general anaesthetic feels like,” says Zac chirpily.

The orderly wheels him through the doors to surgery. “Perimenete,” he says.

I wait. And then I go and grab the grandparents. “He’s in,” I say. “He’ll be in about an hour.”

“Thank god for that,” says my dad. “I was convinced it was never going to happen.”

I pop out for a fag. All sorted!

A few minutes after my return, the doors to the surgery open. The Embarrassing Medical Specialist beckons me in.

Oh fuck, I think. Fuck, fuckity fuck, fuckity fuck, fuck, FUCK.

“I am sorry,” he says. “We cannot do this operation. For two reasons. One, we have an emergency. And two, the diagnosis is not quite correct – the operation is more complicated than what is on the list. I do adult medicine. This isn’t part of my daily schedule. You’ll need to go to the next provincial hospital, where they have a paediatric specialist.”

He explains the gory details, and why he’s not comfortable handling them. “But…” I say, and I begin my spiel about how we’ve only got a week now before we fly out of Istanbul.

“When are you next in England?” he says.

“Not until next summer,” I say.

“Greece?” he says.

“Next summer,” I say. “We won’t be back in Europe until next summer.”

“OK,” he says.

And in this I am lucky, in that Greeks are to be found the world over, and the notion of returning to the old country for surgery, or fitting in surgery around migratory movements, is not entirely alien to him. Not, of course, that I’d intended any surgery at all. I’d just asked my aunt to put Zac’s mind at rest about his fantasy problem…

“I will telephone my colleague in the next provincial capital,” he says. “Wait.”

“Where’s Zac?” I say.

“In there,” he says, pointing to the no-entry sign. Yes, my son is actually lying there, in theatre, wondering what DAFUQ is going on.

The surgeon changes out of his scrubs and we trot back up to the third floor, where Zac has just arrived. He is sitting up in bed, in his gown, looking confused.

“How was it?” I say.

“Well,” he says. “First of all it was two of them poking at me and babbling in Greek. Then they got a third one in, but it was always two at a time doing the poking. Then they went off into the office and babbled some more. And,” he adds with injured dignity, “They were LAUGHING in the office.”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s just gallows humour. Surgeons are terrible like that. Particularly Embarrassing Condition Surgeons. They’ll have been saying, ‘I don’t want that one. You want it? Fancy your chances? When did you last do an eleven-year-old? 1990? During training?’”

“They’ll have been taking the piss out of one of their colleagues,” says my dad. “Going, ‘Why don’t we give it to so-and-so? He thinks he’s such an expert…’”

“Or bitching about the guy who missed the diagnosis. Or trying to force each other to do it,” I say. “They spend their working day cutting up old men’s bladders and haven’t been paid for months. They need some light relief. It’s not about you.”

The consultant re-emerges, brandishing Zac’s records.

“I have spoken to the Paediatric Embarrassing Condition Specialist,” he says. “He’s expecting you at the next provincial hospital, fourth floor, at 10am tomorrow. Take the records with you. He can do the surgery either tomorrow or the day after.”

“Not today?” I say.

He shakes his head. “So Zac can eat and drink now?” I ask.

A nurse brings him yoghurt and toast.

“Do you have a number for the surgeon?” I ask. This hospital is an hour and a half’s drive from here, or almost three hours’ drive from my parents’ house, the town is popularly supposed to be the arsehole of the Peloponnese, and I don’t really fancy turning up on spec.

Also, if this date doesn’t come through, I’m going to need to do some serious rejigging of plans. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do at all.

The Embarrassing Medical Specialist goes off, and returns with the consultant’s mobile number.

Result! In the UK, we’d have been back in the system waiting months for a new appointment.

Yes, he says. Tomorrow. 10am. Fourth floor. He’ll see if he can do the surgery that day, and if he can’t, Zac will need to stay in overnight.

We will need to get up at 4.45am next day to make the bus to the new hospital. Yet again, Zac can’t eat or drink anything after midnight in case they have space for surgery that day. That means an hour’s drive, an hour and a half on the bus, and at least two hours hanging around a hospital with neither food nor fluids.

“I’m like a Mogwai,” Zac says cheerily. He has maintained an unfailing good humour through a second very long day. “Don’t feed me after midnight!”

On the way out, I thank all the staff sincerely. They are, every one of them, doing their very best under difficult conditions.