Sister Pearl's World

An adventure in socialized medicine

The exhaustion from the intense heat and all the travelling (and possibly some bad mariscos) finally caught up with me yesterday. I threw up and passed out right in the middle of a shop in downtown Madrid. When I regained a bit of consciousness, my husband and all the shopkeeperswere around me, asking if I needed the ambulance. All I could think was, no, I´m not a citizen, we can´t afford an ambulance, I can take care of this. I kept hearing one of the women saying, ´Es palida, muy palida´ (she´s pale, so pale), and a customer who was a doctor was checking my pulse, and he and my husband were both saying to the shopkeeper to call the ambulance, and I was just too afraid of how we were going to pay for it, but I didn´t have the wherewithal to make any kind of response.

The ambulance arrived promptly. They weren´t going to let my husband in, but he told them I don´t speak much Spanish, (which is only kind of true — I know enough to describe symptoms and tell what happened, but not enough for more technical medical terms, and truthfully, in the moment, I was so disoriented that I couldn´t even speak much English) so they let him in to help translate.They checked my pulse, which is always very low, but this was dangerously low, and they put me on the stretcher with my feet up and head down. After a few minutes of the blood coming back to my head, I started to feel well enough to talk. The EMTs began to take my information. My husband took my passport out of my bag, and Rafa (one of the EMTs) started writing on a form. I was still thinking, okay, this is the billing part, where we´ll go home to the States and get this crazy bill, and then it´s going to be a headache trying to pay it overseas and transfer dollars to euro, it doesn´t matter that my husband is a Spanish citizen, I´m not, I´m going to get charged up the nose. I started to say, okay I´m feeling better, and I was ready to go. I wasn´t, but I am so used to the American system of drive-through rapid medicine, you get ten minutes before they rush off to the next pateint. But Rafa and Jesus laughed and told me to lie back down, there´s no rush, they weren´t going anywhere until I was okay. And they were being honest — I stayed in the back of the ambulance for around 45 minutes. They didn´t let me go until I could stand up and walk on my own, until the color had returned to my face, until I could have full and coherent conversations, until they were sure I was alright.

Later I asked my husband how they would bill us. He laughed. ´Babe, welcome to socialzed medicine. There is no bill. They take care of you for free.´ I said, yeah, I know they take care of you citizens for free, but I´m not a citizen. He shook his head and told me that it doesn´t matter who you are, if you get sick or injured or whatever in Spain, you´re taken care of. You don´t have to worry about whether or not to seek care based on whether or not you can afford it. If you need help, you get help. Rafa looked at my passport, not for billing, but just for ID and to make sure he was spelling my name correctly on the medical forms.

What a society.

What does it say about the US system to which I am so accustomed, that I was more worried about how we were going to pay for an ambulance than I was about getting well?