Testing the Waters

On Monday, R., showed me where the ‘best’ swimming spot in town was – a small, wooded, rocky cove, a bit further along the coast road from the more popular, more crowded, better known beaches in town. It was a treacherous walk down a steep incline. Unlike the beaches in the United States, it seems as if every beach here hosts at least one café, often more than one, where swimmers and sun-worshippers alike can refresh themselves. The café of this beach was perched on the side of the hill, and we stopped for beverages before continuing down to the beach.

The beaches in Bar are also unlike most of the beaches in the United States, in that they are covered in smooth, rounded stones. The sea was a brighter blue in color than the ocean. It was saltier. The waves were smaller, lacked white caps.

I swam out to the furthest jagged rock and clutched it, watching boats sail past, thinking how my sisters and I would have played in the water had they been there, wondering how many generations of people had clung to the same rock and watched the horizon.

R. joined me and asked how it compared to the Jersey Shore. His gold chain bobbed in the water.

When we finally emerged from the water and sat on the warm, pebbled beach, his brother noticed the small but steady lines of blood trickling from scrapes on my legs. Despite my protests that it was nothing, they must have grazed one of the rocks, there was much talk of my ‘wounds’ and my colleague disappeared and quickly returned with a shotglass of slivovica, which he carefully poured over my legs, and a paper towel, with which I daubed at the stinging cuts. We then stopped at the café again, and watched the sun set.

On Tuesday night, the top part of my left foot began to hurt; it was painful to put any weight on it, but the pain was only on the top part, where the muscles covered the bones. A dose of my bright pink Kosovar buprofen helped.

On Thursday morning, I woke up to find that it was a shade of violet that, although often admired in flowers and sunsets, is only alarming on feet, particularly when, as now, the appendage in question has visibly swollen in the past seven hours to the point that the outlines of the bones cannot be discerned. I got dressed, popped a buprofen out of the rapidly emptying foil blister pack, walked to work mulling over worst-case scenarios, which included at one point weighing the possibility of flesh-eating bacteria on the rocks my foot had touched (my father and grandfather had at one time related numerous horror stories of the sorts of diseases and infections endured by acquaintances, including one furnace repairman who as best recollected had lost a hand after scratching a finger on the job, and although these stories did not include anything acquired in the Mediterranean, the memories of them did little to ease my mind) versus the potential limitations of the healthcare policy that probably ought to have been investigated prior to my departure. Although a dose of the buprofen every five hours allowed me to function, I reasoned that it would probably be a good idea to get my foot looked at, wished that I were back in Serbia where I knew several medical students and a doctor who could have given me advice, decided against worrying my parents until I knew for sure one way or the other, and somehow made it up the four flights of stairs to the office (the Socialist architects apparently not having seen any reason to include a lift in their blueprints) and through my morning interview. After which, while walking back, I mentioned my problem to R., who said that he had no idea what should be done but that he would ask my female colleagues. He did so, as soon as we entered the office, by announcing that ‘She has a problem, a question that only women can answer,’ repeating this in two different ways, each time sounding somehow worse than the previous, and quickly vacating the room, leaving two startled but anticipatory faces looking toward me.

The array of possible issues accurately introduced in such a way is of course limited, and my colleagues seemed quite relieved that the ‘women’s problem’ was with my foot, despite its darkened hue, rather than with something that would have been more difficult to translate. One, S., accompanied me to an Apoteka, or pharmacy, where they asked if I had put anything on it. Although I thought it had been doused with the rakija, I could not specifically remember – it seemed to be more of a puncture wound than a scrape, and had not bled very much – and in any event, the woman behind the counter said that it would have to be looked at by a doctor.

We walked a block to the emergency room, which was in the same complex as some doctors’ offices, which we entered first. I am not sure of the architectural symbolism of Yugoslav buildings, but someone had apparently given into a creative impulse when designing these. We walked into the doctor’s building and down the corridor, past staring pensioners clutching colored forms and lining up at various windows, and soon ended up precisely where we had begun – the building was circular, an endless loop, a Mobius strip of healthcare bureaucracy. S. led me out of the building and around the side to the emergency room. A dilapidated and thankfully unoccupied stretcher, its pleather supports peeling from the metal handles, rested in the entrance; a yellow plastic back-board was propped against it; outside, an ambulance was parked, waiting, and the mountains rose in the distance beyond. S. talked in Serbian with a woman behind a sliding window, who had short brown hair and a bright red medical technician jacket. Then she turned to me, and said, ‘If anyone asks, you are from England. You need to get an x-ray now, follow her.’ As we walked outside and to yet another building, S. commented, ‘We are very lucky that she is doing this – if she said that you were from America, it would be three or four times as much money.’

We passed through double-doors. The woman in the red jacket hustled us past several elderly people who looked obviously ill. One man whose face was deeply creased, his arm was across the shoulder of a slightly less wrinkled younger man, was supported from the building. It was unclear whether the people in the hall, with their canes and walkers and younger family members, were waiting for the x-ray; they, at any rate, said nothing, but watched, looking for something wrong with this newcomer that would account for her presence among the aged. We were joined by a white-coated, balding man who resembled a spectacled egg, passed through one room in which the only speck of color was a shelf of orange-wrapped Kodak paper, and into another which was occupied by a large and intimidating-looking machine which I was told to get onto. The egg-man spoke in Serbian to my colleague, who translated for my benefit. Then, while positioning my foot in front of the camera, he abruptly asked, in English, ‘Are you pregnant?’ I, of course, immediately responded, ‘No.’ He then turned and motioned my colleague and the emergency room woman from the room, followed them out, and shut the door. I sat and waited for the machine to click and doubted the necessity of x-raying my bones when the problem was not with them.

Those three words would be the only ones in English that he uttered in the entire process, which took an interminable amount of time and cost 15 Euros.

Afterward, as we once more followed the red-jacketed woman, who now bore the photograph of the bones of my foot, back to the emergency room, S. said that when I paid for the visit, I should also tip the woman a couple of Euros for coffee because she was doing me such a favor by saying that I was from England. Once in the emergency room, the red-jacketed woman gave the x-ray to a doctor, who carried it to a back room and put it up to a light before announcing that my bones were fine, the foot was fine, I should continue taking buprofen. She seemed to have no intention of inspecting the foot itself; seemingly reluctant even to tell me to sit on the examination table, she poked at the swollen part and then at the cut with her fingers, announced that it was fine, and almost as an afterthought scrawled the names of two medications that I might take for it. The red-jacketed woman, meanwhile, had swabbed some iodine over the cuts.

That was it. S. and I went back to the window. The red-jacketed woman went back to her side and started shuffling papers. The doctor came and sat next to her. They started discussing something. I waited to be handed a form to sign. At some point, S. said to give the tip then, and I absently gave her a 5 Euro note, which she handed to the woman behind the counter saying, ‘For coffee,’ in Serbian. The woman made a show of refusing it and handing it back across the counter, but when S. insisted and set it on the counter next to the woman’s arm she pretended not to see it. A little while later, S. named an amount to me – 12 Euros – and it was paid.

As we finally left the emergency room, S. commented that she didn’t usually tip, but that the woman had done me a favor and it would have been much more expensive if she had written that I was from a non-EU country. Also, she continued, they had been discussing how much money to charge me, and had been thinking of charging 20 Euros for the doctor consultation, so after we tipped them, they had lowered that price. This was news to me, since although there had seemed to be something odd about the tipping situation I had not realized that it was actually a sort of bribery to keep prices down. Later, someone else advanced another thought – that it had been in their interest to say that I was British, because they would have had more forms to fill out, and it would have been more work for them, to say that I was from elsewhere.

In any event, the entire experience (x-ray, ‘consultation’ to be told that I should continue taking the same pills I was already taking, and medicine – only one tube of which was actually medicine, and which cost less than 2 Euros, but there was some other ridiculous American-made concoction called BioFreeze, the main ingredient of which appears to be menthol, that cost almost 8 Euros) set me back 40 Euros, which was nearly all of my per-diem for my time in Bar. The thought that it might have cost even more, and that the price was determined solely by the two women behind the desk, and that it was only luck that we happened upon someone who made the decision to misreport my nationality is enough to make me shudder. On the other hand, it was a tremendous relief not to have to fill out any of the health insurance and other forms that are inevitably part of a medical visit in the U.S., especially as they would have been in a language that I do not speak and I probably would not have understood what I was agreeing to or waiving. (Additionally, although the x-ray was rather pricey and I never thought that my bone was injured, it was still better care than my mother received in Taiwan two decades ago when she broke her foot and it went undiagnosed… at least they checked, here.)