A real pain in the side

I fell off my bike. I would very much like to sulk, which is maybe one of the reasons for this column. Let me indulge myself a little and tell you a little story. On hitting the tarmac, one thought that went through my mind was that I might have broken my rib. My wife was somewhat surprised at seeing me reappear with my hair matted with blood. “You’re in shock,” she said. Then my breathing became laboured so we drove to the local private hospital. When my son broke his collarbone they patched him up within half an hour but it wasn’t quite the same for me.

I thought it a little odd that on relieving us of PLN 250 they asked me to queue to see a nurse. But no one seemed that fussed anyway to call in new patients. When I did stagger to my feet to knock on the door I was rather unceremoniously sent away. But after another interminably long wait I eventually was summoned.

“I think I’ve broken a rib,” I said. The only medical decision I witnessed that morning was taken just then. She put me in a wheelchair. Somehow the mere fact that I was seated comfortably suddenly meant that I could more or less breathe normally again. She then wheeled me off to see the osteopath – or rather, left me in the corridor outside his door. Twenty minutes later he wheeled me into his surgery only to discover that I wasn’t who he thought I was and then wheeled me out again, dumping me by the door facing in a random direction. Eventually yet another nurse came. She kept on burbling on about a card and I didn’t have a clue about what she was talking about. Then she went off to reception, to find out more, but somehow failed to even ascertain who I was. Twenty minutes later she came back and then I told her I was here with my wife. So she wheeled me off to look for her. We went back to the reception. Words were exchanged above my head, but when I heard that the doctor “didn’t do ribs”, with these words not addressed to me on the assumption that I wouldn’t understand them anyway, that was the point I lost my rag. I told my wife we should leave, demand a refund and I’d just spend a week in bed with over the counter painkillers and then I was left waiting in the original corridor. Somehow my wife then turned up with the document that would allow me to be x-rayed and we set off to join my fourth queue of the day. When I was called in, it was to be told that the document was invalid because it didn’t state why an x-ray was thought necessary. Back we went to reception. The nurse then wheeled me back to the x-ray room, but this time there was no technician present to take the photo and so she decided to disappear. Again I was left to wait helplessly for Godot in a corridor. However, after a further twenty minutes the technician did turn up and I was wheeled back to the doctor, who I still hadn’t seen. I was informed that my x-rays would take at least a couple of hours to write up. God alone knows why. But she at least promised me some painkillers. I was then wheeled off to a private room to be tortured by the delights of Polish daytime television. For three hours. Eventually I had had enough and made my way back to reception to ask them about my x-rays. And – surprise, surprise! – I’d broken a rib.

I still feel angry because the osteopath “just didn’t do ribs”. It struck me that when the hospital cocked up everybody suddenly seemed to care about which piece of paper would be the best shield for their own backsides. Back in 1995 when I first started working in Poland I was paid by cheque. The only way to cash it was to walk into Pekao bank and join what must have been the longest queue you could ever encounter. At the end of it they would take the cheque and give me a blue token so I could join what seemed the second longest. My flatmate almost went to prison because nobody ever told him it was obligatory to fill in tax returns every year. And then there was the time I went to the tax office to be told that they could not find five years worth of my returns. I offered to fill them out again but that turned out to be a criminal offence. And what on Earth is this replacing of number plates when you buy a car? When I left the UK in the 1990s you re-registered a car by chucking the documents in the post. In this country, if you can hear a strange rumble of thunder coming from Konstancin it’s my father-in-law screaming at being unable to register a car he bought on hire purchase in my wife’s name because some bureaucrat has asked for documents he simply doesn’t have. Poles pride themselves on what they call kombinowanie, which is finding a way around the rules. A useful skill in communist times. But it’s almost thirty years since that ended and the Polish penchant for paperwork shows no signs of being consigned to the past.