Ahh. I wish I didn't even have to write this post. Partially because I wish that the occurrence never happened, and partially because I feel like I've creeped enough people out with my description of the event.
So here is your final warning that if you're squeamish, maybe stop reading here, it may get slightly gruesome.
Here goes nothing. Tuesday night my roommates and I got home from a very long day at school, with the thoughts of a very long night ahead of us lingering on our minds, because we had our final sketchbooks due for Reading Cities that coming Thursday. After making dinner I decided to clean up the dishes a little bit, so that we wouldn't have to do it later when we were totally exhausted (plus it's actually become a very relaxing practice for me). In our apartment we like to save as much as possible and reuse what we can, so we reuse jars a lot. My roommate had used one earlier in the day to take her lunch to school, so it needed washed. I was simply going through my normal washing routine and put the sponge into the jar, fut what fingers I could in with it, and was sweeping around when I looked down and saw that I was bleeding in between my pinky and ring fingers. I took my hand out of the jar and looked at the rim, which was no longer smooth but quite jagged. I looked back down at my finger and saw that it was bleeding quite a lot. I took a closer glance and saw it was also quite deep.
From there I was just thinking "Great, this is going to ruin my whole plan for the night."
I called my roommates, although I didn't quite know that to say so it sort of came out as "Shoot. Umm, guys, this isn't good."
My one roommate Rachel glanced over and cringed. My other roommate, Christian, happily rushed to her room to get her first aid kit. We got it rinsed off, got my butt into a chair, and Rachel was doing her best at holding some gauze in between the two fingers while applying ample pressure. Meanwhile Christian had been appointed the one to call for an ambulance, her Italian being better than Rachel's and all.
This is where is starts to get interesting.
They didn't pick up.
We were given a list of numbers to call in an emergency, and not one of the picked up.
So after getting in contact with some of the awesome people who work at our school, Rachel and I ended up walking to the Emergency room that was a few blocks away.
We had initially thought to handle it by ourselves. Even though we had a lovely lady, Beatrice, who is on-call 24/7 by the school to help us with situations like this, we were hoping it'd be an easy enough process that we wouldn't have to drag her out of her house at 10pm.
But we ended up having to be jerks and making her come down.
The ER's in Italy are just unrecognizably different from those I'm used to in the states (and yes, I can say that I'm used to them since I've been in them several times in my childhood. Klutz syndrome.) There was no one to be found, no one came up to us as we wondered in, but plenty of people staring at the doe-eyed and clearly confused English-speaking girls.
We decided to wait outside in the fresh air for Beatrice.
As soon as she arrived, the rest of the process was quite smooth. They usually rank you on the level of urgency, but it wasn't super busy that night and I'm fairly certain that Beatrice played my injury up slightly, so I got in right away.
They took off the gauze and disinfected the wound. And since I had said that I wasn't entirely sure whether or not there was still glass in there, the doctor had a bit of fun (and by fun I mean not for me) squishing the cut all around. Coming to that conclusion that it was probably clear, they then told me that I wouldn't be getting stitches, but they were going to use glue instead. My haunch is that because the cut was through the webbing of my fingers that they couldn't stitch it and gluing was the easier option. Either way, it was a pretty quick process.
Rachel made more grotesque faces pointed towards my hand, the glue stung a bit, I said things poorly in Italian, and the whole thing was over. I was just directed to keep the butterfly wrapping on for the next 7 days, to keep it out of water, and I was done.
We were given a piece of paper with a barcode on it and directed to a machine outside of the ER in order to pay. Now, when we travel abroad with my university we are required to buy insurance, which we were also told would cover our trips to doctors. But unfortunately nothing in Italy is that easy. Since my trip to the ER only cost €26 I was required to pay. But if the bill had reached over €30, my insurance would have covered it. I'm not complaining (too much) because I had the money and my hand wasn't falling apart anymore.
And that was basically my encounter with the Italian health system. I've had a few set backs in the healing of my hand since then, but at this point it's looking pretty good. Unfortunately it set me back in a lot of my school work, since architecture classes are almost all hands-on, thus my absence on here updating you guys. And I fear that it's only going to get worse, what with only a few weeks left of classes leaving me with finals and final-production. So you all may or may not get my spring break update before I get home. I also want to update you all on my studio project, but what I want to do and what I have time to do are often two separate worlds.
Anyways, sorry for my extended absence and sorry in advance for the absence that is bound to come. But thanks for all of you that stick with me!
So here is your final warning that if you're squeamish, maybe stop reading here, it may get slightly gruesome.
Here goes nothing. Tuesday night my roommates and I got home from a very long day at school, with the thoughts of a very long night ahead of us lingering on our minds, because we had our final sketchbooks due for Reading Cities that coming Thursday. After making dinner I decided to clean up the dishes a little bit, so that we wouldn't have to do it later when we were totally exhausted (plus it's actually become a very relaxing practice for me). In our apartment we like to save as much as possible and reuse what we can, so we reuse jars a lot. My roommate had used one earlier in the day to take her lunch to school, so it needed washed. I was simply going through my normal washing routine and put the sponge into the jar, fut what fingers I could in with it, and was sweeping around when I looked down and saw that I was bleeding in between my pinky and ring fingers. I took my hand out of the jar and looked at the rim, which was no longer smooth but quite jagged. I looked back down at my finger and saw that it was bleeding quite a lot. I took a closer glance and saw it was also quite deep.
From there I was just thinking "Great, this is going to ruin my whole plan for the night."
I called my roommates, although I didn't quite know that to say so it sort of came out as "Shoot. Umm, guys, this isn't good."
My one roommate Rachel glanced over and cringed. My other roommate, Christian, happily rushed to her room to get her first aid kit. We got it rinsed off, got my butt into a chair, and Rachel was doing her best at holding some gauze in between the two fingers while applying ample pressure. Meanwhile Christian had been appointed the one to call for an ambulance, her Italian being better than Rachel's and all.
This is where is starts to get interesting.
They didn't pick up.
We were given a list of numbers to call in an emergency, and not one of the picked up.
So after getting in contact with some of the awesome people who work at our school, Rachel and I ended up walking to the Emergency room that was a few blocks away.
We had initially thought to handle it by ourselves. Even though we had a lovely lady, Beatrice, who is on-call 24/7 by the school to help us with situations like this, we were hoping it'd be an easy enough process that we wouldn't have to drag her out of her house at 10pm.
But we ended up having to be jerks and making her come down.
The ER's in Italy are just unrecognizably different from those I'm used to in the states (and yes, I can say that I'm used to them since I've been in them several times in my childhood. Klutz syndrome.) There was no one to be found, no one came up to us as we wondered in, but plenty of people staring at the doe-eyed and clearly confused English-speaking girls.
We decided to wait outside in the fresh air for Beatrice.
As soon as she arrived, the rest of the process was quite smooth. They usually rank you on the level of urgency, but it wasn't super busy that night and I'm fairly certain that Beatrice played my injury up slightly, so I got in right away.
They took off the gauze and disinfected the wound. And since I had said that I wasn't entirely sure whether or not there was still glass in there, the doctor had a bit of fun (and by fun I mean not for me) squishing the cut all around. Coming to that conclusion that it was probably clear, they then told me that I wouldn't be getting stitches, but they were going to use glue instead. My haunch is that because the cut was through the webbing of my fingers that they couldn't stitch it and gluing was the easier option. Either way, it was a pretty quick process.
Rachel made more grotesque faces pointed towards my hand, the glue stung a bit, I said things poorly in Italian, and the whole thing was over. I was just directed to keep the butterfly wrapping on for the next 7 days, to keep it out of water, and I was done.
We were given a piece of paper with a barcode on it and directed to a machine outside of the ER in order to pay. Now, when we travel abroad with my university we are required to buy insurance, which we were also told would cover our trips to doctors. But unfortunately nothing in Italy is that easy. Since my trip to the ER only cost €26 I was required to pay. But if the bill had reached over €30, my insurance would have covered it. I'm not complaining (too much) because I had the money and my hand wasn't falling apart anymore.
And that was basically my encounter with the Italian health system. I've had a few set backs in the healing of my hand since then, but at this point it's looking pretty good. Unfortunately it set me back in a lot of my school work, since architecture classes are almost all hands-on, thus my absence on here updating you guys. And I fear that it's only going to get worse, what with only a few weeks left of classes leaving me with finals and final-production. So you all may or may not get my spring break update before I get home. I also want to update you all on my studio project, but what I want to do and what I have time to do are often two separate worlds.
Anyways, sorry for my extended absence and sorry in advance for the absence that is bound to come. But thanks for all of you that stick with me!
No comments:
Post a Comment