This morning I went to get my eyeballs checked. My medical coverage in the US is less than ideal; it doesn’t cover specs and choppers. There’s not much wrong with my eyes or my teeth and the exams are fairly standardized, so I do that stuff here in the snowglobe. It saves me a packet. (For the more personal under the hood stuff, I prefer to see my doc in Seattle, who I’ve been seeing for 10+ years. There are some language barriers I just don’t feel like climbing over.)
My mother-in-law (MiL) needed the same standard checkup so we went together. It was nice to have her there to help out with the administrivia. You can’t imagine how long it takes me to process such simple questions as “What’s your address?” I can do it, but there’s a delay, like the one they use for profanity on live TV.
The clinic is in an ancient building about 20 minutes drive from here. We arrived a few mintues early, checked in, and proceeded to sit around in the dingy waiting room for at least an hour. At one point I suggested we go for coffee and come back, but the receptionist said that we were next. What she meant to say was, “You have at least another half hour, but if you go, I’ll move you to the end of the line.” We flipped through the magazines and chatted with the other ladies about cross country skiing and where the nearest bakery was. (THESE are the Austrians I adore.) One of the ladies picked up a magazine, flipped it open, and hurled it back down in disgust. “What’s with all the naked?!” she exclaimed, exasperated. I picked it up later to discover that, yup, it was pretty much porn. (Note to self: Add “porn in doc’s office” to list of things that are different in Austria.)
I wandered out to the loo at one point and stood on the landing waiting. The building has those crazy arched ceillings and stairs built out of 6×6 timbers and just up from where I was standing was one of those iron doors to keep out the Huns, or whatever. There was a swastika scratched in to the paint at the base of the stairs leading up to the next floor, just to the right of the entry to the clinic. I spend a lot of time trying to clear my preconcieved notions of what central Europeans are like, but I still find myself stunned from time to time. I’m not in the graffiti covered bathroom in a bar or at an urban bus stop, so what the hell? I’m not jumping to wild conclusions about anything here, but wouldn’t you think if someone had scrawled “Fuck You” on the wall outside the door to your clinic, you’d get it painted out, pronto? Do people just not notice? Is it just white noise to them? I don’t get it. I just don’t.
A-hem. Insert my usual rant here, then move on. Central Europe, boys and girls, is hard sometimes for a Jewish girl, even one as not-Jewish as I am.
Finally, after what seemed like an awfully long wait, it was my turn to see the doc. She was a chatty 60ish gal, no doubt nearing retirement. Competent, surely, please don’t project dotty. The office was a huge dim chamber furnished with nearly nothing but an imposing desk and the usual “lean your forehead here” apparatus. She was a nice lady and the exam, in spite of the peculiar setting, was a fair proximity to the exam I’d get back at my fancy Seattle clinic. My prescription doesn’t need changing, the eyeballs are fine, thank you, and I was on my way, everything covered by my state insurance plan. A bargain, even if you subtract the emotional trauma inflicted by graffiti. Well, maybe not.
MiL took me for lunch after we both got our clean bills of health. We buzzed in to Liezen and as we passed the newly renovated Arcade shopping center, she asked me what I thought of it. I told her. “It looks like a dumpster,” I said, honestly. I went on to explain that it doesn’t look like just any dumpster, it looks like the bear safe dumpsters you see in the National Parks in Canada and the US. “It’s almost exactly the right shape, and they’re green too.” I asked her how it was faring with the locals. “I can’t speak for the people of Liezen,” she said, “but everyone I’ve talked to thinks it’s an eyesore.” (At this point you should be really impressed because we had this entire conversation in German.)
I had a frisbee sized piece of turkey schnitzel for lunch, MiL had the lunch special. We talked a lot about health insurance stuff, topical, since we’d just been at the doc, eh? (Also in German. Hello!) She told me how the national health care system in Austria is running out of money and followed that with a crazy story of a guy who had to go to three different cities to find a doctor after being involved in a bad accident. I learned that there’s a whole thing going on with state vs. private docs. The eye doc we saw was a state doc – this means that the insurance company will cover the costs. (This might explain the dingy clinic but I’m not sure. Our dentist is a state dentist and his clinic is really quite nice.) If you see a private doc, you pay the doc directly and then submit a claim to the insurance company. You get a refund for a portion of the expense, but you’re never sure in advance how much you’ll be getting back. The state allocates a certain number of docs to a region, so if you want to open a practice, you have two choices: go where there’s a state slot open or open a private practice. Some docs do both, I’m not clear on how that works. Maybe it depends on who your insurance provider is.
The place we ate lunch is in the same building that’s soon to house a swank new clinic. We wandered through the lobby to see what was there…the dermatologist, a couple of GPs, something called a “sports opthomologist.” It looks like there’s going to be a coffee stand in the entry way so you can get a little java to keep you perked up through your morning wait. This place also appeared to be remarkably free from Hun proof barriers and graffiti. Worth the extra expense? Maybe next time I’ll find out.