“¡Tengo dieciseis años! (I’m sixteen years old!)” I shouted frantically over the nurses’ chatter and the clatter of glass syringes on the metal cart. “¡No puedo perder tanta sangre! (I can’t lose that much blood!)”
The Spanish nurses ignored me, pushing the IV to a corner of the crowded room to make way for the two-tiered cart of syringes, clear liquids and gauze. “Aspetta, aspetta per favore! (Wait, please wait!)” I babbled in Italian, fear oozing into my language comprehension. I was going to die alone in a Spanish emergency room just because I had asked for a blood test. I don’t remember mentioning “Please drain me of all the blood I have and replace it with a mysterious clear liquid, por favor” in any of the three languages I can speak.
“Una análisis de sangre, sólo para seguridad (a blood test, just to be sure).”
I had become mildly concerned when I had watched first a swarm of tiny bumps march up my feet stopping at my knees, up my back starting at my waist, and from my shoulder to my elbow. Then I had noted the bumpy pink carpet as it completely covered my chest and arms. And now, my hands were so swollen with boils that I had to ask a friend to put my shoes on and open my water bottle for me. I surrendered and tattled on my mysterious rash, alerting my summer program’s staff.
But finding the cure was more painful than the affliction. A day earlier, a dermatologist had gouged out one of the boils on my hand for a lab biopsy and then stitched it up with coarse black thread--a scratch, he had told me in comforting English. Really, a lie or a mistranslation. I naively nodded consent, a universal signal.
Now I had learned from my error and no longer trusted Spanish doctors. They are notoriously lazy in Barcelona, working from 9 to 2, followed by siesta time, and then maybe returning back to work. Weekends? Debe estar bromeando (You’ve got to be joking). Emergencies must be at a convenient hour. I had walked into the emergency room with flaming hands and a mini Spanish-English dictionary on a Saturday afternoon. Not the time for an emergency, silly American girl.
A young doctor with dyed blonde hair had rolled her eyes at me, and explained step by step in a high pitched, overly enunciated voice that she was going to prick my arm and fill only a small vial with my blood and then using the same needle point to minimize pain, she was going to make my hands all better with a cortisone drip.
I looked at her beauty and squinted. Though she was the antithesis of the chubby, wheezing dermatologist with wispy white hair from the day before, she was Spanish and he was Spanish.
“¿Puede esperar un momento? (Can you hold on a moment?)” I dialed long-distance to my parents and explained the situation. Then while my aunt, a retired pediatrician, called me, my parents tried to reach my doctor. Then my aunt hung up so that my parents could call again, and my aunt called my mom’s cellphone to discuss the matter.
“Vale (Fine),” I agreed, holding out my right arm tentatively. Would this prick really be a prick? Or would it be a hole in my vein and then, oops lunch break, come back again in two days during the mid-morning and she’ll finish sewing up the wound that she herself, a professional doctor, inflicted?
I lay back, certain my picture would appear in medical textbooks throughout the country and throughout the world. Bad adjustment to Spanish tapas? Doubtful. Eczema? Perhaps. Allergy to gluten? Possibly. Herpes? Patient repeatedly denies, but doctors remain skeptical.
These professional diagnoses were just as ridiculous as the non-professional ones I had received earlier in the week. That Thursday afternoon, I had been in the computer room waiting for my friend Matt to finish his Google fix. “Do you have menopause?” he yelled to me. Heads turned. I shook my head no and awkwardly laughed.
“Then it’s not your progesterone.”
“Thanks, Matt.”
My second non-professional diagnosis: meningitis scare. For an Andalucian museologist, the best way to tell if someone has fatal brain and spine swelling is an indication of a fever.
At a quarter to two in the morning on that Saturday, one of my Spanish teachers, José, sprinted to my dorm room calling my room to tell me he was coming. As I waited outside my door in my pajamas, tired and utterly confused, he raced down the hallway flailing a thermometer. Without a word, he jabbed the thermometer into my armpit and waited for thirty seconds with deep concern carved on his young face. Before I could even ask, the thermometer was yanked away and held up to the ceiling light. “Estás bien (You’re okay),” he stuttered and left. “Buenas noches, (Good night)” I called out to him.
Now as the large IV bag drained into my bloodstream, my hands and arms were no longer hot, but the cortisone drip did not immediately make everything all better like the nurse had promised. The boils stubbornly refused to yield. In time the carpety rash turned from pink to white and shrank into little acne pimples. The boils on my hand turned from red to purple to white, shrank into squishy lumps and disappeared. The bumps on my legs and back became a tannish yellow color and left dotted remnants--a souvenir.
I had paid 100 euros for the emergency room, 70 euros for each of three dermatologist visits, 110 euros for the lab biopsy and 30 euros for meds. Diagnosis? Priceless. I was allergic to the sun.