Been feeling ill recently. Without boring you with the details, I needed a doctor's certificate. The rule here is that you need a doctor's certificate for each and every day you are off sick. And this meant that I had to throw myself into the national lottery that is the call out paramedic/doctor.
In the UK I believe you do this only once you've been off for 5 days. That way you do not burden an already overburdened NHS by calling out a doctor to confirm that you do indeed have the sniffles, and it is nothing to do with the fact that you've just really got into The Wire: Series 3 and you're shamming it for a working week.
Anyway, no certificate, no pay that day. This is so strictly enforced that a colleague of mine had to take a day off (unpaid) to get a sick note from his doctor (9 -5 appointments only) to get paid for his sick day. But had he not done that he'd have been marked down AWOL for a day, which is sackable, and consequently missed two days instead of one.
You never quite know what you're going to get with the medical system here, I find. Often it's excellent, efficient, highly professional. Often it is barkingly mad, with a level of informality that you literally would not believe. From my immediate circle I know one person whose gynecologist gives her a friendly pat on the bum at the end of each appointment, and someone who called a doctor out and, after he asked her a series of questions such as: "So, you alone in here?" he asked her out. Before he'd examined her. And an honorable mention for our midwife, who turned up, a good hour after she'd arranged to meet us, a good 4 hours after Katie's waters had broken, with an armful of liquidación shopping bags. Can't miss a bargain on a Saturday, baby or no baby.
This is not entirely surprising. This must be one of the only countries in the world where you do not need very high grades to study medicine. You do at UBA - the eminently respectable public University of Buenos Aires. But you don't at any number of private universities around the province. And I have taught some deeply average students who, a couple of years later appear back at school, comfortably completing their 2nd year in Med School. Terrifying. If some of them appeared at my bedside table, I'd operate on myself.
So I shouldn't have been surprised when Lady Doc arrived on Saturday evening. Maybe I was in a crap mood because Scotland had just been beaten by the Pumas. Again. Maybe it was because I had a temperature of 40 degrees. But after a mumbled Spanish conversation - bit tired... yes, I've been drinking water... no, I'm not on any medication.... yes, The Wire, it's excellent... - There was a slight misunderstanding regarding how long I'd "been here" (I thought she meant the country, she meant in bed... so I said 2 and a bit years), and I asked her for her diagnosis.
Lowering her stethoscope, she looked me in the eye and said:
- Very bad, your Spanish.
As you might imagine, it took me a little while to process this, partly because she spoke so slowly I had time to worry about the very bad... bit, assuming this related to my physical condition, and not my incorrect use of the subjunctive.
Furious, I took my ordens that work would need, and asked her a simple question.
- What's your job?
- I am doctor, she said.
- A doctor. Not a Spanish teacher then?
- No no, she joked.
- Then your job's done, isn't it? Out.
Which she did, without so much as asking for my number or even trying to pat me on the arse. What's coming to the profession?
