When I said I wanted to fully experience life in Germany, I meant it. Everything - including such titillating life situations as minor sinus infections and major back disruption as a result of falling down stairs. The former was taken care of nice and early (my second day in Essen), it was treated without antibiotics (which are usually the mindless prescription of choice in Australia), much to my glee and healthful satisfaction. The latter I left until last week so I could have a couple of weeks running about the place exploring. So, clearly having had my fill of free movement and painless excitement, last monday night I hurled myself mercilessly down a flight of stairs en route to the laundry (If i keep this up, bearing in mind the broken leg story, i will become famous for my unbelievably-not-rock-n-roll injuries) and awaited with great anticipation the consequences. First to arrive on the scene was en enormous black bruise about the size of a good sandwich on focaccia bread (side-on view) on my butt. SEXY. for the first few days though, that was all and, thinking i had escaped unscathed, resolved to try harder next time. All was not painful but not quite right so when i visited the doctor for a check up on the other thing on thursday, so i had him check and he assured me that all was in order. on friday the situation deteriorated immensely and it began to appear that the good doctor's initial impression was horribly, horribly wrong. Thinking it would pass (because i´m smart and stuff) I went out for cocktails with Annabel anyway, and maybe a bit of salsa dancing. heh. The music was so loud I could scarce hear the faint voice of my brain´s pain centres saying 'i hope you're enjoying that, dickhead, it'll be the last significant movement you'll make for next 4 days.'
True to the word of my body, the next 4 days were spent either languishing in bed in a state of extreme discomfort or shuffling about the place like an old woman trying to use some time effectively to do washing etc (not a word mum, NOT A WORD.*) in a desperate wish not to waste a single second of my time here on such unexciting endeavours as lying around in bed for hours doing nothing. I couldn't even read, as I'd previously lost my glasses ('incredible, uninsured inconveniences' is also my list) so the existing headache already provided by my errant back would have been immeasurably worsened by my poor dysfunctional eyes trying to read without the assisstance of glasses. i'm typing this without glasses actually, but now i have painkillers :-) the glasses have been found, by the way, parents, so, crisis** averted.
Anyway, so, lying in bed, no entertainment, horrid horrid boring boring and then we had a visit to the Opera on Sunday night, which was incredible, didn't make any sense linguistically or visually but it was ever so pretty and the music and singing were amazing so i was happy through my head-splitting pain and enduring discomfort. On monday I went straight to the doctor, who told me again that all was in ordnung and that it would get better. bless. the man is a little touched. seriously though, he's very busy and can't always take the time to listen to idiots like me try to explain their problems in the clumsiest german ever. His brownie-points for being into natural medicine still hold, but I found this particular diagnosis rather unhelpful, because it WASN'T GETTING ANY BETTER. So, today, like any ignorant dickhead traveller, I decided I simply had to find an english-speaking doctor (words i later swallowed when i remembered my frequent ranting in australia about people who bloody come to a country and can't bloody speak the language). I thought this was a fairly reasonable idea given that english is the language of world and all that, and borrowed a phonebook from reception ('just look for a name that doesn't look german!', she says. hilarious. we're not in australia darling, there's no multiculturalism here, i've never seen such a long list of exclusively german-looking names in my life!) and started dialling. This phone quest taught me two things - german medical receptionists are either rude, or they lie. at this point the rudeness was preferable, because it turned out that when they said 'yes the doctor can speak english' what they actually meant was 'the doctor can barely speak english' - a rather large difference, the importance of which i clearly could not stress enough in my limited german. So i found a doctor who claimed to be able to speak english (pah) and went on my way. Another equally helpful person at reception gave me completely incorrect directions (this place was on the same street as me, so i´m thinking not too hard to find, right? we're at number 80, the doctor is at number 447. placid mcponytail here tells me it's 1 minute by car, so, he says, about 5 minutes by foot (i allow 30 mins for his gross overestimation of my speed capabilities at this point - did i mention shuffling about like a nanna?) in one direction (yes i´m sure, we checked that i understood by simultaneously pointing), and a little later i find that it is in fact an INCREDIBLY LONG WAY in the opposite direction. I don't know what he drives, but I've never seen a car that could do that distance in one minute.) which resulted in an extremely long and not terribly comfortable walk to the other side of the freaking city.
It was a nice walk though, fresh air and new scenery and all that, on which I made some fine discoveries - the first being frozen puddles in the street. Now that is some WINTER right there. The second discovery, a rather more useful one, was a sign for a physiotherapist. I quite like physiotherapists (all the anatomical know-how of a chiropractor without the gut-wrenching torture and besides, in Australia one has to be some kind of freak-genius to get into the course so i reason (on the shaky grounds of the queensland OP system) that they must know what theý're doing), I have quite a good one at home actually and when i was screaming her name at 1 o´clock this morning i was desperately wishing i had brought her with me, along with my hairdresser (oh the ends! the dry, splitting, knot-forming ends!!) and the lady who does my eyebrows (if i can't explain something as simple as 'i have nausea and ongoing back pain, and i'm also having shooting pains in my head and legs, which suggests to me that i may have compressed the vertebrae, putting pressure on the surrounding nerves. i probably just need bedrest and traction. no painkillers please, i`m a hippy and you can keep your chemicals, they'll only lie to me about the state of my body.´ in german, I've absolutely NO hope of effectively explaining how i want my eyebrows to some crazy german beautician (beauticians seem hard of hearing when it comes to instructions at the best of times) who moonlights as a butcher (oh they ALL do) in her spare time.
Anyway (geez, can you follow this? i can't), I decided to pay this physio a visit, her sign had a little stick figure in what looked like a happy pose standing in a triangle, which is, like, the strongest shape ever, or something, and at this point such icons were enough to engender enormous amounts of trust in me. She seemed lovely and her pamphlet had a picture of a person in traction (recommended by my dad - he may not know much about style but he knows a LOT about backs, and, oddly, WW2 history...) so she met the only two criteria i could think of at that point and i promised to go back to see her after my appointment with the reportedly english-speaking doctor.
Of course the doctor couldn't speak much english at ALL, but that didn't matter too much, because in all that time i'd spent in bed earlier in the day, i'd realised the laziness and ignorance of my demands for an english-speaking medical assisstance and written everything down in german, with helpful diagrams. And when i say diagrams i mean extremely bad pictures of stick figures falling down stairs and sitting on chairs ( chairs with 4 legs but NO percievable depth, by the way) with arrows pointing to pain spots and, my personal favourite, standing with a slightly bent back (to imply something is wrong - ok, it actually ended up looking like a provocative stick figure, which i wouldn't previously have thought was possible) and one arm bent to the head in a head-scratching motion to illustrate the 2/3 days in which nothing was clearly wrong but everything was definitely not right. ('cabin fever'... i hear you say... '4 days in bed and she went nuts'... and you're probably right, but they could finally understand what i was on about, so the method is largely unimportant). This pleased the doctor NO end, she didn't stop laughing for the whole appointment and then requested photocopies so she could take it home and show her husband and they could laugh it up all night. sure, it's hilarious if YOU'RE NOT THE STICK FIGURE!!! Anyway, now that someone finally understood what was going on, X-RAYs were ordered, painkillers were forcibly prescribed and return visits were requested. happy in the knowledge that something was finally being done, i visited the physiotherapist as well, because doctors don't know everything and physios are particularly good for back things and she had a prod about and took some of the pressure off. meanwhile, anyone who has ever spoken to me after i've been alone all day has an idea of the HORRENDOUS half hour of chatty-chat-chattiness (oh i can make SMALLTALK in german, oh yes.) she was subject to, but she´s a lovely girl and she humored my attempts at conversation with great aplomb.
So, tomorrow, off to the radiologist, back to the doctor and back to the physio ( i bet she can hardly wait) and possibly back to uni. For now, i´m enjoying the blissful lightheaded joy of painkillers – justine (justine is a pharmacist) is 600mg of ibuprofen 3 times a day a particularly high dose?? I only ask because i can´t feel my legs J
