Me Who Writes: Leaving Spain
My favourite photo of the whole trip: The Alhambra at dusk, Granada, Spain
When the ambulance driver turned on the siren, I started to cry. Just over five weeks into our eight-week long Spanish adventure, the wailing noise was for me. It’s a very different feeling hearing a siren when you’re the one in the back of the ambulance.
I was strapped in sitting up. Geo was across from me. Just above him, I could see the side of the ambulance driver’s head through a small window.
“He looks like Dan,” I said through my tears.
“Stop crying,” said Geo. “The siren is just to get through traffic. And he doesn’t look anything like Dan.”
“He does,” I wailed. “He looks just like Dan.”
I needed to see a resemblance between my driver and our calm, capable, confident, ER doc nephew. I needed Dan to be at the wheel of my Spanish ambulance to my Málaga hospital. When we arrived at emergency, I thanked the driver. Geo was right. He looked nothing like our nephew. He looked about twelve.
It was day five of me being sick in Spain. On day one, I had started to feel unwell. On days two and three, I rested and tried to keep fluids in me. On day four, we went to a farmacia. You can’t buy over-the-counter medication, even an aspirin, anywhere in Spain except at a farmacia. The pharmacist gave me something she said would help. It didn’t. On day five, Geo asked our hotel to call a doctor, who came to our room. He gave me an injection for the pain and wrote some prescriptions. That night, those prescriptions made me sicker. On day six, Geo called that doctor again. He said I needed to go the hospital. He said he would send “a ride.” It never occurred to me it would be an ambulance.
While I was going through the admitting process in Emergency, Geo stepped out of the room for a moment. As soon as he was gone, a man popped in through another door. “I am the doctor,” he said. He took my pulse and said something in Spanish. Then he left. I never saw him again. I don’t know if he was real or not.
A few hours later, now up in my room, I asked for water and was told that my doctor said I was to have nothing by mouth. The next morning, after being denied food and water for almost twenty-four hours, I finally met the real doctor. The first thing I did was ask her why I couldn’t eat or drink. I never said that, she said.
The bed was narrow and hard. The nursing staff were kind but communicating with them was difficult. Nevertheless, I started to get better. My doctor told me I had a viral infection of the digestive system. Which virus did I have, I asked. She laughed and listed off about five. Pick one, she said, there are so many these days.
This hospital had little interest in putting labels on things like viruses. Or patients. I never had a wrist band. There was no chart at the end of my bed, no name on my door. No one checked to make sure I was the right patient for what they were doing. I thought it was strange, but decided not to worry about it. Unless they tried to take me for surgery. I would have resisted that.
After two days, they released me. The doctor told me to wash my hands and eat a lot of yogurt, but NO sugar. No cakes, she said, waving her long elegant Index finger at me. Then she shook her thick mane of raven hair and walked away. All she needed was a flashing red skirt and crimson blossom behind her ear and she could have been my treasured Spanish doll from my childhood collection.
Geo and I took a long gentle downhill walk back to our hotel. It felt so good. When we got there, I went straight to bed.
Alas, I wish that was the end of the story. My unlabelled virus was very stubborn and a week later, in another city, I was back in a hospital, this time for five days. This was a much different hospital. They had wristbands and charts and labels for everything. The bed was wide and comfortable. The administrator told me that Geo, rockstar ‘acompañero’ that he is, had brought me to the best hospital in Seville. They would look after me, she said. And they did.
But it all came with a price, both literally and figuratively. Navigating a sudden illness is difficult enough, but doing it far from home, in a foreign language, all the while dealing with travel health insurance bureaucracy takes a toll. Before we were eager to explore. Now we are tired and ready to come home. I know I will take some time to process this experience and at some point I will write about Spain in particular and travel in general, but for now, I just want to get home and sleep in my own bed.
As our trip winds down, I want to share some of my favourite photos of what has certainly been an unforgettable experience.
Violins in a Valencia window.
Geo and me in windy Mijas, taken by a friendly fellow traveller.
Parque Natural on the scary road to Ronda.
A Granada street.
An adult playground/workout area by the Mediterranean in Marbella.
A garden of peace at the Nasrid Palace in Granada.
Boy, ship, and sea at the beach in Málaga.
The waterfront walk in Málaga
The gold tower in Seville.
Just out of the hospital. Geo took me for a Seville carriage ride.
Thanks so much for reading and subscribing to Me Who Writes. The next newsletter will be a change of pace. No more travel. It’s time for me to start telling you about how I spent the last ten years writing my new book, She Who Burns, coming out this summer.
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