Day 148 - Romanian Medicine

I told the members of the class that asked to remain with me about the theft of my soy sauce. I shared that I thought it would be funny to see the thieves' faces as they poured out and sipped what they thought would be some exotic liquer and instead got a mouth full of salt.  I had ordered the soy sauce from an international import company because it wasn't available in Romaia. My students told me there used to be soy sauce in the stores, but no one bought it because they didn't know how to cook with it. And that is when I invited them to have a Chinese meal for lunch one Tuesday. I not only had soy sauce, I also had oyster sauce. And with chicken and vegetables usually available, I was confident I could put together an acceptable Chinese meal.

milk bottle image by NickPiggot,
via Flickr.com

The morning of the lunch, just as I was getting started with the preparations, there was a knock on my door. When I answered it, two of my students, Miriam* and Elena*, from that class were there. I asked why they had come so early and because they didn't answer my question, it appeared to me that they had forgotten my invitation. Instead, they asked if I had milk. Miriam had a calcium deficiency and she needed a quick dose. I had milk, but I apologized explaining that it was sour. Miriam said sour milk was better for her because her system absorbed calcium from sour milk more quickly than from fresh milk. Each day she would have to drink a quart of milk to get the calcium into her system. But since milk wasn't pasteurized in Romania, it was necessary to boil the milk for a fixed length of time and then cool it down. That morning, the milk she boiled separated into curds and whey and she didn't have time to boil more milk. So she headed to the university for her classes. While there, she realized she needed a calcium injection and got one at the student clinic. But it wasn't enough. She was on her way home with Elena accompanying her in case she had more problems when they they realized my apartment was at the plaza where they were waiting for a tram. And that is why they ended up at my door.

Miriam drank my sour milk, but even that wasn't enough. So they decided they needed to go to a hospital and there was one just behind the plaza. They asked me to go with them. I don't know if they thought a foreign lecturer as a companion would speed things up. But I was curious to know what the Romanian medical system was like, so I went with them.

My first observation was that I coudn't tell the doctors from the patients. I saw people walking down the hall wearing slippers and what looked like bathrobes. I assumed they were patients. But one of those slipper and bathrobe wearers showed up to examine Miriam in the room we were brought into to wait.

hospital ward image by jbpic, via Flickr.com

That "waiting" was my second observation: there didn't seem to be either a waiting area or examination rooms because the room in which we waited had six beds, each with a patient, and no chairs for us to sit in.

When the doctor examined Miriam, she started by tapping her left cheek. I watched as the muscles in Miriam's face rippled across her face and then rippled back. I had never seen anything like it. Apparently that satisfied the doctor that Miriam was short on the required amount of calcium, so she got another injection,

When we left the hospital, Miriam apologized about missing lunch at my house, but she felt she needed to go home and rest. Miriam then spoke very quickly with Elena which I interpreted to be instructions to get to the university to tell the other members of the class that the invitation for lumch was for Tuesday, not Thursday. The names of the two days are very different in Romanian, marti and joi, but much too similar in English.

I went back to preparing a Chinese meal. At noon, many of the members of the class arrived for lunch. One did give away that she got the message about lunch being that day very late.

They all said they enjoyed the meal. But I doubt they would have told me anything other.

*names, not necessarily the right ones