Medical mayhem

Being British, I was born to queue. Nice and polite, one behind the other, waiting quietly until the person in front has had their turn. Yet all it took was a visit to the doctor’s waiting room for me to turn into the queuing equivalent of Paris Hilton at a meeting of Nobel prize-winning scientists - completely out of my depth.

Just getting to the queue was a hurdle in itself. In almost three years, neither Ged nor I have been ill enough to need medical assistance (the power of positive thought - three years of thinking: “I’m positively petrified of going to a doctor in Spain”) but I could not put it off any longer. Spain is very strong on preventative medicine and after the hundredth student told me off for not going to any sort of well woman clinic (“after all, you are in your 40s” - muchas gracias for that, Pilar) I decided the time had come to take the bull by the horns and pop into our local medical centre to register - taking a book with me: I have by now, after all, had lots of experience in Spanish red tape and how long you have to wait.

Five minutes later I was out. Organised? Efficient? ¡Claro que no! Turned out that the medical centre only ten minutes walk from my house wasn’t the one for my area. No, the one I needed was a ten minute bus ride away. Course, that makes perfect sense. After waiting for the bus and then waiting in the queue, I was sent home to queue at the town hall for a certificate, after which I was back waiting in line at the medical centre. After registering, I asked for an appointment. “Sorry,” said the woman behind the desk, “I don’t do appointments. You need to queue up at the window next to me.”

With all this practice, by the time I actually got my date and time - Thursday, 11.15, number 27 - I was an old hand at queuing in Spain.

Yet it all went horribly wrong. The place was packed, the patients waiting outside their specified doctor’s room rather than in one general waiting area. Ged and I sat down and I checked my number again. It was then I realised there was a fatal flaw in my queuing procedure - I had a number, but there was nothing displaying numbers in the whole building . “The doctor must call it out,” surmised Ged.

A few minutes later, the doctor’s door opened. A woman came out. Another woman went in. Then it happened again. And again. A steady, silent stream of patients moved in and out of the consultation room, all in perfect sequence as if taking part in a silent dance. How did they know when to go in?

I was starting to get desperate. Then I had an idea. Some of my fellow waitees were holding their appointment slips. “Try and see the numbers on their papers,” I ordered. Surreptitiously, squirming around on my seat, screwing up my eyes and contorting my body, I tried in vain to make out the tiny writing. After a couple of twists and turns, I realised a few people were looking at me. Others were looking at Ged in sympathy. The woman next to me was edging away so nobody would think we knew each other.

“Stop it,” Ged whispered out the side of his mouth. “They all think you’ve got a marble loose. Or piles.”

Suddenly, the door opened and a kindly looking woman in a white coat appeared, clipboard in hand. She read out a list of names and I watched anxiously (listening is no good - have you ever heard a Spaniard pronounce Carr-Ellis?). These were the next group of patients but it wasn’t until after she’d finished that I realised I’d been expected to see who was before me so I would know my place in the dance. I’d failed the audition miserably.

But I wasn’t the only imbécil. An old man turned to me and asked: “Was I before or after you, young woman?”

“No, no, no,” said another woman. “She was after that woman in the red trousers over there...” she pointed to the woman I was to follow in a manner my mum used to tell me off for “... then it’s you.”

He nodded thoughtfully, and then decided he had time to go home and have a coffee (it was 12.15 by now). Ten minutes later, he was back. “I’m after you, true?” he asked. I nodded, ecstatic that someone else was worse in the Dance of the Doctor’s Queue than me.

Eventually, the woman in red trousers - the only time I’ve ever been glad to see red trousers - finished her turn. I stood up - just in time to see my original old man come through the front door, smiling broadly that he wasn’t too late to lose his place. The place I had now told another poor waitee was his.

I scurried in. Then scurried out five minutes later, turning my ears away from the argument growing behind me: “But the English girl told me I was after her.” “No, estúpido, she told me I was after her.”

Not having had the foresight to ask the doctor for some tranquillisers after my thoroughly stressful morning, I popped into La Terraza for a beer and checked the hospital appointment the doctor had given me. Three weeks later at 13.10, queue number - 72. Another day of it.

But this time I have just what the doctor ordered - I’m taking a bottle of gin in my handbag.