Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

10. The Polish Hospital

10 The Polish Hospital Midway through a fifteen-day conducted tour of Eastern Europe in 2009, my wife, Mala, slipped in the snow in the Slovakian town of Banska Bysteria and fractured her left foot. The shock destroyed a kind of reverie that had enveloped me. Grand thoughts of visiting parts of the vanished Habsburg and Soviet empires had made me sign up for the trip although it was winter. Who could have blamed me? If, for roughly US$2,500, you were to fly from Singapore and see Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Banska Bysteria, Cracow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Warsaw, Poznan, Berlin, Dresden, and Prague, you, too, would throw caution to the December winds and travel through the rolling plains, hilly roads, and sleepy villages that lie in one of the most historically charged parts of Europe. The tour of a lifetime turned out to be a nightmare sufficient for a lifetime, when, screaming in agony, my wife was carried aboard the tour coach. It made its way to Cracow, where the Hungarian driver, Kiseri Csaba, drove us straight to the 5th Military Clinical Hospital and Polyclinic. Sam Lee, the agreeable tour leader from Super Travels in Singapore, went about with his usual calm efficiency trying to get Mala admitted. Since the tour bus was too large to enter the hospital premises without blocking other vehicles, the security guard The Polish Hospital 131 ran inside and returned with a wheelchair. I pushed it into the Emergency ward, and Mala was admitted to hospital. Over the next four days, a string of doctors and nurses — particularly the English-speaking Doctors Michał de Lubicz Jaworowski, Dariusz Sienkiewicj, and Krzysztof Miśkowiec, and a nurse, Sister Natalia — cared for my wife as they would for a child too young to speak for, indeed, neither Mala nor I speak any Polish. One English-speaking doctor bought her a bottle of mineral water and taught her that the Polish word for the all-important painkillers was nabol; he also told the non-English-speaking nurses that she did not eat beef or pork. Another doctor found time to speak to her in his broken English even while attending to the two other patients in the room, elderly ladies who had suffered severe fractures. Neither of those ladies knew English, but one has a daughter who does, and the mother summoned her to the hospital so that she could speak to my wife and find out her needs. Grażyna Boźek turned up promptly. The relatives of other patients mistook Mala and me first for Albanians, and then for Mexicans. Now, because of Poland, we feel a special affinity for Albania and Mexico as well. The insurance company in Singapore contacted the doctors in Cracow and, after having ascertained that my wife was fit enough to fly back home in her cast for her operation, arranged for an escort nurse from Prague to accompany her on Business Class. This arrangement agitated the Polish doctors greatly. Did Mala and I doubt their professionalism? No, she said: It was that she would have to remain under observation in hospital for ten days before the operation, that the insurance company was paying for her travel back home, that I was running out of cash, and that the Cracow hospital did not accept credit cards. The mention of money 132 Celebrating Europe agitated the doctors even more. Dr Miśkowiec had said to me in the Emergency ward: “Even if you had no money, we would treat your wife because this is an emergency.” Now, the doctors were wondering why I kept bringing up the question of money. They were interested in healing my wife’s fractured foot. What was I interested in? Unlike the hospital, Hotel Sympozjum is a business and is, therefore, interested in money. Yet, on hearing of my wife’s accident, the staff’s smiles gave way to concern. I could not pass by Reception without being stopped and asked about her progress. When I finally left the hotel, the porter carried my heavy luggage out to the taxi without expecting a tip. When he did receive the tip, he looked, not at the money that I had given him, but earnestly into my eyes as if to ask: “Are you sure?” Meanwhile, the Singapore tour group had moved on. Mala and I had forced our son Abhilash to stick to the group because...