Suddenly the letters on the screen start to dance. You can no longer read what you’ve written. You stand up, but there’s a violent spinning dizziness. Vision problems, dizziness – your good doctor had prepared you for it: call the emergency services at once! Which you do.
After what feels like a quarter of an hour, they arrive. Two friendly paramedics escort you to the ambulance; at the wheel sits a young woman. At the nearby hospital they test you, then you’re put in a room, half ward, half intensive care. They call it a “Stroke Unit”, and the diagnosis is clear even to the layman who knows English: a stroke! Nothing hurts, and the mind still works as usual.
Later they test all sorts of things, on average every six hours: speech, eye movements, reflexes. And what day is it today? The date too, please! And again the eye must follow the glowing pen, sometimes moving the head, sometimes with a stiff neck, squinting.
On the fifth day after the incident, they put you in a taxi and drive you to a rehab clinic in the Thurgau back of beyond, nearest human settlement: Bischofszell! The daily schedule is tightly packed, on average 30 minutes of ergonomics, physio, strength training, treadmill, nutrition theory. As in hospital, the kitchen is impeccable, and in the morning you can choose your kind of croissant as well as your newspaper.
There’s plenty of time for television, so I watch the horrors in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. I remember reporting trips to India, Nepal and Africa and the hospitals I saw there – where doctors hold out their hand without embarrassment and relatives camp in front of the hospital so their patient gets something to eat. In Europe, too, the gap seems wide. Didn’t an experienced doctor advise me years ago, when I told him of upcoming holidays in Italy and an operation to come: “But please, no further south than Florence or Bologna! And are you already a Rega member?”
Next to me in the Stroke Unit lay a construction worker who was certainly no private patient. As far as I could tell as a layman, he received the same care and quality of nursing as his better-insured neighbour. In four weeks and two hospitals I did not meet a single unfriendly carer – only, strikingly, many people who originally spoke a different language from ours.
Our healthcare system is scolded non-stop: too expensive, yes, and far too bureaucratic. But I find, and not for the first time: you get something for all that money. After a nurse with more than twenty years of service told me the size of her monthly salary, I thought of the famous difference between “receiving” and “earning” – and speculated about who really profits from this system.
And when, in the evening, the television showed the horrors of Kyiv and Gaza for the umpteenth time, I almost felt ashamed to regard a “mild stroke” with a benign outcome as a blow of fate.
This article appeared in MEN issue 2/24 (November 2024).
