blacklisted:

After I caught a cold when it was hot, I stayed in bed for six days with no improvement and then finally decided to see a doctor. I normally hate going to the doctor and avoid it at all costs unless I think I am dying, but since I thought I was dying, I decided to go. I experienced a best case scenario, but it was still crap, as were other past experiences this dredged up.

So, I bring you a very special series on Egyptian healthcare.

Bear in mind that I had some kind of throat infection or emphysema or Hypochondriac’s African Sudden Death Syndrome and not something more immediately urgent like a heart attack or an exploding appendix. So I was not obligated to call an ambulance, get a busy signal, call again, have a network failure, call again, get through, and then wait for an hour and a half for a car to weave through traffic while I negotiate with some afterlife gatekeeper that the ambulance is still on its way, and then be violently thrown onto a stretcher and brought to a hospital in another hour and a half of weaving through traffic.

I just had to make an appointment.

The reason this was a best case scenario for me was because the boyfriend took care of most of the dirty work, like having to physically approach the hospital and wait in line for an appointment despite the recent inventions of the telephone and Internet, which incidentally were made available to Egypt around the same time several other countries in the world began catching on. So if he had not done that, it would have been my carcass fighting for an appointment.

I can order books, restaurant food, gourmet groceries, and drugs to my door online, and order anything under the sun from a plasma television to a car to a pet orangutan to a new flat to my door by phone. But I cannot make an appointment to see a doctor at the hospital by Internet or by phone.

I know better than to ask why…

I have been in Egyptian hospitals and in Egyptian prisons. There are few differences between the facilities. Same echoy cement buildings. Same cigarette and urine smell. Same bureaucracy. Same torture methods.

The private hospital I went to was crowded and I was pushed around through a confusing maze. It is a lot like being at a train station, where you sit in uncomfortable chairs while people smoke indoors and loudly play pop songs on the tin foil speakers of their mobile phones.

When I had to have a physical examination done for my UN recruitment, I had to see this dirty 200 year old man dubbed the “UN Doctor” in his private clinic. Private clinics are not much better than hospitals. Perhaps the doctor can afford to provide sofas for the waiting area rather than some kind of metal train station bench, but once inside for the check-up, similar to hospitals, the “UN Doctor” still proved to continue using the metal medieval torture instruments that passed as medical during that era when the town doctor traveled by hansom to the sick woman’s bedside in the country and diagnosed her black plague as hysteria.

So when I did go to a private clinic for whatever was quickly ending my life and I was laid down on a bed that did nothing to separate my body from it, which–on a microscopic level–would mean my body from whatever horrific cocktail of germs and bacteria and disease that had been transferred from previous patients who surely don’t shower as often as I do and was already swarming and having sex all over it and me…I could not help but worry about sanitation and the idea that I might come out of the check-up itself with something worse than what I came in with.

*Photo from Channel 4.