Sticks and Stones

(J. has written his own account at The Rambling Gnome. It should be more readable than mine, because I don't feel like polishing what I've written.)

At noon yesterday J. and I went to the hospital. . . . Now that the excitement naturally prompted by this gripping hook has subsided a little, it is to be added that we went because J. injured his arm during his sports lesson the day before. So, guided by the map that Papa printed out, we went to the Benjamin Franklin Campus (which is, as Papa and Mama told me later, where I had the surgery for my cleft palate when I was two years old) of the Charité (the large Berlin hospital organization in which the medical faculties of the Freie and Humboldt Universities are integrated), far out south in Steglitz. The building itself is an impressive complex in grey and glass, bleak but an atmospheric representative of its architectural era (it was built in 1968).

First we followed the signs to the "Erstkontaktstelle" (First Contact Location), a little office with requisite potted palmetto and windows at the level of the back road where the ambulances and their personnel were loitering. There a lady recorded the nature and location of the injury, as well as J.'s age and the day of the injury. Then we crossed the hall to the "Anmeldestelle" (check-in), a dimly lit room, as sterile as the first, in a wan colour scheme of white and blue, where a solitary lady beside the desk asked for J.'s health insurance card, etc. After that we were asked into the hallway where the paramedics and nurses were hanging out, it being a peaceful day, and (eventually) pointed into B-something-or-other room 13.

There we waited for a very long time, though we did not become too bored. Underneath the window there is a white desk of drawers, labelled "blankets" and "diapers" and so on, and a white desk with two telephones, a computer whose minitower reposes on its own wheeled tray underneath the desk so that the floor can be cleaned more easily, and a stately well-thumbed copy of the Rote Liste (a pharmacological manual, I believe). In between these and the narrow wheeled bed, there is a black rolly-chair and a caramel-tinted wooden chair, and a raised metal tray as well as a padded black thing that looked like a speaker's lectern. In the air a lamp whose inside looks, as J. remarked, like half a disco ball, awkwardly hovers on its folded arm. To the left of the door there is a sink and then an amply stocked cabinet. Two cartons dispensing rubber gloves are affixed to the wall, as are strips of metal presumably intended to prevent beds from scraping against the walls, an IV drip and a peculiar bottle that might hold oxygen or something. At the door there is a black analog clock that is stuck on ca. 7:10.

At length two doctors came in, of course in long white coats over blue suits. One of them shook our hands (which was, in my case, a little embarrassing, because due to the heat and my anxiety my hands were atypically warm and perspiry), asked who I was, and then proceeded to ask what had happened, carefully unwrap J.'s arm, probe it gently, and ask him to bend the hand up and down, curl his fingers, etc. I kept out of it as much as possible and let J. answer the questions. Then it was decided to X-ray his elbow and wrist.

So we waited in front of an X-ray room. It was impressive, with heavy sliding metal doors, an anteroom fitted out with flat-screen computers, and a spacious dark back room. Out in the hallway there was a constant coming and going of the personnel, wry and impatient but not unfriendly Berliner types, nurses in blue as well as the doctors. An elderly lady was wheeled in with an assortment of bags around her; she was going to be X-rayed, too, and was well provisioned for the wait. A long time she simply lay there quietly, yet when I eventually glanced over again she was standing beside the bed scarcely looking as if she had needed it at all, rummaging or packing up her luggage, in an amusing resurrection. Then there was a man in his thirties, the type who wears jeans and baseball caps and a ring in one ear, who was waiting beside us with surprising good humour. There was a child who passed through with his parents; he had crushed his hand but, as it seemed, not too badly. Finally there were two elderly men on stretchers, and I forbore from looking at them because they seemed to be in more serious straits. Lastly, on the wall there are two maps, one of Berlin and one of Brandenburg, which we could stare at.

Then J. entered, and the lady whom we had seen going back and forth through the rooms sat him beside a scanner/table, on which he had to lay his arm in a particular way. Then she summoned the X-ray beamer, which slid along the high rail in the darkness and gleamed with neon green figures before coming to a stop over the scanner, so that I had to laugh because it was strongly suggestive of Star Wars. Anyway, she took, I think, two shots of J.'s elbow and two of his wrist, in different positions. I could see the images as they appeared on the screen, and scrutinized them carefully, but from the hallway I could only see that the elbow is fine but that there appeared to be a fissure in the radius (the lower arm bone that is located on the side of the thumb). The lady then brought two classic black X-ray photos to the doctor, and a group of them then held a consultation with a gratifying absorption. We waited longer, and were finally led into the "Gipsraum" (plaster room). J. was seated, the X-rays were stuck up against the luminous screen, and then we waited again. At length we went up to take a closer look at the pictures, only to find, as we joked, that J. had done the thing thoroughly. There is a break running all the way across the ulna, and what had looked like a fissure from afar is actually the lower contour of a sizable bump on the radius.

Finally a nice nurse with flaming red-dyed hair came, tied a clear plastic apron over J.'s clothing (he had taken off his shirt), and then slipped a tube of a pantyhose-like material up the arm. J. had difficulties holding his arm properly, so she slowly lowered a metal hook from the ceiling, which made me feel like laughing again because it was so reminiscent of a horror film. The nurse was smiling, too; whether she did so at the same idea I couldn't tell. Anyway, the ends of the tube were tied up over the hook, and then she could cut the excess length off more easily. She summoned another nurse who reminded me of one of my classmates at UBC and who chatted away with her colleague in a pronounced Berliner accent. (No "ich" was left un-"ik"-ed.) I gathered that the red-haired nurse is a "Springer," i.e. she is a part-time employee who jumps in as needed, but she grumbled about being superfluous; then they talked about their co-workers' cars being towed because they were parked in the wrong spot. In the meantime the younger nurse wrapped a thick bandage (white, of course, as were all the others) around J.'s arm, then a thin gauze, as the older nurse held the arm and kept on asking J. to loosen his shoulder, which finally worked.

Then the nurse was anxious that the cast would not be good because of the swelling of J.'s arm, or something else, so she summoned the doctor. They consulted the X-rays again and thought that it should be fine, and that there was nothing else to be done. (What everyone also discussed is J.'s skin condition, which a dermatologist has examined and which he controls with a lanoline(?) cream, but which has been presumably aggravated by the dry winter weather.) So the younger nurse took up the plaster bandages, drenched them in tap water, and wound them gently over the other bandages. The older nurse stood at a careful distance, though still holding J.'s arm, so that the plaster wouldn't drip all over her, and intermittently checked whether the cast was too thin at some point.

As the cast was drying, the doctor told us that we would have to return tomorrow (i.e. today), and have a "Durchgangsarzt" check it; in two weeks we must return again, and J. will receive a new, lower-arm cast, which will be removed after a further two weeks. Then he gave us a record of the injury and the X-rays as well as an information sheet advising J. not to immerse the cast in water, etc. Lastly, if J.'s fingers begin to tingle, etc., we could come back at any hour of the day or night.

After this the older nurse cut a slot all the way along the cast. The implement with which she did it has an enormous handle with a round toothed blade at the tip, which looked pretty threatening. If I were J. I'd probably have been uttering a series of inward shrieks at this point. Then a male nurse, a mild edition of the portly, short-bearded professorial type, came in and tucked wadding into the slot, whilst chatting with the other nurse too (he mentioned that he was about to do, or had done, his turn at the fire department). Finally the other nurse wrapped a fresh bandage over the whole, and then J. was free to put on his shirt again, and then we were free to go.

We were in good spirits at going again. But frankly it was too strenuous for me, even if I'm not the one who broke the arm and therefore haven't much of a right to be so. The process did last ca. 4 hours. I started this blog entry yesterday but didn't feel like finishing it, just wanted to forget it, because the whole excursion was a little embarrassing since we didn't always understand where we were supposed to be or what was being asked, and because I felt (and still feel) so worried about J., even though broken bones do heal, of course, and though they are, on the spectrum of ailments, neither especially mysterious, nor pernicious in the long term.

Anyway, a good course of reading and watching The Sea Hawk on YouTube should help me feel better.