Return to the Hospital, and Other Ramblings

J. and I peregrinated back to the hospital today, went almost to the First Aid station, then took the elevator to the first floor above ground level, to the surgical polyclinic. (Well, the German is "Chirurgische Poliklinik.") It turns out that we did not have to display J.'s health insurance card or anything today; the lady at the polyclinic check-in pointed us into the corridor and told us to go directly to the Durchgangsarzt, who is responsible for workplace accidents (school accidents run under the same rubric). On the door of that office, a sign (apparently erroneously) pointed us to the cast room. A doctor looked at the injury report we brought along, then asked us to wait and said that somebody would come to fetch us. As it turns out, we were forgotten.

So we sat in the hallway, on the perforated, folding metal chairs, as J. talked about school and looked at the photos of film or theatre productions in his copy of A Tale of Two Cities (including a delightfully hammy photo of Lucie Manette fainting), etc., and both of us stared at the paintings on the opposite walls. In the hallway, the wall is incidentally of cream-coloured stucco, and brown, rubbery strips run along it presumably so that stretchers won't scrape it. The painting to the left looked to me like a Cézanne rendering of a Provençal scene, where wavy red-roofed houses stand and the dark green leaves of trees and shrubs swirl on a hilltop overlooking the sea. The painting on the right is the scene of a presumably Dutch river in the midst of winter in what is presumably the 15th century. As grey clouds lie in banks in the sky, filtering beams of sunlight in the distance, and speckled with flights of birds, a brown city with very lazily executed roofs and peaks stretches on the distant bank of the watercourse. The river is principally frozen, though detached floes appear close to the city, and ships in brown and dabs of white paint for sails are suspended in it, as the townsmen skate on it near and far. These figures are posed and clothed as if in a Brueghel painting, and one of them is in the act of falling (very fitting for paintings in a hospital). In the lower left-hand corner a black-clad lady, who looks like she's wearing a nun's habit with a squat, peaked witch's hat on top, promenades with a gentleman who sports a resplendent, pointy Van Dyke beard and a modest quasi-Elizabethan ruff. Other figures gather around a fire, which unleashes a plume of smoke and then a dark blob that might conceal a terrible error on the part of the painter, or depict darker smoke or, most likely, delineate the gloomy earthy bank of the river. There are bare, jaunty trees that are fairly anthropomorphic, the branches of the leftmost one peculiarly webby, and a dusting of snow over the whole. Altogether it's reminiscent of Brueghel's "Hunters in the Snow," and quite friendly, but in my view a little carelessly executed.

At length a young nurse asked us if we were going into the cast room, and I replied, half-jokingly, "Hopefully." Then she inquired after us among the other doctors and nurses, and we were beckoned in. A doctor promptly looked at J.'s X-rays, and a kind older nurse, a seasoned teacher type, bade us welcome (asking me if I was J.'s mother, which greatly amused me, especially as most people who ask me something in an insecure tone are asking if I'm still in school, which makes me think that I look really young) and then cut the outer bandage off the cast and began prying it open. The younger nurse stood by, and then washed J.'s arm, which looked soft and pudgy and pale (I mean that in the nicest possible way (c: ), and applied a cream to it. Then the older nurse put a little tube of gauze over J.'s thumb, and a longer and broader tube along his lower arm, and then she began wrapping thick, cottony gauze, followed by a thin strip of bandage that either absorbs or prevents perspiration, around the arm. Having asked J. which colour he preferred (purple, dark blue, red, or light blue), and rolled back the exposed edges of the tube gauze to form a nice little frame over the gauze layers, she wrapped a strip of wettened, light blue fibreglass around his arm. The bandages always started at the wrist and ended at the elbow.

Then we went to the check-in of the X-ray rooms, which were not far off, lingered uncertainly, and saw nurses in the rooms at the back of the office, one of whom at last emerged. J. handed her a form from the polyclinic; she pointed us to the waiting room, where one other person was waiting on a stretcher (which made me think that, annoying as waiting sitting on a chair might be, waiting lying on a bed, where your range of motion and of sight are inhibited, is far worse). Then she motioned J. into the X-ray room, and it went quite quickly. She handed us the X-rays right afterward.

Finally we returned to the plaster room, where a doctor (and we) looked at the X-ray photos of 2.5 weeks ago and of today, and professed himself satisfied. The fracture across the ulna is clearly knitting up, though the bump on the radius is even more visible; though from a side view the bones are still clearly offset at an angle, this angle appears slighter, and the doctor (having evaluated the X-rays in pleasing detail) told us that it would grow straight. Then we were given a writ to reappear on a given date, and told not to go to a regular doctor but to a "niedergelassener Durchgangsarzt." I had no idea what "niedergelassen" means in this context, and asked, and received no very enlightening reply from a slightly stunned nurse. Possibly this is a very stupid question, but I console myself with the thought that, given my lack of exposure to medical institutions, my ignorance on that point is coincidence rather than idiocy.

Then we rode the bus back up the Schloßstraße, which runs through buildings that appear to have been built predominantly in the 1960s, and is a parade of dated modern ideas. The red brick Rathaus (= City Hall) Steglitz, with amusingly rare Moorish bands around the windows, is a staunch 19th-century-ish bastion of tradition where the glossy consumerism reaches its apex. (The Schloßstraße is a shopping street.) There as well as here, snow lies on the pavements, where it has not vanished due to salt or dark sand or been trodden into distasteful pale brown ice. It lines the tree branches, too, wherefrom every now and then a tufted speck of snow drifts in the wind like thistledown. Icicles, as long as a hand is wide, hang from signs and the undersides of cars. It is quite cold.

At any rate, today's excursion is the most productive thing I've done in ages. Otherwise it's been "chick flicks" on YouTube, 19th-century novels on Project Gutenberg, Gawker and Jezebel (which are sometimes productive to read, but more amusing than productive at present), television (there was a nice documentary on the Galápagos Islands today, à propos of the birthday of you-know-whom), and staring at Word documents that are supposed to become stories. Well, I did play the piano and sing, too, and read about early Chinese and Indian music. But I am contemplating taking language courses at the Technische Uni, following the eminent example of T. One needn't be registered at the TU to take them. In general I have sworn not to go to university, but to learn on my own, for reasons which are too elaborate and possibly boring to elucidate here; but for languages, where hearing and speaking are so important, an exception must be made. My whim is to learn Chinese because, to put it baldly, the written characters look pretty. And I'm interested in China, though in a tentative way that is not enough to make me eager to read much about it.

Besides, I intend to start reading Japanese manga and watching animé and Korean dramas. So far the only Korean drama I've seen is the Princess Hours, or Goong, which tells the tale of a princess who is born in the middle class, marries the prince in an arranged wedding, and then must come to terms with her new life. I watched it in almost one sitting, though it impaired my sanity by the end. It became very repetitive before the dénouement; the princess kept on talking with the prince's cousin on the balcony, the prince kept on stalking out jealously to rudely interrupt their conversation, and the threat of fisticuffs was ever imminent, whilst I tired of the matter and fast-forwarded the video. Anyway, I'd avoided manga, etc., so that I don't become addicted to it as well as to nineteenth-century online novels and YouTube films. But, having surfeited on the latter, finding the idea of reading The Crooked Path for the 10th time excessive and not having the least intention of revisiting Twilight (where much fast-forwarding took place), there is room now for a new expedient for frittering away my time. And I do want to learn more Japanese. (My plan to move to New York is indefinitely postponed due to the financial crisis, and my plan to volunteer at an archaeological dig in Scotland over the summer is uncertain, though the relevant website is on my bookmarks list.)

In other news, Uncle Pu visited today, as he had another violin practice this evening, and everyone except J. and me (and Papa, who was still at work) consumed chocolate and, presumably, the traditional brew of ovaltine. In international news, I watched a portion of Barack Obama's speech (live from Denver, Colorado) on the recently approved economic stimulus bill, and am very much interested to see how the New Deal-type building programmes, which he (if I remember correctly) said were expected to create 400,000 jobs, will fare. [Catty remark deleted.]