Hungarian Battle Wounds

Lying with my face buried in the crook of my elbow, I’m trying to simultaneously block the harsh hot light emanating from the round medical lamp and ignore the doctor/surgeon’s feeble attempts to make me concentrate on something other than the excruciating and disgusting sensations I’m feeling as he digs around in my leg (“So how old are you?” You really think that’s going to help right now?!). My stomach starts to churn as I wonder what the fuck exactly was I thinking when I decided this was a necessary—even beneficial—decision. My thought is interrupted by a sharp, deeply penetrating pain, followed by a heavily accented exclamation, “It was glass!”. My knee has given birth to a long, shiny sliver of glass, and I want to puke.

Though the doc asked if I wanted to keep the piece of glass as some sort of sick souvenir, I have no pictures of it and it is no longer in or anywhere near my body. Also note the awesome bandage cross mark.

What brought me to this fateful moment lying on the iodine-stained operating table in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Hungary, you ask? About a year and a half ago, my ex-boyfriend and I found ourselves locked out of his house. We had to climb through a broken window to get in, and, after perhaps a couple of beers, I didn’t notice I’d gotten stuck by a large shard from the window until a small stream of blood had appeared down my leg a little while after we’d made it back inside. I fearlessly yanked at it and got most of it out, didn’t find it too worrisome at the time that there might still be glass in there, and promptly PTFO’d. The next day, in my morning-after haze I somehow twisted my memory to conclude that it was a wooden splinter from the window frame that had gotten lodged in my leg. A week later I could still feel the “splinter” inside of me and I asked my family doctor if I could get it taken out. She said not to worry, that my body would eventually take care of it.

So, a year later—this past summer—I had almost all but forgotten about it. Until, that is, I banged my knee the wrong way somehow and it had been periodically bothering me ever since. But over the past month, with the drop in temperature and frequent walking/running/roughhousing with kids, the pain had become excruciating. If I took a particularly heavy step or so much as grazed my other leg against it the wrong way, it felt like someone was stabbing me from my knee down to my foot. Out of desperation, or perhaps more out of frustration, I set my mind on making the first trip to the hospital in my life, in Hungary no less, where public services are chronically underfunded and almost no one speaks English. Excellent.

The building was pretty nondescript, the only hint that it was a hospital was the sheer size of it—it was mammoth. I walked into the nearest entry because it was cold out and I wanted to ascertain whether or not this was the place I was looking for. “Beszél angolul?” Of course, the two security guards spoke absolutely no English, but they assured me that I was in the right place, and one of them was nice enough to walk with me to the pharmacy where one of the pharmacists spoke English. After explaining to her my situation, she told the guard where to take me and he left me with the woman at the reception desk of the emergency room, who also spoke not a single word of English. Thankfully within a few minutes a doctor who spoke perfect English came to help input my insurance information and I took a seat in a creaky wooden chair in a row of crowded wooden seats. As I went to sit I eyed a rotund old man with the messiest, most pathetic attempt at a leg cast I’d ever seen, and I thought that this did not bode well for me. The lights were only half on, barely enough to cast a shadow in the icy beige hallway. Elderly people with faces that looked like burlap sacks stuffed with potatoes were rolled past, their vacant stares meandered. The ambulance crew pushed a decrepit old man down the hallway in a wheelchair. One of his feet had come dislodged from its proper platform, so that as he passed he made a clean, steady squeaking sound across the floor. His eyes were empty. I was seated next to a row of people who all had their left arm in a cast. It seemed like they’d all been in the same accident, but I could draw no possible commonality amongst them to support this supposition. People in white coats occasionally stepped out of the line of doors in front of us to announce names. When mine was finally called, it was extremely obvious that it was mine because it didn’t sound like mush coming out of the doctor’s mouth.

I stepped into a sterile hybrid of an examination room and a cubicle. One of my examiners spoke some English, the other spoke maybe three or four words. After I explained my problem, they each took turns jabbing their index fingers into the side of my knee. They were genuinely confused as to why I was coming to them. “Why don’t you just wait until you go home?” But I was determined. “Well, the only thing we can do for you is surgery.” “I just want it out,” is all I said. And that was that.

A woman (who of course also spoke not a word of English) led me to an impossibly even more depressing hallway and pointed at a door vigorously before pointing to another row of wooden seats vigorously. I sat down and dissolved into the shadows.

Maybe it was the sudden rush of anxiety following the realization that I was about to have someone cut into me, in a place where almost no one could understand me, with no one but the dazed burlap faces to accompany me, but some deep fear started to consume me and my heart began to race. As I generally react to stress by becoming drowsy, I began to roll in and out of consciousness with my head cocked to the side leaning against the cold beige tiles. I heard screams of children, the recurrent noise of a saw. Under the hideous pale blue florescent light, doctors walked with trays carrying mysterious medical samples down through a faded red gate down a flight of stairs that presumably led to the underground torture chambers. Dazed, I laid back on the row of chairs. My phone fell out of my jacket pocket. After abandoning my attempts to pick it up because my arms were too short, an older, fatherly man knelt in front of me and gently passed it back to me. He said a few things in Hungarian, and when all I did was return him the expression of pure, innocent confusion that I imagine his six year old daughter gives him as he tries to explain to her one of life’s great mysteries, he repeated himself again. Coming to, I finally mustered up “Nem beszelek magyarul.” All he did was put his hands on his knees to rise and sigh as he said wistfully, “Nem beszéls…”

I had just gotten to close my eyes and find some peace when I heard the magic door creak and “Baker Kelly Anne” roll uncomfortably off the assistant’s tongue. I took a deep breath.