Hospital

Visiting the Hospital in Sydney Australia
I didn’t have a big night because I was preparing to go canyoning and ab sailing the next morning in the Blue Mountains. I was supposed to wake up at 6am and be at Central station at 7am to take the train to the Blue Mountains. I say “suppose” because that is definitely not what happened.
Around 5 am I was woken up from my roommate moving around our living room. Assuming she was just drunk and just having trouble finding her way around in the dark by bumping into things I just attempted to fall back asleep. After all I have done the same thing, a week before I walked straight into the fridge at 2am, so from my past experiences I didn’t think much of her fumbling around. However, 10 minutes later I hear “MARISA” in a terrified voice. I open my door and lying on the floor is my roommate curled up the fetal position. She was sweating profusely and pale. She described terrible stomach pain that woke her up in the middle of night that was coming in and out. She thought it might be gas, but my dad has gas all the time and I never once found him in the fetal position on my living room floor, so we decided to go to hospital.
So in our pajamas, we jump in a cab. In the cab I tell the driver that I want to go to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He has no idea where that is, so I tell him just to take us to ANY hospital that he knows and this is an emergency. He just looks at me, then looks at my roommate and says, “What, is she going to vomit in my taxi”, and then kicks us out of the cab. It was outrageous. We then get in another cab, in which the driver is also concerned with my roommate vomiting in his cab and thus drives as slowly as possible to hospital. I kept pushing the idea that we were going to the emergency room because it WAS AN EMERGENCY. We finally get to the hospital and my roommate gets a preliminary examination as I fill out her paper work in the waiting room. At thing point the desk clerk hands me a card for foreigners. This card notified me that my roommate would have to pay $800 a day if she was admitted. We then went to this hallway with curtains separating the beds. We waited three hours for a doctor see us, but in the mean time he were graced with the unique opportunity of hearing an 80 yr old man getting a catheter put in.
At around 6:30am I hear an old man across from us yell “Will someone help me, my penis hurts.” He yelled this about four times before a nurse came over tohelp him. I know this is insensitive but I could not stop laughing. I had to shove my sweatshirt sleeve in my mouth to keep myself together. Once the nurse came over I could hear her giving him an examination. I can’t be completely sure what happened, but I did hear phrases such as “Does it hurt underneath this flap” and “SIR, can you please keep your arms by your side”. About 20 minutes after the catheter was put in, another man came to visit the 80 year old. He said he was giving him a memory test and asked him a series of questions. When I say a series of questions, I mean six questions that consisted of: what is 100-7? What is 40-7? What day is it? Where are you? What is your name? AND ….. Sir, where are your teeth? He answered all the questions correctly including the last one. He told the nurse that his teeth were in his backpack underneath the bed, to which the nurse responded “So you can still enjoy a good steak”.
A few hours later, my roommate got her test results back and we found out she had to stay a few days in the hospital just to make sure she was ok. I got her an IPod and magazines just to make sure her stay was a little less painful. A few days later my roommate was released from the hospital with a $2000 bill…… I did miss canyoning and ab sailing, but it is alright because I got my money back and hope to do it in a few weeks when my friend from Boston comes to visit. My roommate and I discussed later that we wouldn’t have experienced true cultural immersion without a visit to a hospital in Sydney, Australia, however, I wouldn’t suggest this to other tourists. I was later notified that there is a TV show that takes place at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.