Health care shenanigans

Let me just start this with six words: I am fine, nothing is wrong.

Ok. So, with that out of the way, Monday I went to a Georgian hospital! I ended up missing all of my language classes that morning in order to take the trip, but thanks to some very helpful fellow TLGer's, that isn't a problem.

It all started a few weeks back with what I thought was a heat rash. Marquette had been particularly steamy and gross, and heat rash was a perfectly acceptable answer for the itchy redness that started popping up all over my arms and upper thighs. But then I had to get on a plane, so there was a lot of doping myself up with Benadryl just to make the 9 hours sitting bearable. I found it strange that after almost a week, this rash was following me overseas. Georgia added a new fun twist to my itchy life - the tops of my feet and around my ankles randomly develop itchy spots, but they tend to disappear about as randomly as they appear. This doesn't really placate me, however, because I still find it annoying as shit.

So we had our orientation meeting about the health care and insurance plan we get while here. I find it endlessly amusing that I'm in a technically developing country and I have better health care than I do in America, but that's a whole other issue. Actually, it's not, because fucking shame on you American pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Ok, now I'm really done, cause I don't feel like going into a diatribe right this moment. Anyway, I spoke with the TLG medical staff after the meeting, asking them if they had any advice about what I should do. They got the mother hen horrified face, and told me that they would arrange for me to see a doctor immediately.

Tuesday rolls around, and sure enough, I'm told I have an appointment. Now, here's why I love Georgia. Instead of leaving me at the hotel while a TLG driver went out to the headquarters (about 40 minutes outside of the city center) to pick up Kate, the TLG med staff member who would be coming with me, and then going about 10 minutes out of the way to come back and pick me up before going to the hospital, the Georgians just said fuck it, and brought me out to the suburbs with them. I am way not complaining, because it was a pretty awesome excursion around Tbilisi, it just cracked me up. The circuitous nature of my morning continued at the hospital.

I hate to do a comparison this early in, but it was just such a stark contrast that I sort of have to. Ignoring all the other things that I'm sure people would nitpick this establishment about, the one thing I think would rattle your average, run of the mill American the most is how Georgians enter their doctors rooms. There isn't a nice waiting room with the sort of smug and judgmental receptionist who tells you when you can go in, at least not on this particular floor - there are a few small rooms around a large open space with chairs for you to wait in. But in order to know if you have to sit down, you have to open the door of your doctors office, and poke your head in. If there's no one with them, you can head on in. If there is, you just pop a squat in one of said chairs until the current patient vacates. Maybe they have ways of indicating that you shouldn't enter, but there wasn't any discernible one I saw.

The whole process was pretty entertaining, especially since Kate had to translate pretty much everything. She was awesome - super patient, really helpful. The doctor just looked at my arms, and basically told me to go see a dermatologist, so Kate and I hopped in the ridiculously small elevator (no seriously, it was about the dimensions of a twin bed, and about 7 feet tall only) back down to the lobby, where we took the note the doctor gave us, and they scanned my passport, insurance card, and pointed us down some stairs to the dermatologist. She was pretty friendly, and prescribed an antihistamine pill, a sedative antihistamine pill, an antihistamine cream, and some other liquid that is supposed to help moisturize the area. So we take her written prescription back upstairs to the first doctor, who writes out the order on a different, fancier piece of paper, and that's all. We're done.

After that, it's just a matter of taking that fancy piece of prescription paper to a pharmacy to fill it. By the way, those four things I mentioned? Yeah, it was a total of 11.50 GEL, so about $6 USD. With our insurance, all prescriptions are covered 50%, so I effectively only paid 5 GEL, about $3 USD.

Granted, I did not have a serious ailment, nor did I require urgent medical attention, but the fact that I was in and out of a doctors office, with a prescription, for less than $5 USD, in under two hours, is pretty fucking amazing. 

So as of this writing, along with the two antihistamines a day, 80 minutes a day total of the bottled liquid on the rash, and putting that box of gel on them, it's way less itchy, and going down. I'm also on what looks like a gluten free diet, since they also think the rash is an allergic response to something I'm eating. I swear to god, if it's actually a food allergy, and I can't drink my delicious IPA's ever again, I will choke a bitch. But I will wait until it's fully clear and then slowly start eating foods I actually like again (I miss chocolate, meat and coffee the most, and we're only on day three of this!). Upside is I guess I'll lose a lot of weight? Neat?