“Ma’am, I’m not calling the family doctor for fun. Can you perhaps discuss with the doctor if I can come?”. How many times (as an expat) have you stumbled (or stumbled) in a similar discussion? If you thought it was an “aggressive anti-foreigner, think once more: Joop’s blogger Judith Bottigliero recounts his misadventure with illness, Dutch doctors and paracetamol. She and she is the same as yours.
In short, says Bottigliero, following having told the doctor’s secretary that she needs a visit, and not a paracetamol, she obtains a hearing at the huisart.
“You can come tonight at ten.” Fortunately, only 4 hours later than now. Luckily, only walking around in that pain for 4 hours. Though I wouldn’t call it walking. Stumble? Creeping? I can finally go to the doctor’s office. Of course I have to repeat my whole story to the doctor.
“After listening to him, he wanted to give me two paracetamols. And then I protested.” Apparently, however, the Dutch doctor didn’t seem willing to give up: he then suggested a whole list of other drugs that I had just mentioned that I had tried in the last year and suffered from the side effects. “But yeah, he didn’t know anything else.”
After practically begging if I might see a doctor at the hospital because I actually wanted to be admitted, she said, almost laughing: well, ma’am, I will, but she will never be admitted.
With her most arrogant look, she picked up the phone and even put it on speakerphone. After I told my story, the hospital doctor said, he let the lady come to the emergency room, she probably will be hospitalized.
Go and trust me: if you don’t hear from me, in short, the Dutch health system offers you two paracetamol tablets. And a phrase like: call back if you have other symptoms. Yes, but which ones? When would it be too much to bear to need shelter?
For now, I put on the morphine patch prescribed by the hospital doctor. Something I wouldn’t have been prescribed if I’d just walked from the doctor’s office for fun.
