Foot Loose (part 1)

As a first article, I’m going to relate an old incident I had with a Swedish doctor and the Swedish social security. Not everybody has had international experiences like I have, but EVERYBODY has had to deal with their country’s medical system, so here’s a good warm-up anecdote bordering between medical malpractice and inept administrative skills.

Several years ago, I had a problem with my foot, so I went to see a specialist in a clinic in central Stockholm. What the specific problem was, who the doctor was and which clinic I visited are not important. What is truly gravity-defying is what happened during my visits, as you will shortly discover.

The first visit was quite rapid and, at least for a while, went quite well. I showed my problem, the doctor gave me a treatment then booked a second appointment in about 4 months, which she dutifully wrote into her little agenda, I paid her 500SEK, she gave me 180SEK back, and I was ready to leave. Then somehow the conversation hit my profession (English teacher at the time), and she started bombarding me with questions about her daughter and where and how she could learn English to go studying abroad. I was more than happy to help out, so we chatted for 20 minutes (while at least 5 people waited patiently in the waiting room). I finally stood up to leave, embarrassed by all the time I was taking from the other patients. That’s when she asked me to pay… again! I stared at her in total confusion, as I had just done so before the conversation about her daughter. She replied very dryly that she had never seen any money from me yet. I was just standing there staring with my jaw hanging, probably looking like a complete idiot. Finally I mustered some courage and told her I had paid her 500SEK, which she had placed in her drawer, and that she had given me back 180SEK, which were sitting in my wallet, and which I proceeded to pull out as proof. She retorted that it was impossible, since she hadn’t written a receipt. Indeed, the receipt block was lying empty on the table, and she was holding in her hand a pen with which she was probably going to write the receipt, except for the fact that the situation about her daughter had happily filled the last 20 minutes of our otherwise dull existences, with the result that she forgot to write the receipt. She finally, grudgingly, decided to open her drawer, to find, to her complete amazement, 500SEK, fresh from my wallet. She then pulled out a frown the like of which I had never seen before, and told me in a patronizing and very skeptical way that, only for today, and as an exception, she was letting me go, and that, perhaps, but most unlikely, I had already paid her after all. We agreed to meet again in 4 months to see the progress on my foot, and that was that.

I walked out, shook my head and laughed, and then I peeked into the waiting room, which was now holding up to 10 people, some of them pretty angry-looking.

This incident in itself was more amusing than upsetting, but then I had the pleasure of the second visit, which put a whole new light on the first episode. Stay tuned for the next installment of The Stamp Wars to read the conclusion of my foot saga in Sweden!