Some people know they’ve found home when they’ve established themselves as a regular at a restaurant. Others find home when they have a running route they like, make friends with the neighbors or can finally navigate the public transportation system without getting lost.
Me? I know I’ve found home when I’ve visited the emergency room of a city.
It’s not that I’m accident-prone or clumsy — rather, my life motto is “go big or go home” and it carries over to illnesses and injuries. I didn’t just hurt my back, I herniated a disc. I never just have a cold, I have the sickness that can only be cured by heavy duty horse pill-sized medication.
To be honest, I’m surprised it took me three months to visit the hospital here in Buenos Aires.
I woke up Thursday morning with a headache, nothing unusual there. I popped a few pills and met my friend at the Recoleta Cemetery, a very famous cemetery where Evita and Juan Perón (along with every other wealthy family in Argentina) is buried. I wish I could say I loved walking through the beautiful and morbid mausoleums but all I could think was “I wonder…if I slam my head hard enough against that tombstone, will that pain overtake this headache?”
The headache continued through Thursday night, developing Friday into a definitive migraine that I can only describe as feeling like someone was hammering a nail into my eyebrow, repeatedly. Saturday morning rolled around and I admitted defeat: The migraine made me its bitch and forced me to take a field trip to the hospital.
Accompanied by my incredibly kind host mother, I walked the eight blocks to Hospital Alemán, the 140-year-old hospital that once served the German community so all the signs were in both Spanish and German. My host mom helped me check in and we waited an hour to be seen by the very kind doctor.
My Buenos Aires hospital experience was better then my Evanston or Fairfax hospital experiences — for one thing, Buenos Aires medical care doesn’t include forms. I didn’t fill out a single sheet, not even with just my name and birthday. No medical history, no list of medicines I’m taking, nada. Just some conversation then forty minutes of being hooked up to an IV, a quick (and relatively cheap) payment and I was done and feeling better. I was in and out of the hospital in under three hours, record speed for a migraine visit.
It’s not that a hospital makes a new city “officially” feel like home. Rather, when I get ill all I want is to have someone wait on me hand and foot, bringing me soup, ice cream and peaches. But when I’m not home where someone will do that for me, a hospital visit affirms for me that there is a place that will at the very least make me feel better.
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