So you have to figure that if you’re in Austria you’re going to waltz at some point in time. So having learned to waltz at Lois Pons dance studio when I was a teenager, plus taking the onboard refresher course in the ship’s lounge, I glided on to the River Beatrice’s dance floor with Marcia as a violin an viola squeezed out some Johan Strauss tunes. 

Being the creative type  I am, I added a Lindy twirl or two a dance designed for a ball gowns and tux. Well, the twirl turned into a tweak, an our next onshore tour was to the real St. Elsewhere of a Bratislava, Slovakia Hospital ER.

I’m right handed. My right arm was dangling by my side with a hard lump like it’s a bundle of spaghetti and golf balls. The pain was hovering around 10 on a 1 to 10 scale.

Now the details here are going to get a little sketchy because the Slovakian language even written out is absolutely incomprehensible and unpronounceable. But the Uniworld staff, which is composed of many people from the Eastern European countries, was great. Veronica from the Ukraine found a hospital that was open over New Year’s weekend. She accompanied us translating everything that transpired. 

The hospital itself whose name was as usual unpronounceable–not that you’d ever have heard of it anyway–was an old Soviet-style institution now owned by a private religious sect. My only requirement was that they weren’t Druids. 

The receptionist, between bites of an apple she was eating, needed my passport and my medical insurance. As they didn’t have a Blue Shield or Medicaid or credit card appliqués on the window, I assumed, and she verified in Slovakian, that she just needed this information for her forms. I had to pay first and she handed us a bill for 761 Euros. Seemed kind of steep until we realized it was only €7.61, roughly 9 dollars and change. 

We were given a number as long as my Social Security number and I thought I’d be waiting a long time. But, within 20 minutes or so, I was ushered into a doctors office. He looked a little like a cross between Ben Casey and Dr. Kildair after the two of them and I had a fight. But he spoke English and had been to Saratoga Springs in New York. He had friends, he said, who had been to San Diego–although the thing that seemed to impress them most was a bust of the comedian Bob Hope statue. Huh?

He inspected my arm like a butcher prepping chicken wings and gave me an order for an X-ray. That department was nearby and had its own non-Apple-eating receptionist. Again, I had to pay first. 

The X-ray machine looked like it dated from the Cuban missile crisis. The technician dangled a lead apron from my lower parts and zapped me twice with the machine. But, modern technology had entered the picture in that the images were digital, and I was given a CD ROM of my x-ray as we left the department. 

Back to the doctor, where he looked at the X-ray and told me it was what he thought, badly sprained tendons–something called a DG impingement syndrome–medical speak is about as incomprehensible as Slovakian. He gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory that I’ve never heard of, and told me to keep my arm in mobile for two weeks – the remainder of our trip.  

Then we had to pay the rest of the bill. Marcia and I were hugely embarrassed as Americans, because the whole experience amounted to less than $35 American. And that sum didn’t just include all the hospital charges, the diagnosis, and the x-rays, but the prescription itself and two cab rides between the hospital and the ship.

Update two days later: the golf ball is now about the size of a marble, and my arm is less like spaghetti than elbow macaroni. We are enroute to Australia via Turkey and Abu Dhabi and shuttling around our luggage is a literal, but not excessive, pain. Marcia is doing most of the heavy lifting. Everyone looks at me like I’m a real shirker, and I smile and point to my arm, which looks perfectly normal. Then they look at me like I’m a complete idiot.