we go 2 hospital

On Saturday, my friend Natalija and I were on our way to some barge on the river, that I guess has an artificial island attached to it or something? It sounded like a good idea. I texted my roommate/colleague Nathan asking if he wanted to join us. We were waiting at the bus stop, and I received a reply: "Um i'm at hospital maybe getting stitches. Gashed my head on the water heater." This came as a bit of a shock. When I thought about it, though, I wasn't incredibly worried. He was able to text me, after all, and with punctuation no less. Dying men don't use punctuation, was my reasoning.

So, we decided the thing to do was definitely to go visit him at the hospital. My boss Albert was already there with him, but more company couldn't hurt. Plus, I was curious what a Serbian emergency room looked like. And the weather was on the verge of rain by this point, so staying outside held minimal promise.

We got to the emergency room, inquired to Nathan's location, and found Albert outside of the operating room. This detail seemed a bit alarming, given the ostensibly slight nature of the injury, but stitches are stitches I suppose. Albert said that Nathan was fine, but that he had a very large bandage on his head anyway. When he emerged a couple of minutes later, this was evident. He had perhaps the least threatening injury in the whole of the hospital though: a stitch or two isn't much when there are people around on stretchers, with knife wounds, I don't know what else.

Nathan explained he had just nicked his head on our boiler while in the shower. Not thinking it that serious, he had finished showering before noticing any bleeding. He had called Albert about getting antiseptic something-or-other, but the pharmacist had suggested hospital. So, after a stopover in a cafe, they proceeded there. Apparently both the most exciting and most painful part of the ordeal was the stitching needle, which he described as "like a fishing hook." That, and they x-rayed him a couple times for no apparent reason. So, he got some x-ray souvenirs out of the affair. Albert joked that Nathan could now check this important Serbian experience off his list, and next we would have to get him arrested.

What I found most interesting was, he didn't have to pay for anything at the emergency room. They just treated him, and that was that. Definitely a welcome change from life in the US. By the time we left the hospital, our friend Vladimir, who lives in the neighborhood, had also showed up. So we all proceeded to an Irish pub and had a celebratory drink that we had all survived the day, Nathan especially.