Air conditioners!!! I just wanted to smash every air conditioner in New York!!! They are everywhere, except on the streets! In the subway cars - Air conditioner
In buses - Air conditioner
In stores - Air conditioner
At work - Air conditioner
And then one "fine" day I got sick! And if it were just a cold, I would have handled it myself! A boil popped up! Right under my nose... Our Soviet doctors would calmly cut such things open and then put you in the hospital for a week, where they give you painful, painful shots and torture you with dressing changes every day... (I had that happen once - not the best memory in my life, but it was fun in the hospital, really!!)
So, realizing that if I was lucky, THIS might not go too badly, meaning I needed to buy an ointment and do compresses, and then okay! But here, a total failure!! I went to 10 pharmacies, no less! They even drove me to pharmacies in Staten Island, but nowhere was there any ointment or solution for compresses!!! The local pharmacists didn't even know what a boil was! I thought that, of course, in English it's not called a furuncle but something else, but then it turned out I was calling it correctly!! At home, I found a health encyclopedia and read about a boil in English there and even brought the book to the pharmacy, but they just threw up their hands and sent me to a doctor for a prescription! Like, we don't know such medicines at all!! (I specifically found the Latin names on the internet, because every self-respecting pharmacist should know the Latin names of medicines).
After long torments (it was also difficult to find a pharmacy, since few pharmacies were open on Sunday!!), I called an acquaintance who lived in Brighton and asked him to look for medicines there! After all, most likely, if they exist in America, it's in Brighton! They did bring me the medicines, but I couldn't handle the sore myself... I had to go to the doctor...
I called the insurance company! They tried for a long time to find me a hospital with Russian-speaking doctors! They also asked me to fill out some documents that would come by mail. They had to be printed, filled out, scanned, and sent back!! Are they kidding? Where would I get these devices? A scanner? A printer? But that's not the point! They never found me a hospital with Russian speakers anyway!
When I got tired of waiting and enduring the pain, John from the grocery store said that there was a regular hospital a couple of blocks from the house. We headed there, or rather, John's friend drove us, and even stayed with us and talked to the doctors)) But here I was lucky, the girl who worked with documents at the hospital spoke Russian!! Woohoo, she was the one who helped me! Moreover, when I went to the doctors, they brought me to a phone with 2 handsets, it turned out to be an interpreter!! The doctor requested the Russian language and the girl translated everything for me! Why then was it such a struggle to look for Russian-speaking doctors!!)))
Medicine is certainly strange! The kind doctor looked at me from a distance of 2 meters, and immediately made a diagnosis and prescribed 2 types of antibiotics and gave me some ointment... that's it! 5 minutes and done!!
I, a little distrustful, bought these medicines and after 5 days everything was almost gone!! A miracle! I thought that only surgeons could have helped me here!!
By the way, American doctors write just as illegibly as our Russian ones! I didn't understand anything except "7 days"!! At least in something our medicine is the same!!))))
There are also pluses! I saw American hospitals from the inside! Haha)) It's a bit scary there) so many different devices!!
Regarding hospitals! An acquaintance told me that his stomach hurt a lot and he went to the hospital, he had no documents with him and he gave a fake name (consequently, the bill for treatment didn't need to be paid). They provided him with help, put him under observation for a day (that is, he spent the night for free) and fed him!!))
Yes, one more thing! I have a photo where I'm all bandaged up, miserable, but I decided that for the sake of preserving my sanity, I won't post it))))
