Me No Spleen

I had my first cold, which was drippy and exhausting enough to land my sniffly butt in the doctor’s office while I should have been teaching. I had unsuccessfully searched for the word “spleen” in my English-Lithuanian dictionary, as I don’t have one and felt the need to warn the doctor of this. Not finding the word increased my trepidation as I had already heard horror stories about the Lithuanian healthcare system. One of my friends told me that when he had stomach pains they’d folded him up in the fetal position and placed a wooden block in his mouth. It turns out that the block was actually just to assist in slipping a tube down his throat, not to prevent him from biting off his tongue in a paroxysm of pain while they amputated an unsuspecting limb or probed cold, pointy metal instruments into orifices unmentionable, but it sounded barbaric enough to scare the hell out of me.

Luckily, a friend who speaks a good deal of Lithuanian picked me up and drove me. She signed me up for my appointment, then took me upstairs to find our door. Here you sign up as early as you can, wait in a long line and then shove your way in as soon as the preceding patient exits. In this way it is similar to lines anywhere in Lithuania: at the grocery store, for example, or the public toilet. Had my friend not taken me, I would not have known that the Lithuanian woman with the grimacing underbite who followed us in wasn’t shouting “I’m going to bite you,” but was instead yelling “I’m next, you American idiots!” Nor would I have known that it’s normal for the doctor to have only one room with the door always opening and closing, and that it was apparently perfectly acceptable for the audience of sickos waiting in line behind us to get several fleeting glimpses of my bare, hunched back. Had she not been there, I might have mistaken my doctor’s visit for another of my messed up dreams.

The doctor “spoke English,” which I shouldn’t sarcastically put in quotes because she definitely had more English than I have Lithuanian. My friend still had to translate her English for me. Only after Robin had dropped me off at my apartment did I realize that the doctor had been telling me to “drink liters tea” and “lay bed long time.”

Somehow the lack of language increased my sense of the barbarity, as though we were pointing and grunting and gesturing with clubs. The cave-woman speaking match came to a climax when I tried desperately to communicate my lack of spleen.

“I have a stomach. I have a liver. I have kidneys. I don’t have a spleen.”

At least I didn’t switch completely over to Tarzan mode. “Me no spleen. Me sick no good.”

Now, ironically, thanks to “drinking liters tea,” “laying bed long time,” and “eating two pill day,” I am back to teaching students valuable lessons about prepositions and word choice. I am also back in my Introductory Lithuanian class, where I have happily resumed clubbing their language to death.