Monday, January 30, 2006

• Currently Reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter By Mario Vargas Llosa see related

  I'm reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa, and now I want to go to Lima.  I went so far as to do google searches titled "Tourism, Lima" and "Buy Real Estate, Lima Peru."  Houses are surprisingly expensive.  Back in the late '60s, my mother lived in South America for nine months.  Her home base was Quito, Ecuador, where she worked on a master’s degree in Spanish literature at Catholic University, but she traveled extensively in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela.  When I was a little kid, this was still a relatively recent experience, and my mother spoke of it often. Our house was full of artwork, textiles and other items from South America and my mom spoke fluent Spanish, which was exotic in our little suburb.  I would really like to retrace her steps someday.
  
  So-- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter-- it’s a semi-autobiographical novel about an 18 year old boy who has an affair with and eventually marries his Uncle’s wife’s sister,  “Aunt Julia.“  A parallel plot tells of a writer of serial stories at Lima’s Radio Central who is perhaps a tad too devoted to his art. (This is Lima of the 1950s, before television arrived.)  Aunt Julia--it’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s got everything.  I will definitely read more of the literature of Latin America.  
  

  ---

  
  I ended up working 35 hours last week.  Saturday was particularly grueling because I worked 11 hours (7:00am-6:00pm) and did not eat any lunch and was posted to work in the “back,” which meant answering the main ER phones in addition to the paperwork I was supposed to be doing.  You would not believe the calls we get.  One guy called from the waiting room.  “I want to lodge a complaint,” he said.  He was unhappy at having to wait 45 minutes in the waiting room.  I gave him the standard lines: “It’s very busy back here, we’ve had several traumas, if you‘re feeling worse, you can see the triage nurse...” (all true) and he got more irate (“Well what if I fall down out here and sue you?”  “Go ahead.  Do you think I give a crap?”) and demanded to talk to my supervisor.  I handed the phone to the other secretary, who, as "supervisor" got rid of him.  I learned later that he was making a big pest of himself in the waiting room and demanding that the front registration ladies call an ambulance to take him to Martha Jefferson Hospital--Charlottesville’s only other hospital-- which they refused to do.  Someone hit him on the head with a rock.  I can see why.
  
  I’m learning that there’s a semi-hostile war being waged between UVA hospital’s main operator and those of us in the ER.  We love sending difficult calls to the operator--you can’t imagine how good it feels to hit “transfer” and “0” and make a difficult person disappear--and the operator responds in kind.  One day, I picked up the phone to hear the operator saying smugly, “I’ve got one for you,” and suddenly I was talking to a woman with a heavy foreign accent and a fish bone stuck in her throat. 
  
  I wouldn't work the main switchboard at UVA for any amount of money.
  
  It's not that I am devoid of compassion--actually the fish bone lady was very nice and I was able to help her--but some people are such complete idiots that my misogyny meter, as Pina La Nina calls it, goes through the roof:  people who call to check on a patient, but don't know the patient's name and then are irate when we can't find them:  "What kind of a hospital is this?"  demanded one man who expected us to find a patient based on his mother's name; people who are furious because they can't go back and visit a family member immediately after he has arrived in an ambulance.  (Visitors are allowed back after about 20 minutes.)  "Your rules are stupid!" huffed one woman after I patiently explained that the doctors and nurses need to take care of the patient first before she could go back:  People who call and expect to get medical advice and are angry that I won't just grab a passing doctor and make him take their phone call.
  
  
  

  • 12:57 PM
  • 41 views
  • 8 eprops
  • 4 comments