A & E and Alumni

We had our first little emergency last night. One of our girls accidentally fell down some stairs at the University. Everything is made of stone here, so I'm sure the stairs did not give.

After the fall, she walked the two miles home to the flats from the University. By the time she got back here, she had noticed that her arm was hurting pretty badly. Had she fractured a bone?

We had to take a cab back to the University, because that's where the hospital is. It's a nice, modern hospital, but it's laid out in a rather labyrinthine way. So the first order of business was to try to find the ER (which here is known by the British nomenclature of "A&E," or "Accident and Emergency). That took awhile and a bit of asking around. Along the way we passed quite a few gurneys parked in the hallways with patients in them. Not a good sign. Things are backed up.

When we finally were directed to the reception desk, they had no interest at all in seeing our insurance cards. Instead, there was a no-nonsense demand for a deposit of €100 up front. Not having that kind of cash on me, I pulled out my trusty company credit card and handed it over to the man behind the desk.

He looked at and said, "Luther College. Decorah, Iowa" (the card has the Luther logo on it, but not the town). So I said, "You know the place?" The guy replied, "I went to school there. How is Mr. Eckhart?" I told him that my faculty colleague had retired a few years ago, but was still living in Decorah, doing well, and enjoying retirement (he goes to my church, and I had talked to him the Sunday morning before we left the U.S.!)

From there our visit went much more smoothly. We saw a triage nurse almost immediately. We did have to wait well over an hour to see the doctor (during which time our Luther alumni friend came to check on us and make sure all was well). The doctor promptly sent us off to X-ray. The X-ray was taken quickly and efficiently. It was a bruised bone and not a fracture. They put her in a sling, and we were back home again in about three hours.

We got change on our 100 Euro deposit -- that wouldn't have happened in a U.S. ER -- and got to chat some more with our friend about memories of campus before he called a cab for us for the return trip.

Who expects to meet a Luther College alum in a hospital A&E 4,000 miles from Decorah?