Appendicitis in Pasing

This is an excerpt from my unpublished novel "The Mummy and Daddy Christmas Present Fund"

Saturday 25^thAugust 1973

The most awful thing happened.

I went on holiday to Munich, to stay with Jenny for her 14^th birthday, which is a few months after mine. And I got appendicitis and ended up in a hospital in a place called Pasing, which is a suburb of Munich.

It started after about one week. I got all the way to Munich, and everything was fine, I had a really nice bedroom in the top floor of Jenny’s house (which is huge) and about a day after Jenny’s birthday I started to have stomach ache and vomiting.

Well then Jenny’s Mum said of course that I should go to the doctor’s, so Jenny took me because she is the only one in the family who really speaks German. So Jenny and I went to see this lady doctor, and I was telling her about my symptoms, which took quite a long time because Jenny had to translate everything (and her German is really good! I couldn’t understand a single word) and then finally this lady doctor slapped herself on the thigh and said a word and Jenny also slapped herself on the thigh and turned to me and said, Appendicitis.

This meant that I had to go to hospital straight away (that was the hospital in Pasing) and they put me in a room and gave me some medicine and told me that if I had diarrhea I should call them immediately. When the doctor told me that, Jenny was there so she translated it for me, and then she gave me a little German/English dictionary which is called Langenscheidt and that was the only help I had! Because after that Jenny left and told me that she would come back the next morning.

So in the meantime, guess what, I did have diarrhea and I pressed the button for the doctor. And after a while a doctor and two nurses came and while I was waiting I was of course looking up the word diarrhea in the German/English dictionary so I could tell them about it.

And then the problems started. Because I can’t spell the word diarrhea in English. I mean, I can spell it now because in the meantime I know how to, but I had no idea how to spell it right then. And so between the time of me actually having the diarrhea and them coming I was desperately looking through the Langenscheidt dictionary and not finding the word either in English or in German!

I mean, I tried looking up diarea, and direa, and diahreea, and various other mutations but do you think that the Langenscheidt dictionary had any of those words? No it did not. So that by the time the doctor and the nurses arrived, I still did not know how to tell them I had had diarrhea. And I was kind of relying on that in the hope that I would not need the operation for appendicitis. I was kind of hoping that my having diarrhea was the prerequisite for me not being operated on the next morning.

When they came, I was standing just outside the toilet leafing desperately through my Langenscheidt dictionary and I said, “Hello. Ich habe…” and that was where I stopped of course. “Ich habe” means “I have”, but I couldn’t tell them what I had.

So the doctor said, “What? What is the matter?” And I kept repeating, “Ich habe…” but that was it really. And he turned to the nurse and said a lot of stuff in German and then he asked me again what my problem was. “What is the problem?” he said. They were pretty cross.

I tried saying “diarrhea” in English but they had no idea what that meant. It was at this point that I realized that despite two years of German in school, I couldn’t explain that I couldn’t spell a word. So I am thinking that maybe we should have progressed a bit further in German than “The table is brown” and “Günther is a fat baby who is sitting at the brown table” and to be frank, we cannot really say much more complicated sentences than this, much as I like our German teacher Mrs. Lambert.

There never was anything about diarrhea in our textbook “Sprich mal Deutsch!”. And there was not a word about how to speak to doctors in hospitals. Nobody was ever ill in “Sprich mal Deutsch!”

So the result of it all was that the next morning they came to pick me up to operate on me and I was still trying to tell them about my diarrhea but nobody was listening any more. I did insist on having the little Langenscheidt dictionary underneath my pillow on the bed all the time regardless of what they were going to do to me, including any operations. Fat lot of good that was going to do me though. And then suddenly I went to sleep.

About a minute later I woke up because a doctor was standing right in front of me and saying, “Hallo! Elizabeth!” and he had a couple of nurses with him and I was really surprised because I was in a ward with quite a few other people and I said, “Aren’t you going to do the operation then?” in English of course, and he said, also in English, “We already have done the operation.” And he laughed!

They took out my appendix even though I had had diarrhea! And so quickly!

Well. There is not a lot I could say, especially not speaking German, although this doctor did speak English. And he showed me my scar, which was painted over in orange, which was a bit of a shock, he said that was something to do with the antiseptic, and then he took a paintbrush and dipped it in something and painted my nose orange as well! He thought he was very funny! And I didn’t!

Anyway, he told me that the operation had been successful, so I said, Can I go home then? And he laughed again and said, No, you will have to stay here for two weeks.

What!

Jenny came a bit later and she said that her Mum had called my Mum and just said, “Does Lizzie have health insurance?” before she had said anything else, so of course my Mum went up the wall. But then it seems that my parents for once had had some foresight and had taken out health insurance using the E111 form and that covers health insurance in the European Community. But it seemed like both our Mums were much more concerned with the health insurance than whether I was OK or not. And Jenny seemed to think it was all quite funny. She was walking around in an all dark-blue outfit, dark-blue blouse and mini-skirt and dark-blue tights and high-heeled shoes, and flirting with all the doctors in her asthma-y voice in her perfect German and I was a bit fed up. In fact I was very fed up.

She brought me some magazines and some games, and after a little while, the other ladies in the ward talked to me. There were six of us altogether. Most of them were all much older than me, I suppose between 40 and 60. And one lady, she was called Ilse, came over to my bed every day and played this numbers game with me that Jenny brought. Ilse could walk, which I couldn’t at the beginning. That’s why she came over. And every time we finished the numbers game, I would say, “Anderes Spiel?” which as far as Mrs. Lambert taught us, means “Another game?” but then Ilse would always say, “Nein, ich möchte dieses Spiel weiterspielen,” which I understood to mean, “No, I want to continue playing this game.” That was always very confusing.

Right in the next bed to me there was a girl called Karin who was 15 and she had an operation on her left-hand side (the appendix is on the right). She told me that she had mirror appendicitis! I am really not sure that there is such a thing. She laughed a lot when she told me. But Karin was really nice and she also spoke better English than anyone else. So I spent a lot of time speaking with her.

Jenny came every day but I could tell that her interest in me was waning. I mean, she had expected her best friend to come over from England and spend the summer with her. And then look what happens. I felt very guilty.

Finally, I was allowed to leave the hospital and I can tell you I spoke a lot better German when I left than when I went in. It was like having a whole extra year of German at school. I went home to Jenny’s family and I could tell they were also really fed up with me. And I couldn’t walk very well because of the stitches and the operation and everything. It still did hurt quite a lot.

One of the first things that Jenny’s family wanted to do was to take me to visit the castles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau which are not far away from them in Bavaria. It involved a lot of walking up mountains and this was perhaps not exactly the right thing for me. But neither Jenny nor her family really wanted to hear about my operation any more.

And I’ll tell you who else was not interested in hearing about my operation – my family. When I flew back to Heathrow one week later, I got back to London and took the tube to Charing Cross by myself, and it was not too easy carrying my big suitcase. My Mum said she was going to meet me at Charing Cross main station on the other side of the barrier, so she didn’t have to buy a ticket. And when I got there, she was standing there with Jonathon, and the first thing she said was, “Hello Lizzie. Guess what? Walker died.” She did not ask about my operation.

It took me a few moments to work out who she meant. Walker is not someone we know. She meant Private Walker from “Dad’s Army” on TV. The chap who played him died. That meant a lot to my Mum. She was terribly upset.