Lydia’s Blog

Several months after I first arrived in Germany, shortly after I moved out of my shared flat with three med-student housemates into an apartment of my own, I came down with the plague.

I couldn’t get my eyes to focus (it was only possible to get a clear look at my hallucinations), my neck had disappeared thanks to two infected glands sticking out like twin tumors, my skin turned gray and the phlegm I was hacking up always had that copper tang of blood. After a few days of abject misery, I poured myself into a cab and told the driver to find me a doctor.

At the doctor’s office, I was briefly looked over by a relatively impatient member of Berlin’s shining medical firmament. Tongue depressor, thermometer, stethoscope. At the end of it all (and by all, I mean about 90 seconds) he sat back, crossed his arms and said:

“Well, if I were you, I’d try drinking some herbal tea.”

WHAT!? Forget the fact that I hadn’t been able to swallow in three days (and he did not offer herbal tea suppositories as an option, thank you very much)…it was obvious that Damien Karras’s mother was living alongside the alpha and omega himself somewhere in my disease addled body.

Herbal tea indeed. I would go on to learn that this experience is largely emblematic of German medicine. What I was about to do immediately thereafter was also emblematic: I called one of my ex-housemates in tears and convinced him to write me a perscription for antibiotics. Within three days I’d stopped looking like Miss Chernobyl 2003. Fucking herbal tea.

And that’s how it goes here. If you know someone, or can call a friend of a friend, or get somebody to put in a word with someone else, etc…then you’re okay. If you just march into a doctors office (with all of the necessary referring paperwork) and slap down your workers’ insurance card…

You might as well save yourself the effort and jus’ cook yersel’ up some fuckin’ tea. Jesus.

Everyone moans and wails about America’s corrupt disaster of a system which is, let’s all be honest, a fucking epic tragedy. Republicans and big pharma…boo! Then again, liberals have to excuse themselves to jerk off in the coat room when the subject of European-style, universal health care comes up. Coverage for all! Eat shit….seriously.

Britain’s NHS is a well-acknowledged mess that makes Germany almost look like the faux-suede-fringed, prius-driving dreams of hardcore people-first socialists everywhere. Still, all of Europe is slave to a sanitized version of America’s dirty conundrum: You get what you pay for.

For instance, Germans that fall into a higher income bracket can qualify for private insurance, which avails them to far superior care, speedier access to care, and generally enhanced facilities and services. People who earn below this level, like your charming heroine, have to make do with workers insurance, also known as “human beings making do with veterinary medicine”. I hear there’s another bracket for the unemployed (a full 20 per cent of Berlin, by the way). One shudders to think.

I decided to have my ear, face and skull operated upon here in Germany because a.) I’m insured here and b.) Germany is a rich western country…surely their medicine is on the same level as that in the U.S.

Well folks, here’s the short anwer to point B: FUCK NO.

After nearly three weeks of conflicting diagnoses and incompetently or tardily implemented drug therapies, my ear doctor admitted that, well, my operation was, hm, yeah, kind of a failure. Not only did it not serve to improve my hearing at all (quite the opposite), but the entire middle ear mechanism is (prepare the fanfare) crawling with infection. Again. Or still. Fuck it all.

And the doctor’s recommendation for curing the tinnitus I wake up with daily? Try a different sleeping position. How about the dizzy spells?

She shrugged. Come back in a week. See if the same antibiotics that did nothing in the last week suddenly start working.

So.

I think I’m going to try to come back to the U.S. for a few days in June or early July. Soon anyway. Far sooner than expected. The money-begging will occur privately, but if you run into my Mom or Dad in the next few days, lay on a couple coats of “how awful for Lydia” if you remember it.

The advice-begging will be executed presently.

Please, if any of you readers know of a particularly good Otolaryngologist, particulary one specializing in the treatment of Chronic Serous Otitis Media, in either New York, Boston or between…PLEASE CONTACT ME at lydiasteier@gmail.com. All I need is a name and contact details, I can do the rest.

As this one will be coming out of pocket, fathers, relatives and personal friends who happen to be Otolaryngologists would be especially appreciated…but at this point…I’m willing to ruin myself financially just to get seen by a competent doctor.

Ask anyone you know who might have ideas…

Dear Reader: This is an essay from about a month ago. More Graz action fer yer pleasure…
__________________________________________________
For the rest of my life, I imagine I’ll refer to the spring of 2006 as the “Amex Holocaust”. Basically, I am unable to get cash from either my American or German accounts, so I’ve been living off advances from my fee at the opera (which is shamefully little), and you guessed it…the princess card.

The princess card began as a visa application in my mailbox, my freshman year at Oberlin. I applied, was accepted, and got to find out first hand what hypothetical money looks like (and it was fucking sweet).

After dozens of tearful apologies to my stultified parents, we let the princess card expire at about the time I moved to Germany, opting instead for good old-fashioned checking accounts. Mine in Berlin, and a reserve one in West Hartford, where my Mama could throw some green if I ever ended up really, really fucked.

About a year ago, I got sick of calling my Mama for her Amex digits in purchasing big ticket items like intercontinental plane tickets, and decided to get one myself. I was in the U.S. at the time, and it seemed most logical to name old 39 Pheasant as the billing address (because envelopes that end up in 70 Remsen are never seen or heard from again).

Thus, the unintentional rebirth of the princess card. However this time, a guilt that borders on nausea accompanies every use of that slick piece of plastic. It’s a strange little object, both the source (especially now) of nearly every meal and/or tube of toothpaste, and therefore largely what is sustaining me at the moment. It’s also a torture device, a constant, barbed reminder of the fact that, although I’m working my tits off, I’m not making nearly enough to live even a shitty, pale imitation of comfortable middle-class life. As much as I’ve achieved, and as far away from the insidious idleness of West Hartford as I’ve come, I’d be destitute were it not for a sweet, patient, mid-to-upper-middle-class couple back at old 39.

Which brings me to the second part of this post, inexorably intertwined, at least in my mind, to the former part: Therme Nova.

After six weeks of grueling work for which I’m being paid basically enough for pop rocks and jolly ranchers at the nearby deli mart, I got to feeling right shitty. It was Andrew, my main homo des cettes semaines (or whatever), who mentioned to me that I had begun limping several days ago. Frank, our lighting designer, who will, by the end, only have worked a full five days for more than twice what I’ll be making, concurred.

This happened in grad school. I ignored it ended up in physical therapy for several months. Ugh. Well, I looked into chiropractors and massage therapists around Graz. Expensive. Then, coincidentally, a stagehand named Erwin whose one out of five words I can understand mentioned a wellness spa very close to Graz.

I labored over the decision. It would entail a serious misuse of the princess card. More serious than most. Still, my back was looking like an LP left in the back window of a car on a hot day…and I’d already burned through most of my Zanaflex and Advil in these past six weeks.

So I went. One night with full use of all utilities. It was—nice.

I arrived at about four in the afternoon, and went straight to my room. It had a great balcony looking out on the Tirolean Alps, and the quaint yellow houses dotting the mountainsides. I found CNN on the tube (whoa Mexican-Americans…big day, n’est-ce pas?) and contemplated my next move.

After sliding into my complimentary robe, I padded off toward the spa, which is in a different building from the hotel. They provide a little choo-choo monorail so that you don’t have to actually wear clothing to go outside.

I’d been in something like the Therme Nova once before (a hotel in Dessau about five years ago). Yeah. Nakedness + Unselfconscious comfort = Not exactly American. I did my best.

The robe came off, and I shimmied my unbathed ass under an outdoor shower so as to enter the 95-degree-celsius sauna (that’s fucking hot, to you imperial-system-addictees).

For some reason, I always forget how much I hate mega-hot saunas until I’m in there. I come from the side of my family that turns into a panting immobile heap when confronted with extreme heat. It’s funny, because when I’m in there, I actually can’t sweat. It’s like my sweat glands are so shocked and resentful by the affront, that they go on strike, leaving parts of my face, and definitely my knees, to cook—without preventative marination as it were.

After only a few minutes, I’d had enough, feeling potential blisters beginning to raise under the skin on my knees. Just as I moved to leave, a relatively well-muscled (for his curiously unidentifiable age), tall, mustachioed, beef-jerky-colored German man strode into the scorching wooden box. He’d hung a no entry sign on the glass door.

No exit was also implied.

“Gruss Gott” he said to the twelve or so of us who sat or lay there sweating ourselves into unconsciousness.

“Gruss Gott” the others chirped back, in an odd nude custom the charm of which I still fail to find.

Then, the conker-colored man began what I can only qualify as the strangest ritual I’ve ever been unwittingly forced to participate in. First, he threw more water or wood or oil or whatever the hell you throw on the hot-makin’ apparatus in a sauna to suddenly make the temperature jump up 10 degrees centigrade. Then, he threw a festively colored towel over one arm (the long way) like a wing and began to slowly turn around the cramped space…creating a dry, unbearably hot “breeze” in the sauna.

I could feel my eyes begin to sizzle…the tears bubbling at my lids like that place where egg whites touch grease in a frying pan.

He proceeded to enact a series of little magic tricks with the towel, including flicking the damned think hard over each of our heads, so that a rush of boiling air strikes you all at once.

It was all but impossible to bear. My head began to swim. I tried to focus my eyes on something, anything, to keep from fainting. After a few minutes, I realized that the point I’d chosen was the oddly-colored scrotum of the Mediterranean man sitting immediately across from me, who was apparently growing a bit appreciative of the attention. I snapped my gaze away, head reeling.

So. (bright red mullet)

Many. (saggy tattooed tits)

Naked. (complexion like rawhide chew toy)

Austrians. (sweat dripping from ungroomed pubes)

I heard applause. The others in the sauna were applauding the beef-jerky-colored man, who was turning and bowing, displaying his relatively well formed buttcheeks not unflatteringly. The sound pulled me out of my faint. After the applause died down, he asked his audience if they thought they could handle more.

“Ja”, I heard a woman say on my right. Her motion was seconded. And then thirded. And so on.

I stood up, wiped the bubbling sweat (or drool?) out from between my tits, and marched out the door, without a word.

I just got off the phone with a few Le Grand Macabre cast members in Graz. Tonight they were celebrating in grand style: the final performance of my sweet, disgusting, fabulous first big-house remount. Very bittersweet for your still-ailing-but-pretty-much-past-this-bullshit-but-not-cos-she’s-still-deaf narrator here in Berlin.

Apparently the crowd was great. Big. Very responsive.

Tonight I’m celebrating…well celebrating is too strong, really…observing, or possibly even just acknowledging two entire weeks without any alcohol or tobacco (for those who’d care, it’s been over two months without green already). Strangely enough, it’s easier to give up the pair than to kick either on it’s own.

I’ve also had painfully little work to do. That means, without my three favorite vices, my fourth pillar of compulsion is picking up some overtime. Oh, sweet food.

It’s lame, sort of ironic and perhaps oddly fitting that it is this particular period of frustrated, necessary lethargy that has coincidentally been magnified by this tyrannical sobriety.

Just day after day. No fog in the mornings to remind me of the dramatic travails of the previous evening, and to provide that salty delicious undertone of mortality throughout the day. No stink to my coat. I have to near-consciously step down into a lukewarm pool of sleep at night rather than falling into that cool dark sea of nothing.

Everything is so clear. All the time. Nothing tilts or throbs or blurs or stinks or races. Nothing has a story. Situations don’t wink at me like sick private jokes only I can decipher.

Even after two weeks of heavy drugs and pain, people who see me keep saying I look better. Well rested. Healthy.

You know, fuck. Who needs to live to ninety, I say.

Prost.

Yesterday (like most days recently), I’m been moved by boredom to read up a bit on the operation I’ve just had, from which I’m currently recovering (read, depositing liters of pus onto my pillowcase at night).

I’m not a me day kind of girl. A great old friend of mine, Marcie was the queen of me days and nights and hours and afternoons. She had an amazing stash of bath salts and oils and scrubs and aromatic this and that and who knows but I was sad it wasn’t edible. She had this great ablilty to say “Okay, fuck you guys…YOU drive out to that nasty club in Cleveland, it’s gonna be a me night.” The next day, we’d all look like cigarette-reeking, blue-ringed, bloodshot shit, but sure enough Marcie…she’d be ruddy, and glowing and smelling like a Rainbow Bright safari.

It is simply not on my menu. Cruel coincidence also saw my cell phone contract running out two days after getting into the hospital…leaving me incommunicado (via phone) as well as injured, bloated and useless. My Mom and boyfriend are here, which is wonderful, but also serves to compound my sense of constitutional castration. My boyfriend isn’t allowed to touch me, and my mom isn’t allowed to pick fights with me. They just cook and get me tea and watch movies on the computer with me.

Anyway. As I said…I was reading up on this operation yesterday. I suppose everything would seem slightly less insulting if it weren’t made so apparent, via internet literature on the subject, that mine is a condition generally seen in very young children.

Okay. Adenoids. Most people’s disappear by the time they’re seven. Not mine. They just hung out like two great unwanted facial testicles, cutting off my eustachian tubes until adulthood. The websites are even more frustrating. “After the surgery, your Mommy might take you out for Ice Cream! And just think…when you talk, it won’t sound like your nose is pinched anymore!”

Well, to be sure, my Mommy did take me out for Ice Cream, but that’s not the buttfucking point, is it?

I also have to wear a little piece of head gear that looks like a pirate’s eye patch gone lost (and then found…over the ear). We stuff it full of gauze every night and morning to catch the still impressive amount of pus dripping out.

I wear a huge bandana to cover the eye-patch-gone-lost…and also my hair, which I haven’t been able to wash now for a week. It is one itchy, stinky scalp. Shaving the head is now in serious consideration.

So, I find myself wandering around my apartment in what is essentially an enormous bonnet, recovering embarassingly slowly from a child’s operation, being handled with kid gloves by the two people in my life who usually aren’t afraid to give me heaps of shit.

My one joy comes from the one or two times a day when we leave the apartment, and all of the bitchy, way-too-cool-for-you Germans in my neighborhood bend over backwards to be nice to me…thinking I have cancer.

Abe calls it the Kylie effect.

So, I was released from the hospital this morning amid lukewarm German controversy “I wouldn’t let her go…just look at all that pus!” “Well as long as you and your competent staff let it get that bad…” “Well whatever, it’s your damned signature…”

Then, I saw a list of teutonojokes sent to me by a dear old friend and master deadpan artist, Patrick Flanagan (who, upon seeing two blind Russians singing for alms in Vienna’s backstreets once loudly inquired “How do these people find each other?”).

Finding no better paraphrase for my last few days, I bring you the possibly proprietary words of Patrick Flanagan.

The canonical top 11 German jokes.

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
The police. I’m afraid there’s been an accident.
Your husband is in hospital.

A man walks into a pub. He is an alcoholic whose
drink problem is destroying his family.

Did you hear about the blonde who jumped out off
a bridge? She was clinically depressed and took
her own life because of her terribly low self-esteem.

What do you call a cat with no tail?
A manx cat.

Why do undertakers wear ties?
Because their profession is very serious, and it is
important That their appearance has a degree of
gravitas.

How many electricians does it take to change a
light bulb? One.

Why do women fake orgasms?
Because they want to give men the impression
that they have climaxed.

Two men are sitting in a pub. One man turns to the
other and says: ‘Last night I saw lots of strange
men coming in and out of your wife’s house.’

The other man replies: ‘Yes, she has become a
prostitute to subsidise her drug habit.’

Two cows are in a field. Suddenly, from behind a
bush, a rabbit leaps out and runs away. One cow
looks round a bit, eats some grass and then
wanders off.

Why are there no aspirin in the jungle?
Because it would not be financially viable to
attempt to sell
pharmaceuticals in the largely unpopulated
rainforest.

Okay. I’m scared. I really am. I’ve been in the hospital since ten this morning (it’s about nine now). Until now I’ve been cool as a cucumber. That’s pretty much over.

I don’t want them to carve up my head. They’ve decided to fuck around with my sinuses to boot (fixing septum, polyps, other shit, don’t know), in addition to the skull and ear stuff.

It’s lonely here. My mom was around a lot today. Although it’s occasionally clouded by a haze of annoyance, I’m fucking glad, no…rescued by the fact that she’s here. Without that, I mean, just–well…

In about eleven hours, someone will show up in my room, give me a sedative, and wheel me out into a room full of microprobes, lasers and knives.

It’ll be fine.

It’ll be fine.

It’ll be fine.

I

will

be

fine.

A few minutes ago, I went out for a cigarette I probably wasn’t supposed to have. As I smoked, a little girl passed very close to me on a pink bicycle with training wheels.

Nice wheels, I said.

No reaction.

WHAT A GREAT BIKE, I said, louder.

That’s when I saw the wire winding out from under her helmet…ostensibly running back to a cochlear implant I couldn’t see. Or perhaps one that would be installed tomorrow, or Friday, or next week, or when she’s buttfucking twenty-seven years old…

We’ll all be fine, I suppose.

In the U.S. we take it for granted that the indelible marks left on us my our ancestors (and the muttliness that can result) are generally meaningless. Former national identities are quietly forgotten. If the day without immigrants were to apply to all immigrants and children of immigrants in the last century, NOT ONE FUCKING PERSON would have worked yesterday.

Most people think I’m Russian. I have a Russian face. This is understandable, because my mother’s family stems from Ukraine (close enough). I don’t look Austrian, for which I’ve recently begun to thank GOD.

Sometimes Russian people come up and ask me for directions in Russian. Usually I just shake my head and shrug. Sometimes when I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll stare at them, smile and say SEBACA (dog) or PUPIK (belly-button) really loudly, seeing just how far the two words I know in Russian can take me. Either that or I’ll pretend I’m deaf and say STO (what?)over and over again in my best Corky voice.

I’ve also been mistaken relatively often for Scandinavian, as a result of my accent with spoken German, or Dutch (hopefully not due to my inborn sunburn, enormous incisors and upturned nose). Once I even got Spanish, from a taxi driver.

A couple days ago, I was at the grocery store at the Graz train station, waiting in line behind a raving homeless man who paid for several boxes of ultra-shitty wine with a crisp EU 100 bill. As I was putting my items on the conveyor belt behind him, he turned in my direction, peered at me with big, watery eyed and said, with a mouth smelling of something furry and likely long-dead:

"Wow, do you look German"