One of my good friends is in the hospital since yesterday. Her stomach hurt really bad since Thursday, so she decided it would be better to see a doctor. Actually it was better, because she had to go under surgery yesterday. When I visited her in the hospital today and she told me the whole story of her condition, I actually began to wonder what I will do in the future when something like this happens to me!

In Germany I would surely just go and see a doctor or go to the hospital, but in the US I would be pretty unsecure if I had ugly pains. It is pretty scary to think about going to a hospital in a country where you can’t understand any medical language. For sure my english is pretty good and I normally understand nearly everything, but guess what the only TV series is I can’t fully understand – it’s Grey’s Anatomy.

Sure all the doctors in this series are charming and so willing to explain every condition a hundred times, if the patient needs it. But I know from german hospitals that this is fiction. And that reality is cruel. Perhaps I should get some kind of medical dictionary to be prepared for future visits to the hospital, but I don’t think that this would make it less scarier for me.

It’s very likely that my first visit to a hospital in the US will be the birth of our first child one day and in that situation I might be better off with not understanding everything. But till then I will try to hold my unrealistic image of every american hospital being like the Seattle Grace alive and keep on dreaming of a charming Patrick Dempsey giving birth to my first child one day. The time to wake up from this dream will come soon enough.