christopher winslow, patient

loyal ilovepostage readers will recall a previous interview done with christopher winslow, a great friend that moved to argentina last fall. he is still living in buenos aires, where he teaches english, is becoming fluent in spanish, and is gettin knee deep in the mud and scrappin with the best of them. unfortunately for chris, this scrappin' led to an accident on september 10, an accident he described to me on gchat later that night.

chris is no stranger to medical tribulations. while in wisconsin last christmas break, chris told his eye doctor that he was having some problems with his vision. a week later he was undergoing emergency surgery to repair a detached retina in his right eye. while his detached retina might have been diagnosed by high tech tools, a decent way to fix the problem wasn't on our radar just yet. so chris spent the next three weeks lying on his stomach in a massage chair, face through the occipital hole, waiting for a gas bubble to center itself on the retinal aperture until the retina was sucked back into place and reattached itself.

you would think that toughness gleaned from this experience, reasonable apprehension about borderline Second World healthcare and a modicum of pride would have kept chris out of the hospital after a tvp (textured vegetable protein) experience gone awry but, what can i say, the man is always full of surprises and i have deemed his pain to be sufficiently quirky to warrant an interview.

wow, so what happened?
I was trying to separate two frozen veggie burgers with a butcher knife. well, they separated. and in the chaos that ensued a portion of my ring finger on my left hand separated too.

wow. what kind of veggie burgers?
there's only two kinds here - normal and "sin sal". the latter are gross

i mean, what brand were they? do they have just one brand or do you have options?
vegetelex or something

bananaphone...
yeah, it sounds more like a communications company

were you just planning on eating one of them?
yes. i wasn't greedy

what would you say, you nicked yourself with the knife? sliced open your finger?
I sliced open the middle part of the finger horizontally

eee. i'm sorry. is it shorter now?
I blame myself. and vegetelex. no, i didn't cut it off. just bled for a while in the apartment. after i got back from the hospital i ordered food from next door cuz i was gonna be damned before i tried to cook again and the crazy old guy who owns the restaurant asked cameron if she cut me for "behaving badly"

research has shown that gay men are more likely to have a shorter index finger. were you trying to hide something?
by cutting my ring finger?

(so they'd be the same size) also, that's an old wives tale and then i just made up the research part, but i googled it and here's an article:
that doesn't make any sense but thanks for impugning my heterosexuality again

it does too make sense. if you have a short index finger, you have a longer ring finger, so if you cut your ring finger it's less obvious.
ok. your logic games baffle me.

who do you place the blame on for the incident?
my roommate manu. he just sharpened the butcher knife last night

In Hinduism, Manu is a title accorded the progenitor of humankind
groovy

Mahabharata says: "And Manu was endued with great wisdom and devoted to virtue. Manu had fifty other sons on Earth. But we heard that they all perished, quarrelling with one another.
and trying to wedge butcher knives between shit

so you're bleeding. you immediately go the hospital? how do you get there? where is it, etc
well i realized quickly toilet paper wouldn't be a sufficient means to stop the bleeding. so i went to find an old article of clothes to wrap around it

at this point i should interject and remind readers that you use t-shirts for pillow cases
i chose a ripped pair of brown plaid boxers. i first picked up a pair of yellow smiley face boxers

which is actually kind of a good idea, but if you don't know it's coming, it looks very alarming
but I imagined myself in an emergency room with that wrapped around my finger and decided no. I already felt stupid enough for having cut my finger like that as it was

argentinians are fickle. so how'd you get to the hospital? was cam home and did she go with you?
she was working near by she met me and we took a cab

what was your phone conversation like?
I was trying to play it down. I was like "Hey honey, can you do me a favor. Can you take me to the hospital?"

ooooooh "honey". what happened when you got to the hospital?
i have my underwear wrapped around my hand and the guy at the entrance asks me to show him my finger to make sure its the real deal. which was my biggest fear at that point, that i would have made my girlfriend take me to the hospital and have them tell me i just needed a bandaid. but i passed
the test and got to go to the traumatologia section

what's their triage like? the guy at the door just pointed you to trauma?
first i got registered, then i went there. it didn't seem like there were any real emergencies there. i saw one girl limp a little when they called her. i think i had the best injury of the lot of them

what was the wait time like?
not bad, 15-20 minutes

then you see a doctor...
they take off the underwear from my finger and make fun of me a little about it. then they swab my whole hand with iodine or something, and not all that gently either. then they inject anaesthesia

you're conversing entirely in spanish this whole time, verdad?
verdad. the injection hurt like hell, but they said something like "this is where you need to act like a
man," so i pretended it didn't. then they stitched, which was weird cuz i couldn't feel it. it felt like someone was tugging on my sleeve, except...well, my finger, not my sleeve.

how many stitches?
4. i don't think that's bad for a finger. the wound is not that wide

you just went home afterwards?
we walked home looking for a pharmacy. at the pharmacy the guy asked if i wanted to 'apply' one of
the medicines there in the pharmacy so i said "sure" not realizing it was an injection to protect against
tetanus. so he took me to a back room made me pull down my pants and gave me two injections, one
in each buttcheek.

oh good lord. what was the guy like?
he was nice. mid 30s. i kept thinking i must have misunderstood about what was going on but then
he made a clear gesture that he was gonna stick me in the ass.

was cameron there for that?
yeah but not in the back room.

did he act like it was just the usual?
i was worried i had misunderstood and if i dropped trow he would be like "what the hell are you
doing man?". he was all business.

do you have argentinian health insurance?
I don't. they have free public hospitals but i went to a private one which was regretably expensive.

oh, why'd you go to the private one?
cameron knew it. it's a good one, and i think we were concerned about the wait time at a public one. and
i didnt think it would be as expensive as it was

have you ever been to any other hospitals in BS?
nope. my roommate, who is argentinian, said one he went to was like being in a warzone, but that for
emergency care most are good. i'm going to a public one on thursday for a followup

how much was it?
with pills and consultation fee like 500 pesos, which is about $170. the stitches were about $100.

that includes the shot in the ass?
pills and shot in ass were 100 pesos, $33 more or less. i don't know if the pills would have been free had i
gone to a public hospital. actually, i don't think so, because i had to go to a pharmacy outside the hospital.
but maybe there's a free pharmacy in the public hospital.

have you seen sicko?
no. it hasnt come out in argentina. they like michael moore though down here though. i do not.

the first little vignette is about an american guy that is in danger of losing two fingers after a
table saw accident. he can save one of his fingers for, say, $25,000, or the other finger for
$12,000. so he chose the $12,000 finger, and the $25k finger got lopped off.
i heard this one is better. i saw that clip. it really hits home now.

well i guess he couldn't use you for comparison, since you said the public hospital is messy
and you went private
i think it would've been fine for the stitches though. there were some snap judgements made at the time.

i'd think that's how most middle class-y people would deal with things. go to the private hospital if it were an emergency, free public one for checkups.
well, i think you usually go to the closest one. i also didn't know where the nearest public hospital was. i could've asked the cabdriver i guess.

well, it's a funny story. do you have other scars?
not really. there was the matter of the detached retina.

explain that one for the audience.
my right eye decided to turn on me and i had to spend three weeks staring at the floor so the gas bubble they put inside my eye would reattach the retina again. I had to keep my eyes pointed at the ground, walking, sitting, sleeping. i watched the first season of Lost face down through an angled mirror.

wasn't there also a buckle involved?
they put a buckle on my eye that squeezed it so that it would reattach better. it's still there. my eye is more oval now, and it made my eyesight much worse in that eye.

what do you think would have happened if you found out you had a detached retina in argentina?
it actually would've been ok. they have a lot of good surgeons here. expensive since I don't have insurance, but cheaper than the straight up cost in the u.s. maybe a few grand. a lot of people come to argentina for plastic surgery.

how do you know they have good surgeons? just the word on the street?
yeah. i had a student who was a doctor too. they have a reputation for good doctors in general in the public hospitals too. moreso actually; there's more prestige in the public hospitals and universities, even though the pay is less.

kind of like my blog and the charlie rose show
yeah. i gotta go watch the end of butch cassidy and the sundance kid. getting mown down by gunfire
in bolivia is much worse than cutting your finger in argentina. i gotta keep shit in perspective. put a
spoiler alert on that.




i found this picture on google images and it was called "homohands.jpg"