Amsterdam 911
For a Dutch person this title must be as close as “abracadabra” as it comes. It’s the Dutch equivalent of what we call “911” in the United States. The essence of the service is of course to provide health care service as close to the incident as possible, and as quickly as possible. And when you live in the US for a long time you start forgetting how incredibly responsive that 911 service really is.
But of course, we visit my homeland every now and then, and one day we are there watching the World Cup final between Spain and our Holland Orange Team at my sister’s condo in Amsterdam. What a day it was; our nerves being tested. My dear spouse, however, had what looked like symptoms of heart or digestive pain in her chest and was stretched out on a bed. So, I called what in Amsterdam is the US equivalent of a “Primary Care or Urgent Care Virtual Nurse” who evaluates what may be needed. As a by now Americanized Dutchman, however, I fully expected there to be an ambulance in less than 10 minutes.
Yet I obviously was lost in translation. The woman on the receiving side of my urgent call was a very well-trained person who absolutely wanted to avoid having to send an ambulance – at least that’s how I perceived it.
“Good afternoon, what can I do for you.” “My wife has chest pains and needs to be seen quickly.” “Well, what is her name, your name, the address; what are the symptoms? where are you now; tell me about … and so on and on for 10 minutes with me increasingly becoming seriously frustrated with this woman, while I shared my displeasure openly with her. I told the woman that we could take care of the formalities later, but that we now first needed to attend to my wife. She obviously did not feel that way as if she and I had very different expectations and of course medical experiences. I decided to end this call by telling her I would deal with this in other ways and call her back if we needed her help.
In the meantime, as luck has it, my wife slowly recovered and in retrospect she may have had palpitations or indigestion from overseas travelling and she slowly felt better. And, by the way, Holland lost to Spain!
The next day, the woman calls back to inquire how my wife was doing. My dear sister picked up the phone to have the person tell her how unkind I had been to her on the phone the day before. Sis dutifully apologized on my behalf.
“Madame, don’t you think that your response to a perceived medical emergency was perhaps a bit naive? As my brother told you, they live in America and in an international city like ours it should not be all that unusual to you that even asking for medical help means different things in different cultures.”
Well said, sister! Cultures DO clash even in your own home country.
I hope you enjoyed this humbling story, it's truly an honor to share our stories with you. Next week’s episode will take us to the other side of the Atlantic and tells the story of my parents attending our wedding in Massachusetts. For those of you who are not used to eating eel this one will make you either LOL or cause you to have intestinal challenges. Be forewarned! I have called that story: “A Slippery Wedding Present.”
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