II.bureaucracy, I love you!

Bureaucracy is defined as an excessively complicated administrative procedure or Germany’s number one export to universities in the United States. I think bureaucracy was born in Germany, I am not going off of any empirical data, this is merely a theory created through observance of the way things run in Germany. I could probably write a laundry list of examples, but I will instead skip to an example of German efficiency and get to this in a round about way.

Last year I broke my ankle, I am not going to bore you with the details of basketball gone wrong or walking a few kilometers, actually it was maybe one, but we all like to embellish things, to get a taxi, and I had a pin and a screw placed, that sounds so nice, as opposed to my foot was cut open and I couldn’t walk for a few weeks, in my ankle in Bosnia. ( yes, in Bosnia)

So I needed this removed from my ankle. I was tired of setting off old metal detectors in airports and totting x-rays about to explain why.
I went to my general practitioner(GP) and kindly asked for an Ueberweisung, a note saying I needed the surgery, then I was able to go to the hospital and schedule the surgery; no, this was not the bureaucracy part.

I went in Tuesday morning for my surgery and after changing into a wonderful
sea-foam-green outfit I was hooked up to a bunch of machines while relaxing in bed.
A minute later an alarm on the machine starts going off, one of the machines that is receiving information about me, I think. This can’t be good, I know damn well, from Scrubs, that alarms and patients usually don’t mix.
A nurse and a couple doctors come running over, confirming my suspicion, though honestly I don’t know what I was suspicious of, that something wasn’t right.
Turns out all this exercise I do is bad for the machine. Apparently the machines reading my heart rate are set to trigger an alarm if someone’s heart rate is too high or in my case too low (anything below 50). My resting heart rate was between 41 and 43. The doctor, with a slightly evil glare says, you exercise a lot don’t you!? Guilty.
Every few minutes there after a nurse had to run over and turn this alarm off, after an hour or so it became a bit of a joke.
The anesthesiologist came in to give me my IV and prepare me for surgery. He stabbed my arm with an evil smile and then laughed, I have to be honest though it wasn’t much of a stab I hardly felt it, and I thought: you damn sadist. He said “ I found a way to stop the alarm, when I put the IV in your heart rate raised to 51.” A second later it went below and the monotony of the alarm reared its ugly head.

I was then moved to the operating room. I listened while the doctors chatted. One of the, I assume interns, asked how long the surgery would take. The doctor replied “ 6 minutes.”
6 not 5 not 7, but 6! After the surgery when I woke up I sneaked a look at my chart:
Surgery start: 13:21 Finish: 13:27 German efficiency.

When I was ready to leave another doctor helped me out of bed and asked if I needed a wheel chair.
“No thanks” I said with pride.
“Some crutches?”
“ It’s ok.” Cause I am tough and cool and don’t need that shit!
Actually I was still rather drugged from whatever gas I had inhaled, when I trustingly, and eagerly, breathed deeply when they told me too as they placed a mask on my face, and whatever they injected me with.

This resulted in a few days off of work. All I needed to do, which in my drugged out state I had forgotten, was to get an Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung, a doctors note. Simple. (you have to love the alphabetical processions that are German words) Well…
Here, finally, I am getting to the German bureaucracy.
I go to the hospital to get my Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung, my new favorite German word. And I am told that I need a doctors note to have the surgery, yes the surgery which I have already had. Not a note from a GP, but from an orthopedic. In order to get a note from the orthopedic I have to get a note from my GP to see an orthopedic. Once I get that note I visit the orthopedic who gives me a note to have a surgery, yes this surgery is 3 days old now.
Confused? Cause I sure was/am. Then, finally, after getting a note to have a surgery I get, and here is my word again, an Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung.