I'm sorry this blog has been so silent lately. I am ridiculously busy right now, it seems the deadlines just keep piling on without end. I doubt things will get any better in the next year and a half. (Oh god! I only have a year and a half left for my PhD! Ahhh!)
But recently I've had a new experience, and that's what this blog is theoretically about, so I figured I should write about it. That's right, recently I've had my first brush with the Irish health system. In the three and a half years I've lived in Ireland, I've never been sick enough to need to see a doctor. I've had a checkup with a gynecologist, but that was through the college's free sexual health clinic.
As you may know, I have a history of urinary tract infections (UTIs). This is a very common type of bacterial infection that many women (including myself and my sister) are prone to. Unfortunately the more of them you get, the more prone you become, and I've had about nine of them. The symptoms are unmistakable. It's a very specific type of pain, and by this point I can tell as soon as one is coming on. So when I recently started feeling that unpleasantly familiar pain, I knew exactly what it was. There are preventative measures one can take to keep UTIs at bay-- cranberry juice, etc.-- but once there's a full-fledged infection, it takes an antibiotic to get rid of it.
Which meant that I had to go to the doctor. This worried me, of course, because I currently don't have health insurance! And even when I did, the coverage I had didn't include GP visits, only hospitalization. I had no idea what the procedure or cost would be like, but I knew I had to go and obtain an antibiotic when I woke up in terrible pain one morning. The college has a free student clinic, but demand is very high; to get an appointment sometime during the week you need to call between 9:00 and 10:30am on Monday morning. So I googled "Galway GP", found a reputable-looking one that was nearby, and called. The receptionist told me they were booked full until 2:30pm, but that I could see a nurse. I explained "Well, I'm 99% sure I have a UTI, and I'd need an antibiotic." The receptionist said "Oh god, we don't want to keep you waiting with that!" and told me to come in as soon as possible, and they'd fit me in between appointments.
Already I was favorably disposed, because I really appreciated the receptionist's concern and sympathy. I hurried over, and quickly was able to see a nurse. She took a urine sample and tested it. She found blood, protein, and white blood cells-- all the signs of an infection. I saw the doctor shortly after, and after feeling my torso and back to make sure it wasn't a full-on kidney infection, she prescribed me an antibiotic. The visit's cost? €40. And the antibiotics cost me less than €10. The whole experience was over in less than an hour and cost me less than €50!
A few days later, though, the doctor called me back and said that the lab work on my urine sample came back and showed that the antibiotic she'd prescribed me might not clear the infection. I told her that it was feeling much better, and she said to carry on with the antibiotics but if I felt any relapse of symptoms to call back. Well, sure enough about two days later I started to feel a bit of pain again. Worse still: as a side effect of the antibiotic, I developed a yeast infection! So I had both those things going on, which was incredibly uncomfortable. I called the doctor back and scheduled a follow-up visit, which I had yesterday morning.
It turned out that the particular strain of bacteria causing the UTI was resistant to 3 of the 4 antibiotics the lab tested it for... including the one I'd been on. So the doctor prescribed me the one it wasn't resistant to. For the yeast infection, she suggested I get an over-the-counter cream and pessary. I won't go into details about the pessary, you can google that yourself if you're curious, but the end result is that today I'm feeling much better. No more pain, itching or discomfort. The cost of the follow-up doctor visit? €25.
Overall, I'm very impressed by the comparative ease and humanity of the Irish medical system. There is no way an uninsured foreigner would get two GP visits for a total of $65 in the U.S. I had been worried about being sick before that, because as I said it's difficult to get an appointment with the college health centre and they certainly can't take walk-ins. But now I know that it's cheap and easy to see a doctor, and that medication isn't prohibitively expensive. This is really reassuring. Even though I rarely get sick at all and I have a generally robust constitution, it's nice to know that if I do come down with something bad I can easily get medical care.
