University Hospital Attikon

Tuesday morning Lindsay and I woke up earlier than usual to make our way across Athens to Hospital Attikon, where our acquaintance Dr. Koutras works as an Ob-Gyn professor with the University of Athens medical school. He invited us to visit his Tuesday morning public clinic where he sees women with Greece's national medical insurance (similar to Medicaid). The morning's first task involved actually finding Hospital Attikon. Our touristy maps only show central Athens, and our vague geographical knowledge of the hospital put it in the western part of the city ... maybe. After searching in vain for a while for a decent map online , we decided to just hop in a taxi and say "Hospital Attikon" with confident smiles. Shockingly, it worked, but the cab driver whipped around in his seat to stare at us, and I realized a few seconds later that jumping into a cab and asking loudly for a hospital might deserve that reaction. We drove west on main streets that I slowly recognized from our visits last Thursday night with the transvestites. I snapped a picture of our first stop from that evening as we passed by in broad daylight.

When we arrived at the hospital, Lindsay and I wandered past clusters of smokers and through a blue cloud to enter the smoke-free sanctity of Attikon Hospital. The lobby was modern and airy, full of hustling staff and patients clutching their medical books (the Greek public health system uses books to track use of the system and provide continuity). We soaked in the familiar sights of a university hospital, including the obvious cluster of residents and medical students standing to one side slurping coffees. Dr. Koutras met us in the lobby to escort us back to his clinic and we settled in. Throughout the morning a long line of women came and went, some with general gynecology problems, and others newly-pregnant or just wanting a routine pap smear. Another medical student joined us for a while - a sixth-year medical student learning ob-gyn exams (before you flip out over six years of medical school, let me explain that the Greek system circumvents four years of undergraduate university time by including it in a six-year medical school curriculum, followed by a residency system similar to ours in the US). Lindsay and I were happy to contribute to the clinic, doing paps and gyn exams, and we were curious to notice a few differences in the Greek medical system as we worked.

• First difference - instead of the doctor going from room to room seeing different patients, the physician stays in one place while the patients come in one at a time from a line out in the hall.

• Second difference - hand-washing is less rigorous than in our hospitals

• Third difference - as is privacy ... patients waiting out in the hall regularly popped in to see if the doctor was free yet, even in the middle of oh-so-sensitive exams; despite these interruptions, only a handful of the patients seemed truly bothered by the intrusions!

After we finished clinic at 1:30 (Greek lunch hour-ish) Dr. Koutras drove us back to Syndagma Square close to Omonia. We set a dinner date with him later in the evening, and headed back to the office to get some work done. When he picked Lindsay, Robert and I up later, we were a bit dismayed to be fairly underdressed (aren't we always ..) and quickly realized how much our host wanted to show us the beauty of Athens to counterbalance any one-sided impressions we might absorb from our work in the darker corners of the city. Dr. Koutras brought a date, his cousin and his cousin's wife to join us for dinner in southern Athens on the waterfront. The seven of us had a marvelous time eating incredible Greek food and working our way through often hilarious broken English-Greek conversations about our different persectives on the world. They dropped us off in Omonia well after 1am with full tummies and lingering smiles to stagger back to the apartment and fall happily into bed.