Danish medical system

Well folk, I made it the entire summer without getting sick, hurt or needing any kind of medical attention, until today.

This morning I was thinking I might go to the Danish Nursing museum but decided that since it was such a nice day out I would be better off going to the beach for a few hours. I had a wonderful time at the beach and met a family that was from Paris and had a long chat with them about all kinds of things then headed home.

So I was biking home and on one of the paths there was a crane so I decided to pop off the path and down to the street to go around. Then I did a stupid thing and tried to pop the bike back up onto the path but was not successful, instead I fell off my bike, did a nice face plant onto the path and managed to give myself a huge cut on my chin, under my nose and on my inner upper lip. I managed to get myself home and tried to get everything cleaning hoping I wasn’t going to need to go to a doctor but it looked pretty bad so I called Joe and asked him to come home so we could go to the hospital.

Joe was thinking it might not be that bad but when he got home and saw how deep they were he decided we better go. We took a taxi there and after some confusion on where to go were directed into the check-in area and I was looked at by a nurse. She gave me some wet gauze to put on my cuts (which were bleeding less at this point thankfully) and then I went to the waiting room. They called me back very quickly and I was seen by a nurse. She looked at my cuts and used some medical glue to glue my chin cut together. Interesting thing was the only thing they washed my cuts with was distilled water. Apparently that’s all they use here, but my mom told me the glue has some antibacterial properties so anything that might have been in there is no more. She called in another nurse to discuss the cut under my nose. They apparently weren’t sure what to do with it, if they should give it stitches or if the glue would be enough. After a few minutes of talking to each other in Danish and me giving them a confused look the other nurse told me they were trying to decide what would be best for that cut. Joe watched her move the skin around to see if it was really deep and it wasn’t just more of a gouge so they decided to put some of the medical glue on that and sent me on my way. I got a little ice pack from them and talked with the American doctor who told me that it would be fine. They said it would scar but not to touch or pick at the scab (a word they had a difficult time coming up with) so now Joe said I will have a permanent reminder of my visit to Europe for the summer (not exactly what I wanted to have happen but he’s right).

So, I’m thankfully OK, nothing more then some nasty wounds that will look crappy for a few days and then start to heal so hopefully by the time I go home next week it won’t look to bad. Tomorrow I probably won’t leave the apartment just because people were staring at me a lot this afternoon and I don’t really want to deal with that tomorrow so an inside day it will be.

Needless to say even though I did not want to have to experience Danish socialized medicine it was a positive experience. The nurses and doctor were helpful, I was seen very quickly and all in all I should be just fine in a few days. Nothing short of a fun adventure to start off my last week in Europe!

Love from Amanda