Susan drove, and 15-year old Candice and her mother, Rosie, came along for the 30 minute ride into town. None of us knew much about the hospitals in town (they were new in town too). But Rosie had heard something positive about a small private hospital, and so that was the one we pulled into. 

The emergency room doctor arrived 15 minutes later. He was so drop dead gorgeous, that it was as if he had stepped out of the cast of a soap opera. It got better. The lab technician and the surgeon were also Calvin Klein model-esque. What are the odds of that? The only explanation is that in Argentina you get into medical school based on your looks. The nurses have an entirely different set of requirements.

I should add here that I thought when I arrived in Argentina a couple of weeks earlier, that I spoke Spanish. But Argentines I quickly learned, speak Castellano. I’d been with English-speaking Brits since I got here, so my ability to communicate with the locals had not yet kicked in.

A handful of Brits, most of them strangers an hour earlier, had heard and crowded into the examining room to help. There was Johnny from South Africa who had been summoned by the surgeon to assure me that he (the doctor) was competent, and there were Annette and John, Brits who toured the world on motorbikes before stopping in rural Argentina to try their hands at farming, and there was of course Susan, Candice, and Rosie.  Everyone was trying to translate at once. “Dr. Novak” shooed them all out except for Candice. Her father was Argentine, her mother Mexican, and she had been raised until recently in Las Vegas. She would make the perfect translator.

The doctor poked my belly shooting out words like a machine gun. Candice was great. Until he called another doctor in and they began to talk in medical speak. “What are they saying?” I asked. 

“Uh .... Just medical stuff,” she said.  Great. After being married to a surgeon who stayed up many a late night trying to diagnose a ready-to-burst-appendix from gas pains, this was the part I needed to hear. 

She did however tell me that they had decided that I would need to stay overnight for observation. I sprang for the extra $30 a day for the one and only air conditioned room. It was over 100 degrees out, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask them to stand over me fanning the way that other visitors could be seen doing through open doors up and down the hospital corridor.

It was the most third world country hospital I'd ever been in, and this was the private one.  Patients are required to have a companera (friend or family member) 24/7 for basic nursing needs. A not ingenious solution to rising health care costs, but a tricky one when you are a stranger in town. Annette, the biker from Northern England, opened her big heart by volunteering to sleep on the couch in my room. Only problem was that I had an easier time understanding Spanish than her heavy northern England accent. 

Next morning, I was relieved to wake up feeling better, embarrassed that I'd caused such a ruckus over nothing. The docs came into my room, poked my tummy some more, fired off a few Castellano words, and suddenly I was being wheeled into surgery. 

“Wait a minute,” I said. I want to go to Buenos Aires.  He said I’d never make it. 

On the gurney en-route to the operating room, I scribbled down the phone numbers of my best friend and my children in California, and handed it off to Annette with instructions to call them right away. I thought about how it was going to sound on their end  – a stranger they could barely understand calling to tell them their friend/mother had gone into emergency surgery in a foreign country. 

I was strapped atop a table, both arms were tied to boards straight out at my sides, IV needles stuck into my arms, and, like Jesus Christ, I lay there looking up into the light.

My last thoughts as the gas mask came down? A story I once read about a surgical patient who was put under, paralyzed by the anesthesia, but who remained awake throughout surgery, able to feel everything, but unable to let anyone know. They pulled the sheet down and began swabbing my belly with something cold.

Terror set in. 

My mouth would not work. I looked into the eyes of the anesthesiologist and shaking my head vigorously back and forth, I said with my eyes, No, No! I'm not asleep yet! Your anesthesia isn't working!…
 

The upside down face of the anesthesiologist came into focus. ''Robin?'' 

''Fineeshed?'' I asked unable to come up with the Spanish words for, "Is it over?" 

Ow, I'd been hit in the gut, hard. 

They were rolling me down the hall.

"How long?"  I asked.

"Thirteen minutes." 

"Was it my appendix?" 

“Si. Twelve centimetros!'' the surgeon announced, as if that was something. It wasn't until later that I learned that my appendix, an organ normally 2 inches or so in length, had been found poking up into my chest cavity, a fully erect 7 inches. I’m not sure why, but I felt a little bit proud over those stats. 

The next morning, “Dr. Novak” looked in and said,' 'You can put your makeup on now.''  I chose to think that he meant that my prognosis was good. 

Dr. Castro, the surgeon, popped in to tell me that he'd made the scar small enough that I could still wear a bikini. This is definitely not San Francisco.

A nurse entered my room later that day and handed me a package neatly wrapped in butcher paper.  'What's this?'' I asked. 

Neither Susan nor I could understand her reply so Susan went off to the nursing station for an explanation. She returned shortly. “It’s your appendix.” 

I have to assume that Argentine doctors return the faulty body part for the same reason that auto mechanics return the faulty mechanical part that they take it out of your car. I put it on my night stand and there it sat until I started to worry the next day about the possibility of an unwelcome odor in this heat.

I asked the nurse to put it in la basura." 

''La postal?'' she asked. 

“No, no. Throw it away, don’t mail it!” 

They say it’s a global world, but if you ask me, it’s more like the Tower of Babel. (and I wrote this BEFORE the movie came out.)

Two days later, I am back on the ranch surrounded by the warm people of this tiny community near the border of Argentina and Chile - feeling very lucky thank you all very, very much.

Robin near Mendoza, Argentina