First Time In An Ambulance

I GUESS I am lucky to have made it to 65 without needing an ambulance, but yesterday evening one was called by the hotel I am staying at in Poiana Brașov to take me to hospital.

I had been having sharp bursts of pain since lunchtime, and they became more frequent during my game yesterday and especially after it.

As I was waiting in the Romanian equivalent of Accident & Emergency - very smart looking, incidentally - I counted 35 stabs of pain in an hour.

The hospital conducted blood tests and put me on a painkilling drip, and I was discharged around 10pm with instructions to attend another, specialist, hospital this morning.

I will not go into where the pains were, but I ended up with three courses of tablets - antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pain, I believe - and a course of suppositories.

The good news is the doctors reckon there is nothing fundamentally wrong, although they could not tell me what I was suffering from, and the courses are more of a just-to-be-sure measure, I think I was told.

The interesting thing is, apart from using my passport to prove my identity, I was at no point asked to provide proof of health insurance or to produce my UK Global Health Insurance Card.

However, I did have to pay for the prescription - just over £15.

Unfortunately I had to default this morning's round-six game, and I am not out of the woods yet, pain-wise, but hope to play in round seven this afternoon.