Spanish views from a small town

Last Wednesday, I went to refill my blood pressure medication. The pharmacist told me that the prescription had run out, and that I needed to renew it. So, when I came home, I went online and tried to make a phone appointment to renew my medications. But there was no opening until today, Tuesday.  Last night, I got a call from a phone number with so many digits, that it was either the health service, or the bank. It was the local clinic, telling me that my appointment to renew my prescriptions was cancelled, and that it would be rescheduled for the 3rd of August, next Tuesday. The problem? There were no doctors in the afternoon this week.  Excuse me? No doctors? There are no substitutes for doctors who are on a much-needed vacation? Or who are sick themselves and can't come to work? Exactly. There are no subsititute doctors. At the end of July. With tourists teeming all over the place. With the probability of more than one serious accident happening in the afternoon. Oh, but t...

This is summer. Traditionally, people take their vacations in summer, including doctors. Which is an excellent excuse to save money. The regional government does so by shutting up hospital wings, not hiring temporary substitutes for vacationing doctors or nurses, and even shutting down appointments for entire departments. The government justifies its actions by saying that people don't tend to get sick in the summer as much as in the winter. No, there aren't as many respiratory illnesses as in winter, but what about gastroenteritis? Or accidents of one kind or another? Those actually go up in summer. Chronic illnesses don't go on vacation, either. And so it goes that when my father was told in January by one of the doctors who see him, to get a follow-up appointment with him in July, he was given an appointment in October. The excuse? That the appointment books for July and August were still closed and I should ask in June to have the appointment moved up. In June I went ...