A doctor's visit in Berlin

I've been coughing for over four weeks and have developed a pain somewhere in my ribs, so that EVERYTHING hurts, specially to cough. A week ago, on Monday, I waited for almost an hour at a practice on Rigaer Strasse to see a doctor who barely had time for me. After listening to my lungs he pretty much said it's all ok: I was in and out in three minutes. When my cough still hadn't gotten better after a week and the pain had gotten worse, I gave up and went to the doctor's office again. This time I wasn't confronted with an overcrowded room of sickly, elderly people: besides me there were only two pretty healthy looking women in the waiting room.

When you enter a doctor's office in Berlin, you enter the waiting room and you say a greet the people there with a nonchalant 'Hallo' or 'Tach'. You proceed to the receptionist's desk, where you greet her and present her with your health insurance card – there might be no one at the desk, only a little bowl or basket to put your card into. You might be expected to sit down while being processed and wait for being called up again to pay the administrative fee of €10 (mostly cash only, of course).

Yesterday, when the receptionist finally got around to processing my card, she called me up to her desk and told me very apologetically, that I was there at the wrong time. "Your doctor's hours don't start until after two o'clock, you could come back then?". "Can I not see the other doctor?" "No," she said confused "you have to wait for your own doctor." It was such an idiotic conversation that I decided to leave!

After desperately having trodden around the block, going into another doctor's office with only closed doors and cardiologists, I finally found a doctor in the old Stalinist building of Frankfurter Allee 27 who I was extremely happy with; an older man with not much hair, but a white rim around his head, glasses, kind eyes and a white lab coat. When I entered his office, he shook my hand. His German was pretty easy to understand, maybe he dumbed it down for the foreigner a bit. He put me on a nine day antibiotic regimen, wrote a prescription for painkillers and offered to give me a few days sick leave, which I declined, feeling too guilty about the workload for the coming seven days. But still, hopefully I'm on the mend now!