Feeling ropey

Skopelos town has a medical centre with a principal doctor, a paediatrician, a midwife or two and a junior doctor. There is an ambulance and an X-ray machine. In emergencies the coastguard will use their veryfastboat to get a patient to the mainland and in extreme emergencies there is a helicopter ambulance service. The island also has a country GP who holds daily morning surgeries in Glossa plus regular afternoon surgeries in some of the smaller hamlets where there is a significant population of elderly residents.

Since Greece began its rollercoaster of tax reforms much has changed. Our local tax office has gone from being a bustling centre with several specialist staff to a small basement room shared by two women. Private medical professionals have had their tax returns ruthlessly scrutinised and some have taken the decision to cast their nets wider.

And so it is that the former tax office is now the new private medical centre. It has a manager, a receptionist and an ultrasound person plus lots and lots of consulting rooms. Private medical professionals with successful practices in Volos now visit the island and borrow a consulting room in order to reach those islanders prepared to pay a consultant's fees, but not on top of the price of a return ferry ticket. It's brilliant! We now have a visiting cardiologist, gastrologist, gynaecologist, dermatologist, endocrinologist to name but a handful. They come over on the afternoon sailing when it is half day closing in Volos, do an evening surgery from 5 until 10pm and nip back to Volos again at crack of dawn ready to open up shop at 10am.

We both had appointments to see one of the specialists last Wednesday afternoon but received a phone call from the medical centre to say that the doctors could not reach the island and so our appointments had been postponed. This struck us as odd because yes, the sea was a bit wobbly and the Flying Dolphin was forced to deploy sick bags, but the doctors could have got here. Further investigation revealed that yes, they could have reached the island but they would not have been able to return the following morning.

So this Wednesday we were poised and ready for our 5pm appointment when a phone call from the medical centre notified us that our particular specialist had failed to secure himself a ticket on a completely full boat. You might well be thinking how foolish of him to leave it to the last minute, but it's simply not something that would occur. Would you phone an ice-cream parlour ahead of your arrival to check that there is still pistachio ice-cream in stock? No of course you wouldn't, well this is a pretty similar eventuality, nobody expects the Flying Dolphin to be fully booked on a Wednesday afternoon in March.

So our appointments have been rescheduled for next Wednesday at 5pm and this gave me some extra time to do a spot of gardening below. This here is the nautically-themed Morning Glory trellis I put up last Monday. It's still a bit slack at the bottom but I hope the plants don't mind that too much.