London: Accidents and Emergencies

I’m convinced Alex can’t leave his home country without having some part of his body go defect.  When we were in Japan for 2 weeks, he got food poisoning the night before our flight.  Not only did we have to delay our flight, we had to take him to the hospital to make sure it wasn’t the flu which was going around back then.  I mean, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we ended up with better seats and didn’t have to pay a fee for changing our departure dates by getting a doctor’s note.  But still, I was freaking out.  This time, it’s his eye.  His right eye.  It’s bright red.  It’s sensitive to light, feels scratchy, gives him pain and it needed medical attention.  Of course, he ignored the for the first 2 days, thinking it would go away.  3^rd day in London, he decides something should be done because it wasn’t getting any better; it was getting worse.  Trying to find an optician isn’t very easy when you don’t have a phone, nor free wifi in your hostel.   Frustrations were met with more frustrations  when our hostel couldn’t provide us with a simple solution for contacting a local optician; payphones just suck and out of the 5 computers with internet access, 3 were out of order, 2 were occupied.  In the end, Alex took some asprin, took a nap and decided he would wait out the symptoms until the next day.  After a nap, (I haven’t been sleeping so well because one of our roommate, who’s bed is right next to mine, snores like a vaccumm cleaner) we took the Underground to Westminster Station to see the House of Parliament, Big Ben and the London Eye.  Of course, we had what one would call “England Weather”; rain.  It was rainy, cold, and miserable.  Had it not been for our waterproof shoes and jackets, we would’ve gave up on walking along the Thames River.  But we sucked it up and kept tredding along, until Alex noticed something on a nearby map; a hospital.  I guess his eye was bothering him enough that he decided to walk right on into the ‘emergency & accidents’ room.  After waiting a mere 30 minutes, Alex was being examined for his eye.  In the end, they gave him an antibiotic ointment to drop in his eyes everyday and told him to come back if the symptoms persisted.  The best part?  We didn’t pay a single pence.  Maybe it was the accent that seem to make all the nurses and staff seem so friendly.  Or maybe it was the fact that we didn’t have to pay anything at all.  But we both left the hospital into the cold and miserable rain, feeling warmer than before on the inside.