Category: Health

Resident Aliens

After much brouhaha and faffing about, the Turkish Government will finally introduce new visa requirements on the 1st February. Essentially, this means that foreigners entering Turkey on a tourist visa can only stay for a maximum of 90 days in any 180 day period. Anyone staying longer will have to apply for a residency permit.

The permit process is not particularly onerous or expensive but it is a tiresome paper chase of red tape. It can be weeks before you finally get your mitts on the precious little blue book (that looks like it’s been knocked up by a child in a shed). Patience is needed. After years of encouraging foreigners to spend their readies and buy their dream holiday home, Turkey will not allow them to enjoy the fruits of their investment for more than 3 months at a time without becoming residents of a country they don’t reside in.

There’s a more significant change that is rocketing blood pressures into orbit. Spleens are being vented all over the forums. According to an article in the Land of Lights, the Turkish Parliament has passed a law requiring all expats with a residency permit exceeding twelve months to join the Turkish National Health Scheme. The cost will be a flat fee of 212 Lira per month each. This week’s special offers are two-for-one for married couples and children under 18 get in free. Those living in sin or have done the in-sickness-and-in-health thing differently (civil partnerships, for example) needn’t apply. Also, as with all the best health insurance policies, pre-existing conditions will not be covered. So it’s just tough if you’re a bit old and slightly doddery, with a touch of arthritis and spot of hypertension. That’ll be many expats then. Best not cancel your private insurance just yet.

The article also states that, while the scheme isn’t up and running yet, everyone is required to register by the end of this month. Failure to do so will attract a hefty fine. If this is the case, how come this crept up and caught us awares? What’s our man in Bodrum (actually, our woman) been doing? Sod all as usual.

I’m a great supporter of national health care, free at point of delivery and available to all. Apparently, the fee is the same for everyone, Turk and expat alike. I find this difficult to believe as 212 lira is a lot of dosh to most Turks I know. We’re happy to do our bit and pay our dues but I’m not keen on any scheme that isn’t linked to the ability to pay. As the cost of residency for Brits dropped dramatically last year, is this a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul?

As with most things the devil will be in the detail. The forums are hot with gossip and hearsay, outrage, resignation, argument and counter-argument. I’ll let the dust settle before I decide what to do. I’d still like something from the Honorary Consul, though. I won’t be holding my breath.

Jack the Pill Popper

I developed a minor gum infection around a wisdom tooth. Serves me right I suppose. When I had my teeth capped to produce my stunning Hollywood smile, I didn’t bother with the rear pearly greys – I figured nobody could see them without a dental mirror. I’m like a Georgian house. A fabulous stucco façade disguises a jerry-built wreck.

To avoid the cost of a trip to the dentist (which admittedly isn’t that expensive), I picked up some over-the-counter antibiotics at a local pharmacy. Turkish eczaneler have much more freedom to dispense hard drugs than is the case in Blighty. It worked a treat and the infection is no more. I now know where to go if I ever require open heart surgery.

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Hollywood Smile

Little Liam, Rest in Peace

What’s Your Poison?

Heart Attack, Anyone?

Hardly a week goes by without being told that this is bad for you, that is good for you, what used to be good for you is now bad for you, eat more of this, eat less of that, blah, blah, blah. What’s a boy to do? We’ve already abandoned terribly important jobs with responsibility and status (or so we thought) and we’ve jettisoned the Gü Puds. Jobs and puds were the instruments of our undoing. On the minus side we’ve developed a unhealthy weakness for strong liquor and failed miserably to pack in the fags. The cigarette variety, obviously; hell will freeze over before I give up the other brand. Yet despite our various vices, Liam and I have lost weight, feel infinitely less stressed and our blood pressure has dropped. In Liam’s case, it’s so low that I keep a vanity mirror by the bedside to check for breathing in the morning.

I’m not promoting an entirely degenerate existence but ponder this:

Domestic Gorgon

This woman is 51. She is a TV health guru advocating a holistic approach to nutrition and health. She promotes exercise and a vegetarian diet high in organic fruit and fresh vegetables. She recommends detox, colonic irrigation and multiple supplements. She advocates regular faecal examination like some kind of scat fetishist. She’s painfully thin and looks ill, even in makeup. It’s enough to make you anally retentive.

Domestic Goddess

This woman is 51. She is a TV cook who eats nothing but meat, butter and lots of desserts, all washed down with top-brand vodka, single malt scotch and a bottle of good wine every day. She’s voluptuous, sexy and licks a spoon like a porn star.

I rest my case.

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Oh Woe is Me

Emigrey Arms

Thank you Nikki for the inspiration for this one.

Tick Tock

Liam has become increasingly alarmed at the pendulosity of my neatly pruned testiculaire.  It’s a long hot summer and without the provision of a support hose, gravity has taken its toll. I could run a grandfather clock with ’em.

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Back, Sack and Crack

Because I’m Worth It

Siren Inflation

Today’s guest post is from Dina, a Bodrum Belle of class and distinction. Delicious Dina and her partner, Aussie Dave, run a successful gulet charter business here in old Bodrum Town called South Cross Blue Cruising. Dina is civilised and erudite and Dave is, well, Australian, though he does expose his more artistic side in oils. They’re rather good. I know what you’re thinking. An artistic Aussie? An oxymoron, a paradox, a contradiction in terms, it can’t be true. But it is.

Dina

The summer of 2011 in Bodrum will be remembered as the summer of excessive ambulance sirens.  Almost hourly and sometimes in simultaneous, harmonic dischord, ambulance and fire truck sirens have dominated the normal Bodrum hum of cicadas*, clinking of tea glasses, scooters and verbose neighbors discussing the latest diet fads.

Enough, already

In addition to the government operated national hospital’s ambulances, there are a plethora of private hospitals and clinics which have purchased a cargo minivan, painted the sides with red lettered AMBULANS and attached flashing blue lights with a very loud siren. The gleam in the drivers’ eyes of these newly sprouted emergency vehicles is one of sheer thrill as they weave in and out of the congested Konacik highway traffic, delivering patients with symptoms ranging from heat stroke to broken digits as quickly as possible.  However, as a citizen and as a driver, I find it weary and upsetting to hear the sirens continually, as would anyone who has either had to be in one as a patient or follow a loved one in such a vehicle. A quick check on Dr. Google reveals that there are specific rules in many countries as to when lights, sirens, or both together may be legally used. When I’ve got a hangover isn’t one of them.

*A note from Jack.

I didn’t know cicadas existed here in Turkey. These fascinating insects live underground for 17 years before emerging en-masse to breed. I found this You Tube Clip from the BBC’s Life in the Undergrowth series with the incomparable David Attenborough. It’s about Yankee cicadas but you’ll get the drift.

Hollywood Smile

Cabbage Patch Horror

Not to be outdone in the cosmetic surgery stakes, I decided to purchase a brand new set of Turkish gnashers courtesy of a delicious dentist in Yalıkavak with broad shoulders and all the right equipment. He ground my teeth down to resemble Chucky leaving the treatment room door ajar to let squeamish, dental-phobic Liam witness the bloody transformation in horror. He felt my pain more than I did. For a third of the Blighty price my tired old fag stained molars that were being slowly dissolved by alcohol were replaced by a fine selection of Omo-white crowns. I now dazzle with a Hollywood smile like a guinea pig from Ten Years Younger and Liam can see me coming in the dark. I asked my dentist how long my new teeth will last. ‘Longer than you,’ he wryly replied.

Night of the Living Dead

Off to the Quiz Night

Prior to our exodus, my GP was concerned about the slow but inexorable rise in my blood pressure. He regularly, and rightly, gave me the standard lecture about diet, smoking and drinking to defer the time when prescription drugs will be needed to control it. As a precaution, I invested in an electronic monitor from Boots and check the reading every week or so. Soon after our emigration my blood pressure reverted to normal and has stubbornly stayed there ever since, despite my continued dependence on booze and fags. This is further proof that work isn’t good for my health. I occasionally check Liam’s pressure. It is so low that, technically, he is clinically dead and I’ve been sleeping with a corpse for months. I could prop him up in a village bar and no one would really notice. Most nights Yalıkavak resembles a scene from The Night of the Living Dead anyway.

Little Liam, Rest in Peace

Little Liam RIP

For 40 years Liam had suffered from a benign but unsightly growth on the back of his scalp, big enough to develop independent intelligence. I affectionately called it Little Liam and had grown quite fond of it. As the years rolled by his hair thinned and Little Liam became more and more prominent, looking like a diminutive Ayers Rock rising above the bush. Big Liam sought the advice of a local doctor who recommended euthanasia, assaulting Little Liam with a scalpel. It was a bit of a tussle as the roots were much deeper than anticipated. What emerged from the butchery resembled a miniature jelly fish. Big Liam returned from the wars bloodied and stitched. All that remains is a scar in the shape of a neat and perfectly formed crucifix (and not the 666 I was expecting). Big Liam is certain that it’s a divine sign. The Virgin Mary has done it again and the Pope has popped his certificate of beatification in the post. Amen.

Jac the Fucing Felon

I’m having a bit of bother with my full size eyboard. One of the characters, the ey between J and L, only works when it can be arsed. It serves me right I suppose. I purloined the delinquent eyboard when I was helping young offenders and petty theft shouldn’t pay after all. I could buy a Turish eyboard but all those unfamiliar extra characters in strange positions would mean unlearning decades of appalling typing. This old dog can’t learn new trics.

I’ll buy a substitute on the next trip to Blighty for my Mother’s 80th birthday grand gala in March. Meanwhile, I am left to compose my latest masterpost by hunching uncomfortably over the undersized laptop keypad designed for infant digits, unnaturally contort my sagging upper torso and aggravate the repetitive strain injury that I painfully acquired during many arduous years of unsung but heroic public service.