9) Barcelona Surgery
Sep 15-27 2025 - Diary Entry #9
Been in Barcelona for the past week and looks like we’ll be here for another six days or so. For Mon Amour’s eye surgery. Upon arriving here late Sunday night, we were told on Monday evening that the surgeon who was going to do the surgery has essentially gone on strike due to union disputes and a large conglomerate company buying out the eye clinic. Difficult to get to the bottom of the actual issue through translation though. Whatever the case: he was not doing surgeries as of last week, his colleagues were also not doing surgeries, therefore the clinic was of no use to us at all. The initial eye exams and tests and whatnot were all done with this particular clinic and the surgery was scheduled for the Wednesday. This did not happen though. My Western mindset kicked in and was rather displeased. We had travelled all this way to Barcelona from Fez airport – which was a small, quaint, and pleasantly clean airport with little to no waiting lines. The drive was indeed hot and sweaty though. When we arrived in Fez it was 38C. I don’t know the current status of our car, but hopefully someone is looking at it. I believe our neighbour was going to take it to a mechanic. The insurance people said it would take a month to get looked at and fixed, which really means at least three months minimum. So the decision was made to just repair it ourselves on the cheap. A very Africa solution to an Africa problem.
To be told two days before the surgery day that the surgery wouldn’t happen seemed to bother me more than Mon Amour. I think it was because a) she was slightly scared to get it done in the first place and b) her tolerance for mishaps and plan changes is a lot more laissez-faire than mine. I’m still operating on a conceptual framework whereby appointments, let alone surgeries, happen on time and aren’t rescheduled willy-nilly. Or at least if they are rescheduled then plenty of heads up is given beforehand. My frustration was palpable and I was caught in a cognitive doom spiral whereby the surgery wouldn’t happen, we’d go back to Morocco having achieved nothing, and would have to replay this whole scenario all over again in a month or two from now, having found a new clinic and surgeon again. Alas, ye of little faith. Mon Amour’s clinic contact for the past six months throughout this entire process, Monica, came to the rescue. She rescheduled an initial meet-and-greet appointment at another clinic for the Tuesday. Alright. We shall go and see what this new place is about.
Waking up early to be there for the 9:30 appointment, we found ourselves in an orderly clinic that was expecting us. Name was on the list. Spanish secretaries and clinicians buzzing around. Overall the initial appointment went well. It was essentially a full suite of eye exams and tests, which meant her eyes had been fully tested and prepped for surgery twice in 2025. Can’t complain about that at all. Even if such is the final result of the trip to Barcelona, then so be it. At least some progress was made.
But luck was on our side. Or fate. Or the Eye Deities. Not entirely sure what to make of it still. A lesson in patience, acceptance, and in that which I can’t control I must simply let go of. The following appointment was scheduled for the next day: Wednesday. Another morning appointment with the actual surgeon and director of the clinic. Again: very promising. We looked him up online and he seemed reputable and of good upstanding character. The appointment was not as early but we decided to arrive thirty minutes ahead of the scheduled appointment time just to be on the safe side of things.
The surgeon was all that he was cracked up to be. He even spoke French too. A bald but handsome chap with four kids apparently. Two of them eye surgeons themselves. A big happy ophthalmic family. He gave the green light for GO on the surgery, which would happen… tomorrow. Thursday. One eye at a time though.
And this is exactly what happened, much to my surprise and shame and almost disgust. It was all too easy and simple and straightforward. A part of me wanted to be vindicated for my froth and frustration. And yet the more content and zen part of me was obviously delighted that this plan of action had come into fruition. The likelihood was near zero, and yet it happened.
We arrived Thursday morning early again and waited for an hour or so to be seen. I’ve been devouring the immensely brilliant The Shadow of the Sun throughout all these waiting room chunks of time. Read probably ~150 pages of it sitting in Barcelonian ophthalmology clinics. Kapuściński’s depiction Africa is unrelenting: his arduous travels, his fascinating stories, the oddballs and warriors and extravagent animals he encounters. It might as well be a science fiction novel of an expedition to a nearby planet. His elegant and intricate prose leaps off the page, leaving you gasping for breath on one page then chuckling with delight on the next. Each chapter another adventure, another country or territory, another coup d’état he escapes, another animal he almost gets killed by.
Off she went in for surgery and popped out an hour or so later with a big white bandage on her left eye and a little bleary from the general anaesthetic. I didn’t know she would be put fully under. This piece of information was not conveyed to me, much like a lot of the information throughout the past week. The problem with in person spoken translation is: you never get the full story or picture. The translator has a five or seven minute conversation with a clinician or a front desk lady or a surgeon, and then you only get a couple of sentences of that translation out on the other end. This is both due to the time it takes to translate everything and the effort it takes to have to constantly relay and translate entire conversations. It is easier for her to just not translate everything to me. But that then puts me in a bind at times, asking her questions that seem irrelevant or obvious or downright stupid: only because I’m interpreting or understanding less than 25% of the actual details. Such is the scenario I found myself in and which I needed to be a tad more hands off perhaps.
A fellow up appointment will happen tomorrow, Friday. And then the other eye will be done on Monday and follow up appointment on Tuesday. This means we will have to bump our flight and hotel stay back a bit more than expected – having originally been scheduled to leave on the Sunday but will now be leaving on the Thursday or Friday.
Barcelona is a big sprawling city, loud and excitable, lots of old people and university students and mothers pushing babies around in their prams. Not that these details are particular to Barcelona itself. Any major city is the same. But it appeared all the more noticeable for some reason. Seeing a lot more old people out and about having drinks or dinner or simply walking from one place to another. It could be that Spaniards are slightly more healthy on the whole, meaning that old people are more mobile. Or that Barcelona is a walkable city, rather than North American cities where driving is the norm. Our hotel was in a bit of a fancy area, there were clearly private schools and a big university nearby. Lots of young kids in little red uniforms walking to or from middle or high school. Then large swaths of university age students moseying around cafes and tapas bars in between classes sipping on coffee and eating some form of a baked good. Pastries, croissants, bread, pizza, sandwiches. The Spanish diet. Carbohydrate based but still relatively healthy. And no such thing as customer service. Drinks and food are plonked onto the table rather nonchalantly. I determined this was because tips aren’t really a part of the culture, therefore having to be overly nice and pleasant to get a tip isn’t a thing. The bright-eyed-wide-smiling North American customer service is nonexistent, and is instead replaced with the straight forward and direct ‘What do you want? Ok here it is’ approach. Which I sort of enjoyed more. Less pretence, more authenticity.
It is surprising, and yet shouldn’t be, that once you leave the Anglosphere: people don’t speak English. An idiotic and yet revealing statement. English is always assumed to be the universal language that everyone speaks. And yet there are hordes of billions of people on the planet that simply speak little to no English at all. The baseline assumption of communication is tossed out the window. This is all too apparent in Morocco but even in a cosmopolitan city such as Barcelona, I’ve had a few interactions that have been reduced to sheer hand waving, pointing, and the minuscule amount of Spanish I know: “Agua gas!” (Sparkling water!) “Si, gracias!” (Yes, thank you!).
The downright arrogance of English speaking peoples across the globe is risible. My embarrassment is immense at being essentially a monolingual, albeit an ardent striving trilingual (Darija and French being my newfound languages of immersion). When you can’t communicate to the person in front of you, you feel utterly useless. Without any way to tell them what you want, even if it’s just ordering a burger at a restaurant, it is difficult to respect yourself or have some reverence for all your grandiose ideas and philosophical ponderings. They matter zilch in such situations, when you are hungry and simply want to eat dinner but can’t even place an order without a struggling battle of incommunication. Humbling is the word that comes to mind. As well as: try. All one can do is to try, to give it a go, to get in the ring and start throwing words around. Books and lessons and formal structure can only help you so much. When you’re out in a field and pointing at olive trees (zitoun) and birds (altuyur) and the sun (shims) and water (l’ma) – having the farmhand you are walking besides say the words out loud and you repeating them back: it is baptism by trial and error. For them it must be a comical experience. The naïve white man with his large brimmed cowboy hat on is not able to speak to you, but instead points at objects on the horizon and you say the words for him. Like a toddler trying to find his way around and repeating the words, mispronouncing them and getting them wrong half the time, resulting in laughter all around. Immersion works because it is by sheer force of will that the need to communicate is so strong, the need to understand and be understood. It works precisely because: I want to know things, I’m curious about the world around me and about the inner lives of those I’m interacting with. I can only know these things by learning the language. But it has to start with simple everyday objects and words that I hear multiple times a day and I’ll end up saying a lot: fridge / frigo / tellaja, honey / miel / leesel, tomorrow / demain / ghedda. [English / French / Darija]
All in all: Barcelona was a success. Despite its stresses and my infantile reactions to unforeseen circumstances, we managed to get the surgery done. Going from rural Morocco to grandiose Barcelona was also a significant contrast I didn’t quite have time to adjust to either. Hordes of mopeds zooming past us, all our taxi’s and Uber’s driving unnecessarily fast causing me to feel queasy, shops and restaurants being irritatingly closed from 4-8pm for siesta, and plenty of drunk tourists roaming the streets. We did manage to do some minimal site seeing, but that was not the purpose of the trip. The purpose was newfound vision. And we managed to get Mon Amour’s glasses lenses switched out with sunglass lenses. They look great and she can wear them when out and about on the Farm.
Así es la vida. ¡Vamos!
