Given the way our health system is working, a patient will son turn into a walking lost objects office: lighters, screws, umbrellas, caps and bistouries with a historical patina. Almost all these objects will be found in the patient's body. If you hear a phone ringing close to your liver, please don't answer, it's the surgeon's mistress. Please do the same when the 14-year old grandfather, left alone by his grand grandmother who has gone to Spain, takes you on his knee to tell you a Romanian fairy tale in poor Belgian. Since he is creative and playful, a Romanian doctor can do anything. There is no organ he can't manage to pull out, mistake for another one, or move someplace else, except for the organ that gives the malpraxis, because the latter can't be detected, no matter how small are the pieces a human is chopped in. So what has Europe heard about Romania lately? A 11-year old girl pregnant by her 19-yer old uncle, a family being provided with the corpse of a little boy instead of the corpse of a little girl, who should have survived, had the doctors allowed her to by performing a Caesarian operation, as the x-ray analyses required. As compared to these two cases, what happened to the patient of doctor Ciumu (whose penis was split in two) seems almost a joke. The bureaucratic mockery the 11-year old mother was subject to and the impossible to describe carelessness the two parents got are unimaginable even in Chechnya. So a devastated Romanian brings a coffin to the hospital to take his baby to the cemetery, but there is another nightmare for him. "What baby girl are you talking about, sir? We have got here a baby boy ready for his last trip." We feel devastated by these two tragedies because we have learnt about them. They make the daily life of doctors, with its ups and downs. The head of the maternity hospital in Iasi commented: "Why are you journalists making such a big fuss? This is an ordinary case. We met so many 10-year old mothers! And they gave birth to so healthy babies!" This is the true tragedy of the very sick society we live in. We have got used to sleeping with monstrosity in our beds and we seem to get to like it lately. These cases we know about and the thousands cases we wouldn't hear about will be forgotten due to incredible carelessness. There will be gossip about them until other daily tragedies move what is left of our consciousness, rather Simian than human. In no case shall we think about having a check-up, about wondering what we, the society and the institutions did wrong. Let me tell you what they are chatting in the quarter I live in: "Well, the girl liked it too." And about the other tragedy: "He was doomed to die". Well, ladies, he was not, it is just that someone took his life away. Statistics is a science that gives us more trouble: several thousands of underage girls are to deliver babies this year. Last year there were 500 15-year old Romanian girls who wouldn't carry their pregnancy. Most of them were raped by family relatives, not to call them parents. But nothing is happening. Policemen, priests, mayors and social assistants hear about it from the press. Doctors' College can see on malpraxis. We shall not live the day to see a doctor deprived of the right to be a doctor, just as we shall never see some skilled politician rebuked in the Jilava prison. I spent some time in a maternity hospital in Bucharest last winter. In just two weeks I learnt everything: how much for the guardian to let me in and how much for the one to let me park my car, how much for the one who would allow me to smoke. And there was more: 10 RON for the fat woman distributing the overalls, 20 RON for the nurse on duty who was watching the buttery and, least but not last, 5 RON for the caretaker. One evening I was in the courtyard waiting, overall on my shoulders, for the doctor's evening check to be over. I was getting warmed by a kiosk. Another dizzy man arrived. Solidarity made him say "It's the doctor's check." He didn't even see me, but he hastily placed some banknotes into the upper pocket of my overall. I blushed, since I didn't know what to do, but then a kind feeling seized me: it is the overall that makes a man.

Rene PARSAN