Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Vacationing with a medical team

Barcelona, Spain: This city has bad medical vibes for me.

Back in the day when I was in the U.S. Army, I arrived here from Verdun, France with my bride for a delayed honeymoon, only to be crippled upon arrival in our hotel room by stomach cramps so severe they prompted me to call the U.S. Consulate and in my official military capacity (Private) beg for medical help.

Within an hour, a Spanish surgeon trained in the U.S. showed up, diagnosed me as having a case of advanced appendicitis, and by midnight was operating on me in a private clinic outside the city.

I was kept there a week, with my wife at my side nursing me to recovery, before being released and allowed to proceed to our next scheduled destination, Paris.

So it was more than unnerving to show up once again in Barcelona, this time on a cruise ship, where a bronchial infection laid me so low that I decided to make an appointment with the ship’s medical team.

Holland America’s medical team—
It’s personal

I travel Holland America Line (HAL) for a very specific reason: its medical facilities and their staffing.

About 30 years ago, my documentary team and I decided to do a piece on what was involved in being a ship’s doctor, and we spent a lengthy time researching cruise line medical facilities and talking to doctors across the country to find out if they chose to spend some time as a ship’s doctor, with which line they wanted to work, and why.

Holland America came back as #1.

So within weeks my film crew and I boarded a HAL ship in Ocho Rios, Jamaica en route to Tampa, made ourselves at home in the ship’s medical waiting room the following morning, and decided to film...whatever.

Within 15 minutes we were in the middle of a life or death crisis.

A male passenger in the waiting room had a heart attack, and the medical team was in the kind of “Code Red” status where they (and everyone else) forgot we were there. Our cameras captured over the ensuing hours their frantic efforts to keep him alive, stabilize him, and then arrange to have him taken to the nearest island with a hospital and an airfield. We last saw that passenger with his wife, their hurriedly packed bags, and a ship’s officer in a tender heading for shore in the Cayman Islands.

It made for dramatic television, for sure, but I never forgot the experience. If you enjoy traveling, and you like bringing your hotel room with you (a cruise), you might as well choose the cruise line with the best hospital team—just in case.

Which brings me to the night before our cruise ship arrived in Barcelona. I was coughing like crazy, wheezing, nose blowing, and worse, and this had gone on for four days and enough was enough. So I visited the HAL medical team. And I took my wife along, because she had caught whatever I had, but a milder version.

Two and a half hours later, I exited with as thorough a checkup, with the most advanced equipment and trained medical staff, as I’ve had here in Rye Brook—which for me numbers Westmed, White Plains Hospital and Greenwich Hospital, for starters.

Our female doctor and her nurse, trained in South Africa, had the most modern “doctor’s room” I’ve been in, state of the art EKG and chest X-ray equipment, and a state of the art lab that could produce blood test results in minutes.

I was tested for COVID (fortunately negative), thoroughly examined by the doctor (more thoroughly than at my last Westmed annual physical), told about some conditions I had better check out when I got home, and prescribed antibiotics, steroids and cough medicine. As I write this, a day later and lots of sleep later, I’m feeling better. And happy I, as always, bought a travel health insurance policy which will cover all out-of-pocket expenses at the HAL clinic.

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.