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ten deplorable conditions of a bankrupt infrastructure, British caregivers--whether nurses, doctors, or ambulance drivers--are extraordinarily kind and hardworking. Since there���s no real money to be made in the system, those who get into public medicine do so as a pure vocation. And they show it. In the case of these EMTs, I kick myself for not having noticed their names to later thank them, for almost as soon as they dropped us off at the emergency room of the University College of London Hospital, they disappeared. Suddenly we were in the hands of British Health Service, and after a battery of tests we were being pressured into officially admitting my wife to UCL. As we discovered later, emergency care is free for everyone in Britain; it���s only when one is officially admitted to a hospital that a foreigner begins to pay. I didn���t know that. But I did know that I was not about to admit my wife to a hospital that could not diagnose an obviously life-threatening affliction. And even after having given her an MRI, the doctors could not tell if she had a stroke. Now, the smartest thing I did before we left the hotel was to delay the ambulance driver long enough to run back to my room and grab my wife���s cell phone. With that phone I began making about a thousand dollars worth of trans-Atlantic calls, the first of which was to the world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, who I���m lucky enough to have as my GP. As it turned out, not only did Izzy diagnose the problem correctly, he even suggested a cause for the stroke, which later turned out to be correct. ���There���s no reason for her to have a stroke except if it���s a PFO.��� I didn���t know what Izzy meant, but I wrote down the initials and later found out that a PFO HYLAND 4