’Tis around the midnight hour and a figure approaches my bed. I feel my sheets pulled aside and take a sharp intake of breath as my pyjama bottoms are pulled open and a mumbling takes place. I look up to see the figure bending over and peering down into the pyjama clad abyss.

I sigh.  ’Here we go again’

It has become a regular occurrence and I’m getting used to this intrusion. In fact, the other day I realised there was a queue forming to take part in the ritual.  Looking for Gaz to question this, I realised he’d donned a disguise and was number three in line. Some just look into the dark and mysterious interior that is beyond my pyjama cord; some though, prod and probe and one does this really strange thing where he bends two fingers into a claw, presses them into my painful stomach and then beats a tattoo with one finger of the other hand. To what end I have no idea. Perhaps the French, being stretched, have sought support from witch doctors.

Yes I’m in hospital. 

Now the expats extol the virtues of the French Health Care System and I can understand why.  There are generally no long waiting lists.  I had tummy pain for a few days, saw my local doctor, tried antibiotics which failed to improve the situation and so, on the doctor’s advice, turned up unannounced at Urgences (our A and E), was assessed, scanned and admitted within three hours and operated on at 9 a.m. the following morning. But not without financial implications, my friends. We now have our Carte Vitale which entitles us to quite a few treatments which are free at the point of contact, but also 75% of other costs (these costs are retrieved from the British Government).  Of course, even 25% of the cost of operations and two weeks hospital stay can add up to many thousands of euros and so we, like so many others, pay private insurance on top, at the cost or 155 euros per month between us.  We had signed the paperwork and paid our first premium two days before my admittance to hospital. Cancer and heart problems are free to all and the very poor also receive free treatment.  Hospitals, in this area anyway, are modern and clean, seem more than adequately staffed by adorable, young and efficient nursing staff, most of whom try to speak some English.   The male doctors are not so keen to try. 

So at my age of fragility I have had my first long stay in hospital.  Everything was new to me. Another set of rules and etiquette to be observed. On my way to the operating theatre I can remember being parked alone in a sort of equipment graveyard:  a room full of stretchers with bits falling off, wheelchairs leaning perilously on three wheels and I remember wondering if this was also the patients’ worth-to-the-world assessment area. Fully awake in a totally silent world, I imagined I was in a sort of Purgatory where Gods in white coats gave a thumbs up or down to the fate of medical equipment and the odd patient getting towards her ‘used by’ date. Before I met my assessors, though, I was back in my private room, sun pouring in the windows, morphine pouring into my arm and the dearest man in the world peering at me. I must have had the thumbs up by those white coated judges and was to be allowed a few more years of Prosecco abuse.

I have barely spent a night alone in my life and one of the things I was worried about was being in this room overnight, alone except for lovely people with little English. I feared I would unknowingly agree to have my organs used for medical experiments while I was awake and alive, or bits chopped off and replaced to give the staff a bit of practice.  On my first evening,  Gazzie said: 

‘I’d better be going, if I’m to be here tomorrow when you go down for the op.’

‘O.K, love,’ I said, though my lips were trembling so much it probably sounded like ‘Erby bub’.

And then there came a  golden angel in a nurses uniform (this was pre-morphine) saying: 

‘Please don’t cry. Your husband can stay with you if you wish. That’s a fold up bed behind you.   I’ll bring blankets’.

A torrent of the new language I had created poured from my lips: ‘Eets bunderbull.   Wahlick.   Bunderbull’.   Gazzie’s face was a bit difficult to read, but I really think he was thrilled at the thought of sleeping on three bits of plywood for the foreseeable future.

There were compensations for him though.   I have told you in the past how Gazzie likes a uniform and no occasion is too minor for him to don his workman’s outfit, policeman’s outfit and my favourite, the fireman.  However Gazzie’s fave has always been the doctor.   Whenever I’ve got a little cold, on goes the white coat, the professionally kind doctorly face, the shaking of thermometers and pulse beat counting.  

Now, my darlings, he had a stage on which to perform.  He sits beside me as me vital signs are measured, nodding sagely as numbers, unintelligible to me, pop up in glorious technicolour on the nurses computer screens. He follows the nurses outside, where murmured conversations take place.  Donning his white coat he wanders the corridors, fingering an imaginary stethoscope, nodding to other medical professionals in a slightly aloof manner. How he hasn’t been arrested for very suspicious behaviour I shall never know.  But when he nods encouragingly as nurses tear from me plasters the size of the Bayeux Tapestry, with the ’quick is kinder’ approach, and then very carefully peels me from the ceiling, to be honest he could perform surgery on me anytime.  My own Dr. Kildare.

So. Diagnosis? An abscessed appendix. Now both abscess and appendix are removed.   Or were they?   That evening my surgeon called in. They do this twice a day. Amazing. He looked pretty grave and said a lot of stuff which we didn’t understand, but what we did deduce was there may be another operation the following day. My perky, brave little face disintegrated and back came the strange, blubbery language.  ‘Bo, bo do mwore cutty’.   

Our English speaking nurse came in give us the low down on me low downs.   

‘The doctor thinks there is another abscess.   It was hidden from the scan as it is in the Douglas Sac’. 

I’m thinking ‘what’s that to do with me?’   Surely Douglas, whoever he is, can remove the thing from his own bag’. Seeing our looks of total confusion, the nurse laughed and explained that most women are blessed with old Douglas’ handbag hidden down among their bits.  Must say he got around a bit that man.  And then, as if all of that was just to give me another story for the blog, the infection had disappeared and the process of recuperating began.

And time for me to learn more of hospital ways.   Have you ever tried to go to the loo whilst attached to a metal plant holder?  One-handedly you wriggle out of bed, one arm attached to a wire and a bottle and the plant holder; you set off, trip over the end of the bed, the bottle jigs around precariously as you try to wheel the whole contraption into the bathroom.  How to raise the lid, turn around, lower pyjama bottoms.   Well I’ll let your imagination take over, but by the time you reach your objective its almost too late and by the time you get back to bed, its time to set off again.

’If you need anything, press the emergency bell,’ the dear nurses say with that care professional smile. What it actually means is ‘If you could possibly recognise that unbearable pain was going to happen in about an hour’s time, ring the bell and by the time we get to you we might just about be in time to hook you up to the pain killer’. 

Then, what constitutes an emergency? Not being practised in the skill of having only one adaptable arm (the other being hooked up to some liquid or other being pumped into one).   I did get myself into some pickles on the days Gaz was off gallivanting and eating decent food at MacDonalds.  I decided I really needed to change my pyjamas, particularly as the poke, prod and look down my pyjama bottoms was increasing in popularity. So I worked it out technically that if I took off the bottoms first, I could then remove the sleeve from the unfettered arm. Once I’d managed that, sitting with one sleeve round my neck and barely anything covering my dignity, I looked from the drip bottle to my still sleeved arm, and back, working out how to extricate one from the other.   Right.  Unhook bottle of fluid.  Remove sleeve from fettered arm.  Get bottle to end of sleeve, pull through with pipe. Voila. Non.   I now have a sleeve with pipes wound round it tightly, my neck is against the top of the drip stand and I am, in fact, hanging myself, naked.  I began to oscillate my eyes like spinning marbles trying to locate the emergency button. There. I risked snapping my carotid artery stretching to reach it.   I pressed.

Just as I was about to lose consciousness, the door opened slowly and in walked the only male nurse on our ward.  

‘Are you in pain?’ says he.  

‘I soon won’t be,’ I thought.   ‘I soon. Won’t be’.

Chuckling merrily he took my weight.   ‘That nearly killed him,’ I thought gleefully.

He unwound and untangled me and returned the drip to its dripping station and me unceremoniously to the bed and left me, still chuckling away. Then I realised I still hadn’t got clean pyjamas on.  In fact, no pyjamas at all.

One of the drips on my multi-branched drip station was liquid food.   I rather liked it.  No shopping.  No preparation.  No washing up.  Still full up.   Little hints started as I began to get better. ‘May be tomorrow.  Real food.’  Well, I’m not saying I wasn’t a bit excited, especially as it was only the eating bit I was required to do.  The  three course meal came along.  The first course was very often on the menu and became known in our little room as ‘dog turd soup’. This was a rather complimentary soubriquet for something so completely tasteless.  The main course was totally white: a lump of white, maybe fish and white rice, accompanied by a dessert of mashed polyfilla.  It is inconceivable that even with a restricted budget, anyone could produce something that looked or tasted less like food.

But sitting here at home after eleven days in hospital, I smile.  Despite much pain, no television and diabolical food, my experience was not an unhappy one. My darling daughter flew over without telling us, hired a car so Gazzie wouldn’t have to drive her around and poked her dear sweet face around my room door.   

‘Hello Mummy’.   

And she bought the sunshine in, hung up her illuminated climbing Santa and said, ‘Sleep now’.   She distance-worked on her computer while I slept and a party started later when Gazzie, the nurses evening shift and the pyjama lifters all arrived at once.  She took Gazzie out for some proper food and then went back to our cold little house to sleep alone.   She made me start walking around and took me out to the front of the hospital in my sparkly slippers, to feel hot winter sunshine on our faces.  My recovery rate escalated by about 100%.   How lucky I am.

And dear, Gazzie, his back lacerated on the put u up, his body mired with lack of sleep, racing around in the day time and joining me in the evening for a film on the iPad thing.   

And now nurses will visit every day for as long as it takes to heal the wound.  A hell time of no baths for me.  But I am not complaining.  Gaz is out getting the Christmas Tree.   We’ll dress it tonight. We’ll light the fire and, I’m thinking, maybe, just maybe he can put on his doctor’s uniform. Just because.

 

HOT  OFF  THE  PRESS :   So faithful bloggees, the blogs are to become a book published by The Linen Press and due for publication in the summer.   Working title is ‘The husband, the Mistress, Miles and Me Go to France’   or ‘Flamingoes for Tea’   I’ll try to let you know the final title   Unless you can think of one, that would be really wonderful.