Ben Non Bar None

No-one can really say they’ve really lived in France until they’ve experienced the French health care system, so to this end, I’ve spent the last two months carefully nurturing a kidney stone. Its origins are unclear, but could possibly be due to an excess of dairy in the diet; as Ben says, “when a French doctor says you’ve been eating too much cheese, you’ve probably been eating too much cheese…“.

The first diagnosis was stress-related colopathie spasmodique, which my bulging-eyed Dr. Marceau explained by viciously wringing out an invisible sausage. This represented my colon in a moment of panic, such as when attempting to conjugate an irregular verb in the subjunctive. When a couple of weeks of healthy salads, deep breathing and talking completely in the present tense failed to straighten me out, a big expensive machine called a scanner (DWISOTT) finally found an insy-winsy kidney stone jammed down some tiny internal uro-tunnel. At this point I was referred to a urologue, which disappointingly turned out to be a urologist and not a steampunk urine-powered Victorian timepiece.

It was only then I realised my terrible error - I had become malade during les vacances ! Every self-respecting Parisian medical practitioner was sipping pastis on the Mediterranean coast, leaving the hospitals and clinics staffed by foreigners and other social unfortunates who hadn’t yet realised that no-one does any kind of work between August 1st and September 3rd. I duly took the first available post-rentrée appointment (the end of September), and I’d probably still be sleeping bolt upright and twitching if it wasn’t for one of my work colleagues reminding me that we had a “super bonne mutuelle” (a kind of work-provided private health plan), and I could book myself in with a private doctor and get all the money reimbursed.

So to cut a long story short, I forced my way ahead of all those suckers without cushy office jobs (demonstrating that famous queue-respecting English sense of fair play) and got myself an operation.

It all went very smoothly, I’m glad to report. In and out of hospital so quick I didn’t even get to properly explore the bed controls. (”Head… up! Feet… down! It’s like a chair… but it’s a bed!”) I’m now loafing at home, spaced on insurance-reimbursed painkillers, with a little tube rattling round somewhere in me that will eventually permit me to pass (or, more explicitly, piss) the little calcium munter out. Then they pull out the tube, and I can carry on where I left off packing my face with the stinkiest, crustiest, proudly pustular cheeses that France can lay at my hospital-slippered feet.

NEXT!