Sick as a Parrot

‘Make God laugh; tell Him your plans.’

This posting was going to be about our much-anticipated trip to Paris. We were going to write all about the wonderfully comfortable, and remarkably cheap, train journey up there; how much we’d enjoyed seeing our old friends M. et Mme. Fudge (http://6eme-etage.blogspot.com) for the first time in five years; the wonderful time we had wandering the streets and sitting on café terraces, watching the world go by; the marvellous restaurants we went to and the fantastic museums we visited.

You’ve guessed by now, haven’t you? We didn’t go. Our non-refundable rail tickets and our (first-night non-refundable) hotel bookings were arranged weeks ago but, sadly, the normally unsinkable Mrs A was laid low by some foul (we hope not fowl) virus.

Mrs A suffers from ‘hay fever’ in February, March and April. I ought to be more precise as a French doctor rebuked her when she said it was hay fever. It is ‘une allergie de la saison’. For a while we were deeply puzzled by what could be causing this. February and early March are, after all, usually deepest winter here. We eventually reached the conclusion that catkins on our numerous hazelnut trees were the villains of the piece. At this time of year we are pruning/coppicing the trees and the catkins give off clouds of pollen as we’re working. This turns Mrs A into one of Kleenex’s biggest customers overnight.

Without wishing to be too graphic, coughing, sneezing, wheezing and nose-running are quite the norm at this time of year so, when Mrs A started feeling very wheezy and suffering from tightness of the chest, we both assumed she needed stronger anti-catkin medicine. We were wrong. It turned out that some hideous virus – which was about as welcome as a rattlesnake in a bran tub - had installed itself and had settled in for a long struggle. Ten days after she returned home from work in the guise of a shivering, quivering, coughing waif she’s a bit better but still struggling to stay upright and awake for more than a couple of hours at a time. For the first four or five days she was sleeping for 19 or more hours a day. Anyone who knows Mrs A will agree that she could never be accused of carrying spare weight but she’s managed to lose about 2½ kg (5 to 6lbs) in a week.

Of course, it’s at times like this that we can rely on the French health service to swing into action and, sure enough, the doctor came up with the goods. After a quick tour of Mrs A’s chesty regions, he pronounced that it was, as we suspected, a virus. He told us he wasn’t going to prescribe antibiotics, as the infection was not bacterial. It is essential for any French doctor to make declarations like this because French people expect to be prescribed antibiotics for every malady, both real and imaginary, known to humankind. He did, however, give Mrs A a prescription with four different items on it and we were staggered to discover that two of the items were paracetamol and cough mixture.

Since for the vast majority of people, 70% of the cost of visits to the doctor and of prescribed drugs is reimbursed by the state (the balance being reimbursed by the private health cover that almost everyone has) we can now see one of the reasons the French health system is so expensive. Why would you buy your own paracetamol and cough syrup if you can get it for free by taking up the time of your GP every time you have a cough or a cold? It also explains one of the reasons that paracetamol and other ‘everyday’ painkillers cost ten times as much here as in the UK. If you don’t pay, you don’t care. (The other reason is that pharmacies have a monopoly on the sale of such items. You can’t drop into the local equivalent of Sainsbury or Tesco and buy cheap aspirin here.)

Still, as long as you've got your elf! (Or a gnome to go to.)

There, I’ve got that off my chest! (If only Mrs A could get the bug off hers.) I bet you wish we’d written about Paris, don’t you?