I don’t know anyone that isn’t a doctor that enjoys hospitals or doctors offices. The medicinal smell and the sound of the doc’s squeaky rubber shoes elicits an emotional and uncomfortable response for me. Understandable, as I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant experiences in both doctor’s offices and hospitals. With tonsils the size of meatballs and chronic incidents of strep throat, I had a tonsillectomy when I was in 4th grade. Contrary to what my jealous classmates believed, I was NOT able to eat ice cream for a week (or swallow without wailing in excruciating, pain for that matter). My parents refer to this experience as their week from hell which can only indicate how miserable a hungry and frustrated 4th grader with a burning throat can be, for all parties involved. I still gag a little bit when I think of the smell and taste of the liquid codeine mixed with Tylenol I was forced to take. Talk about heightened olfactory receptors.

But it wasn’t until I was in a position to come to the aid of someone else that my aversion to hospitals and doctor’s poking and prodding really took form. It was the day before the 4th of July, 2005 and I was on the phone with my Dad who lived about 3 minutes away from me. After several minutes of chatting, he said he had to go take care of something and would call me back in 15 minutes. Typically true to his word, I began to worry when 30 minutes had passed and I hadn’t heard back. As I started to think that maybe he sat down and fell asleep (it was already close to 11pm), the phone rang. In a trembling voice he said “Lindsey, I’m going to need you to come and pick me up and take me to the ER. I fell”. My heart sank. I told my Mom something happened to Dad and without much more of an explanation than that, I jumped into my Volvo station wagon (aka the “tank”) circa 1984 and rushed to his place.

He opened the door with a bloody towel pressed firmly against his head and explained that he saw a millipede on the ceiling in his carpeted living room, got on a wobbly chair to kill it and fell off the chair in the process, hitting his head on the metal radiator on his way down. It must be said that my father cannot help but extinguish bugs when he sees them, particularly the gargantuan monster bugs, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that all this drama was over a millipede he couldn’t let get away. Still, for someone who always seemed impervious to pain.

I tried to get him to the ER as fast as I could, panicking every time I’d look over at the passenger seat and see him with his head back, eyes closed, seemingly unconscious. I kept screaming “DON’T SLEEP!! DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES”, worried that I wouldn’t know what to do to revive him. When we finally made it to the ER, the only option was to parallel park the rocket ship, my least favorite part about driving.  Struggling to park properly and quickly, my Dad said “get out of the car, I’ll park it”. “You can’t be serious…”, I said. Oh but he was. As I stood in front of the car, motioning for him to inch forward, I couldn’t help but feel utterly pathetic that the person bleeding from the head was doing my job. 

After way too much waiting, the ER doc examined my dad and determined that he had fractured his thumb (up until then, I hadn’t even noticed that it was swollen and blue) and would need  5 staples and 3 stitches in his head. Through all of this, my dad took it like a champ. He was unfazed by the blood, the pain and the idea of stapling his head but since he’s a doctor himself, I guess that’s to be expected. As I turned and fled the room just as the staples were going to be put in, my dad began chuckling undoubtedly at the fact that I was more distraught and unnerved by the whole situation than he was. 

So why did I feel compelled to tell this story? Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve been in and out of different doctor’s offices for intense lower back pain. Since it’s my first legitimate experience with French healthcare, a part from general doctor’s visits, I thought it would be a nice segue into looking at the differences of American and French health systems and why I am relieved to have been in France for this flare-up. More to follow….