20 mai 2007
Avant la whooping-cough
Sorry I deserted this blog for nearly a month: I have been caught by
a strange disease, on the very night of the first turn of the
presidential election (gasp!). Since then, I have been suffering like a
dog and going through many sleepless nights. The disease was not
diagnosed from the start, hence the painful evolution.
Before that,
I was leading a normal life. I'd take tireless walks through Paris,
without those dreadful fits of coughing or those unpleasant heat
flushes in the face. For instance, I'd go to Château-Rouge and I'd take
a picture of a bag of habanero chillies, one of my favorite things,
gracefully hanging on a wall.
In those days, not so long ago, but painfully far away now,
habaneros from faraway countries roamed freely on Paris sidewalks. We
had not yet been hit on the head with a sledgehammer, and half of
France was not yet knocked out, dazed out, powerless and depressed. And
I hadn't yet been informed that I had whooping-cough. I thought
it was a cold. A big, fat, hairy cold.
However, one night, as it was getting
really bad, I could not stand it anymore and I went to Hôpital
Lariboisière (specialized in nose and throat problems). And
since it was the night before May 1st, I could not hope to see my
regular doctor the next day. I wanted to get rid of it as soon as
possible, so I did not hesitate.
I waited from midnight to 4 AM,
coughing and shaking. An elderly lady, accompanied by her old man and
daughter, had been waiting since 7 PM. A young Srilankan girl was
coughing just like me: deeply, almost musically, rooster-like,
recovering her breath with difficulty. I was not thinking of
whooping-cough yet, since I believed, like everyone else, that you
catch it only once in your life and it's OK if you've had your shots.
Which is not true at all.
After
a few hours, hours cease to matter. You can wait longer, what the heck?
Time stands still. If you have to wait until daylight, well, big deal.
Anything, by the way, is better than walking out in the darkest night around
the Gare du Nord area. Sick and variously afflicted people come in,
some on their feet, some on stretchers. Two old people have serious
nosebleeds. Poor souls — probably a result of the fierce, unseasonable
heat we've had for a few days. Two handcuffed young men come in surrounded by
five of six cops. The cops sit them on chairs, asking them to behave,
and let them fall asleep sitting up, with their chins on their chests,
hands behind their backs. A mini-Guantanamo just for me. The usual suspects — a few drunks, a few bums;
one drunken woman with a recently broken calf cackles jokes with the
nurses and firemen. She seems somewhat happy to have broken her leg; at
last some people are going to take care of her now. An Indian man's
feet are so sore that he enters barefooted, his shoes in his hand, all
toes curled up. An old man and a young man, both wearing kippas, enter
with an amazingly beautiful, weak and tearful young woman. She has
taken the wrong dose of medicine but her life doesn't seem in danger.
She only looks very unhappy and vulnerable, impatient to be nursed. The two
men beg the nurse: she replies she cannot do anything, there are
already five people before them, no — do not insist, she cannot make an
exception. The two men do not seem to understand; tears roll down the
woman's cheeks. Before leaving home that night, I wondered if I should
bring a book to read. I decided I did not need one. I was right: you
cannot get bored in a place like this.
Shortly before 4 AM, my turn
comes. I enter the office of a frail, tight-lipped, unfriendly young lady who
hardly takes a look at me. She hardly touches me, too; she does not
check my lungs, although I tell her that I have been coughing for
several nights. She takes a sadistic pleasure from pushing down my
tongue with a rugous wooden stick and the strength of a wild gorilla,
and smiles discretely every time I gag. "It's a bug", she says finally, and sits
down to write down a prescription of physiologic serum to wash my
nostrils. Obviously, she is taking me for a complete idiot. I ask her:
"Do
you think I've come here in the middle of the night and waited four
hours to come out of here with a prescription of physiologic serum?
— If I give you antibiotics, you might develop resistance to germs.
— Do you believe I eat antibiotics on a monthly basis? And what do you say about that cough?"
She
looks at me with hatred in her eyes; apparently I'm the wrong type of patient, the
type that opens their mouth. She isn't even listening to me. At this
point, I decide that I'm not going out of her office without a decent
prescription. I tell her so. She ragingly scratches down a line at the
bottom end of the sheet and hands it to me without a word. Then she
just about kicks me out.
Well done, bitch. You have just made a
beautiful diagnosis error. It so happens — but how should you know,
you're only a doctor, right? — that there is an epidemic of
whooping-cough going on, and that it is mostly passed from adults to
young unvaccinated babies. This is how I found myself with not quite
the right antibiotic for what proved, days later, to be a fine case of
whooping-cough. However, though not quite appropriate, the remedy has
apparently shortened the contagious stage and hastened the recovery
process. Today, May 18th, I am still coughing myself stupid but at
least I have begun to recover some sort of sleep at night. So we're
probably going to live after all. Into what future?
This presidential election has been preceded by a sad period of apprehension, false hopes, justified fears and sickly feelings. We got such a blow on our heads that we are still recovering from it, our minds dormant, our eyes closed. Disaster has happened, The thing that I feared the most has become real, as ouf friend Job would say — so no one seems to know what there is to do. The only voices that let themselves be heard are high-pitched and arrogant; the winning half is getting ready to bleed the other half white. Le Monde needs another title; Pravda will do very well. A thousand-year-old culture has opted for the negation of its very self. Nothing will ever be the same again.
But enough of those sad words. As soon as I get better, I promise, we'll go back to Love Apple Farm. There are plenty of vegetables left.