Perhaps not!

Perhaps it would be better if I didn't ever get "that" excited. Let me explain: I flew to Paris on Wednesday and I ended up in a hospital near Paris with a suspected heart attack...well I did feel pretty unwell, tired and so on and so forth. In the event I managed to persuade the medics to let me come back to the UK where I shall now be fighting the queuing system to undergo the necessary tests- which in St Lys would have been performed immediately, but well, I wanted to be near home in case of surgery etc...

But would it really be better, to live a passion-free life than my roller coaster of joys and gratitude, wonderment and emotional bungee jumping (at times!)?

On the way to hospital I saw very little of the landscape, just the top of a majestic forest of trees and the apex of grandiose stone houses, but on the way back,at night, I saw a tiny rabbit caught in the lights, for whom we had to stop the car dead in order to save his little paws from a fate similar to death...and....a horde of wild boars, going about their foraging business in the rusty leaves. There were five or six big ones and two or three smaller ones. We stopped, and extinguished all lights and they carried on as if we weren't there. It was a magical moment of Obelixian proportion. I was so glad that they hadn't all been eaten by the old Barbarian mob!

In the hospital, I had to explain yet again that having health issues did not render one stupid, or powerless and I insisted that no criminal act having been committed by either myself or those who were accompanying me, there should -in all fairness- not be any punishment either. Injections I don't mind, being seen as a mere carcass I do. Those of you who know me will be glad to hear that by the end even the worse case of "job's worth" had mellowed to my pleas for humane treatment and that I was allowed a) company and b) a certain measure of dignity in the performing of obligatory functions (details will not be necessary I am sure!) Not easy, but can be done if enough determination is put into play!

So now I am back home, and extremely happy not to have died -as I thought I might do-and to be in a more familiar environment where I really can speak the language.

Of course I do speak perfect French BUT I don't speak the language of the French. My body language is different, my eye contact is different, my expectation of respect is different. When I speak I do not "imply", I "say". My own feelings and impressions are not a negotiable element in the equation: I feel what I feel and I know what I am feeling. I pick up on others' "hidden agenda". Hidden agenda is freaky: skating on the wrong kind of ice. The worse part about it is that those who commonly carry a hidden agenda assume that others also practice the same methods: they then engage in a frantic though totally futile bout of decoding, for something which was not encoded in the first place. In an ordinary context, I observe that with some amusement and a few internal giggles, but on an intensive care stretcher it becomes less entertaining.

So many experiences in so few days...AH, .... all adds to the grist. I still think it is lovely to find more than 3 species of mushrooms in the supermarket and rye bread which does not weight a ton...

I'm off to cook something nice...may be quinoa and mushrooms? I have to read up on Potassium, seemingly sorely lacking in my system????

Don't worry about me: I'm sure I'll be just fine!

Cheery love,

Jocelyne