French Hospitals

I have been absent from my blog, my email, and normal life as we know it for the past few days as I was spending some (unexpected) quality time getting to know the French medical system --- particularly the hospitals.  My observations are as follows:

- The exterior of a French hospital may appear to be a rundown "Jefferson's"-esque apartment complex from the '70s, but this is misleading because the interior has definitely "moved on up to the Eastside" and is far more in line with our 'American standards.'

- If you are a visitor accompanying a patient in their room for the night the bed you are issued by the nurses might turn out to be a stretcher...like the one on wheels used in ambulances.  If you enjoy sleeping on a permanent incline and if you don't mind lying on a surface where a dead body may have preceded you then THIS is the bed for you!

- Your single room will be very nicely accommodated with a patient's bed, window, desk, chair, and private bathroom with accompanying shower (i.e. a drain in the floor next to the toilet with a handheld shower thing mounted on the wall).  However, be prepared when you ask for the accessories needed to shower -like a towel, some soap, and shampoo- as this hospital is not a hotel and does not have such things.  Instead you will be issued a hospital bedsheet for drying, some gauze dressings to wash your face, and a mystery murky fluid in a dixie cup that may or may not be turpentine and molasses with which to wash yourself.   Use on private parts at your own risk.

- Nurses changing the IV's of a patient are not concerned with the IV fluid OR the patient's blood splattering onto the bed, floor, or visitor's feet below.  Once finished, their concern level does not waiver from the aforementioned when it comes to to cleaning up said splatterings, thus leaving the visitor to clean off the blood from their own feet with a towl...I mean sheet.

- As a guest of a patient, you can occasionally be served food (pending the patient you are

 with is temporarily not allowed to eat per doctor's orders).  This is good.  You may, however, be given a beet salad for your lunch.  This is bad.  The only halfway decent thing about a beet salad is that for one brief moment it will remind you of Dwight Schrute from "The Office."  Then the smell and appearance of the beets will once again overtake any remotely entertaining thought you may have had for the remainder of its presence in the room. 

*These are key observations that I have been fortunate enough to note firsthand, so I felt it essential to share with any and all of you who may find themselves one day in a French Hospital.  Now back to my regular updating of this blog...