Category Archives: Life

Small things- from November, 2018

Some days, it’s the little things:

  • The fellow playing accordion in front of the restaurant downstairs, I remembered to drop some coins in my pocket so I could toss him a few.
  • The marché paysans twice a week, I at least buy a loaf of fresh bread, some falafels and houmous (yeh, “hummus”) for brunch, vegetarian paella if available.
  • Last Sunday at the marché there was a “poète public” so of course I bough a poem, you betcha.
  • Before I default to Amazon I’ll cruise the marchés des livres and pick up a book or two. Likewise, looking for a particular travel book for a friend, I’ll see if Librairie la Géosphère has or can get it.
  • The couple running the little restaurant downstairs are so friendly  . . . but they’re closing up Tuesday and Wednesday while he has a heart procedure (I’m assuming angioplasty from the sound of things) so I’m making sure to eat an extra lunch or two there before then.
  • So much going on today in the Place de la Comédie ! Including a group promoting vegetarian eating, so I happily told one young lady that I already eat vegetarian, and we shared smiles.

News

I’m in the hospital. Fourth one actually, since July

No, not corona. Strokes. Several since last April. Now in rehab at Centre Bourges, Castelnau-le-Lez, near Montpellier.

And now that I can log in again, I’ll tell more. Later.

Meanwhile, to email me: fred.sampson@gmail.com

Post-Catchup

I came home from the hospital just in time for the hottest day ever recorded in France: on Friday 28 June it hit 45.9° C a few kilometres inland from here, a whopping 115° F. And I left a perfectly good air-conditioned hospital. . . but hey, Simon was so glad to see me that he left a big gash on my left forearm that night.

My first tasks were to fill all my new prescriptions, do a little grocery shopping, and start following up on the doctors’ orders: kiné, or physical therapy; in-home help, at least with cleaning; and téléassistance, which means wearing a monitoring device that lets me call for help if needed, or even detect a fall. Because I can’t count on Simon to call 15, the French equivalent of 911.

It’s now Wednesday, and I’ve made progress on all of those fronts, although I have to wonder how people worse off than me manage. I mean, I have most of my cognitive abilities still functioning.

Fun with hifi

One of the things I looked forward to in retirement was a nearly-inexhaustible supply of music, on CD, MP3s, and all those LPs I digitized before selling. I understand the inclination of modern consumers to just subscribe to one or more streaming services, which have admittedly huge libraries. But this is my music, the music that informed my youth, and the music that has since won my favor. So pulling together the pieces of my stereo system is important to me.

Today I received, via Amazon, a small cheap CD player — I had been using my Blu-ray player for CDs after ditching the old non-functional CD player of years long past. But I also ditched the Blu-ray player in the move, as it was several years old and I had my eye on a region-free player to accommodate my growing collection of European DVDs and BRs.

I had already acquired a transformer to change the European 230 volt 50 Hertz electrons to the 120 volt 60 Hertz flavor that most of my equipment required. So today I tried to push all the pieces together to play CDs. If that worked, my next step would be transmitting from the iMac to the stereo.

But first steps were failing me. With all the right pieces connected, no sound was coming from the speakers. What could be wrong?

I first tried connecting my turntable, which happened to come with built-in support for 230 volt service, and tried spinning a Jacques Brel LP I had picked up at the bouquinistes fair. Still no sound.

So I took another approach, plugging the CD player into an old dusty amplifier, on the principle of a process of elimination: If something’s not working, break it down into parts and validate each one. Because the old amp doesn’t have the same speaker connectors as the less-antique amp, I plugged in headphones. And voila, music reached my ears !

Next, I rearranged the pieces and plugged headphones into the suspect amp, and voila, musique ! So maybe it was the speakers. I checked the speaker connections, and come to find that, silly me, I had selected the + side of speaker pair 1 and the + side of speaker 2 (the amp supporting two pairs of speakers) instead of the + and – sides of only one pair.

D’oh !

Time for the final semi-final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, so I’ll be back.

Catchup

I know, I haven’t posted in a long time. And this will be only a short update, now that I have wifi access.

Monday, 3 June I went down to the produce market in Beaux-Arts, my new neighborhood, or “quartier” in French. On the way back I felt weak, then weaker. By the time I made it back to my apartment, I was failing my stroke self-tests: weak on the left side, could barely complete a sentence, my voice was so weak I wasn’t sure I could make myself heard if I called for help. I did anyway.

It’s now nearly three weeks later; I spent one week at Clinique de Millénaire, where I’d been treated in April; then nearly two weeks at a hospital in the Centre Hospitaliers Universitaire, also in Montpellier, for possible surgery; now I’m back at Millénaire for kinésiologie (physical therapy) so I can walk without falling over.

So far there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive damage done, it’s mostly weakness in my left leg and arm. I’m taking three different anti-coagulantants/blood-thinners (aspirin, Heparin, and Clopidogrel (formerly  Plavix)) in max dosages. Placing a stent is not out of the question, but trying to avoid that step because the risk of causing more damage is not negligible.

And that’s as much as I’ll write now; typing on a small keyboard with an oximeter on one finger is just too tiring. So, more later.

A big day

It finally happened.

Today, I was reunited with all the books and clothes that I shipped over in October of last year. The boxes in storage were delivered to my new apartment, the one with all the new Ikea bookcases just waiting to be filled.

Here’s what it looks like today:

Most of those boxes contain books. Some contain CDs and DVDs and Blu-rays. Three or four contain clothes. Part of the bigness of the day comes from locating and liberating my copious Hawaiian shirt collection, just in time for summer !

Who wants to come help me shelve the books ?

For the record

Just, really, for the record, as of today it’s seven months since I arrived in Montpellier.

  • I have the necessary stamps of approval for me to stay here, but need additional approval beyond the first year — hence another visit to the bureaucracy in a month or two.
  • I am days (or weeks ? who knows !) away from possessing my very own Carte Vitale, which grants access to the French healthcare system (I’m already in the system, the card makes it a little easier to access).
  • I’m about to be reunited with all those things I shipped to myself, currently in storage near Marseille, I think. Mostly books.
  • I have a bunch of new bookcases awaiting those books in a new (to me) apartment.
  • My comfort with French conversation is improved.

So far, so good.

La vie est belle

I spent the last two weeks in the hospital.

Two weeks ago today, comme d’habitude, I went to the Antigone marché paysan, the weekly farmers market that takes place on the street just opposite my place in Antigone. I picked up the usual — I am absolutely a creature of habit — including three chocolate muffins from the Reine des Muffins (my name, not hers), some veggie galettes, strawberries (in season, everyone has them, they pretty much take over every produce stand), and some slices of vegan/gluten-free  mango/chocolate carrot-cake. Then I went  walk home with my  acquisitions.

Only, I couldn’t. Walk, that is. Right foot wouldn’t obey orders to march home. So I leaned up against a conveniently-located building and waited.

After a minute or two, nothing having changed, I pulled out my phone, pulled up my list of shortcut numbers, and pressed the most likely-looking emergency number. The operator understood, I think, the situation, but I had a heck of a time getting my location across — Rue de Thèbes, which is probably pronounced as two syllables instead of the one Americans know — by which time I was able to move my feet and relocated to the little pizza restaurant outside my front door. The ambulance found me there a few minutes later.

The remaining details are probably just boring. Suffice to say I was delivered to a private hospital, the Clinique du Millénaire, with a neuro-vascular intensive care unit. A combination of MRI (IRM in French) and CAT-scan (just plain scan in French) showed a severely narrowed vertebral cerebro-vascular artery — one of the main supplies of blood to the brain.

I’d had a stroke.

The doctor said I was going to spend the next week flat on my back in bed while they tried to open up the artery with drugs. She said it was non-operable.

Fast-forward to two weeks later, I am home with some new prescriptions and a somewhat changed view of what’s most important for the next days, months, years. The proprietors of the pizza restaurant are happy to see me back, my landlady, who helped out by feeding Simon the cat is happy I’m back. Simon is so happy he’s already drawn blood in four places (biting is his way of displaying affection).

I’m happy to be back. The sky is clear, it’s a tad windy but also sunny, it’s a beautiful spring day in the south of France. And life is good.

La vie, as they say, est belle.

Medical Info

For several years now, I’ve had some medical info in the pocket notebook I usually carry around with me, a list of current medications and such. More recently, I installed a Medical ID app on my phone that puts an icon on the home/lock screen, allowing instant access to a short history of medical procedures (like a list of all 6 stents) and prescription medications. I even paid for the premium version; whatever it was, it’s cheap considering how useful it is to have vital information near at hand. Of course, it assumes a certain amount of consciousness on my part to at least point to the thing, but in this case, when the ambulance team asked about prescription meds, I handed them my phone. Same at the hospital : hand over the phone with the app already open, all your medical info is right there (you have to enter it all yourself, duh). I even discovered that the app makes the conversion from pounds to kilos and feet + inches to cm, because you will be asked !

The app I used is available here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.medicalid . The developer is in Cagnes-sur-mer, also the location of the Renoir museum I visited two years ago, near Nice !

More relaxed ?

Diane at Oui In France has some interesting observations from time to time, and is more regular about posting to her blog than I am. Most recently, she wrote about some things that the French might seem to be “more relaxed” about than us Americans: https://www.ouiinfrance.com/things-french-are-more-relaxed-about-than-americans/ 

Which got me thinking.

It’s quite normal here to have a nice conversation with the vendor at a weekly farmers market (marché paysan). In fact, it’s one of the things I look forward to. No one seems to be in a rush, except me. I have always been conscious of the people in line behind me, and try to be as efficient as possible, especially at the grocery store. Well, we’re not at the local Safeway here. I have to learn to take my time. People want to get to know me, I should take the time to let them.

For example: Twice now (that I know of !) I have made a mistake in my favor at a vendor’s stall. I walked away with more change than was correct in one case, and more product than I had payed for in another. Both times I went back and corrected the error — I couldn’t talk to them next week if I didn’t. Most recently, I tried to explain what had happened and fumbled badly with my still inadequate French, and the vendor told me to slow down, take a deep breath, and said “Ce n’est pas grave” — “It’s not important.” Imagine, someone telling me, Mr. Zen, to slow down !

In another case, my French tutor, Christelle, lets me wander off into wide-ranging detours, because it’s good practice at conversation, and besides, I’m paying for it. Monday she loaned me a book (Méditer, jour après jour) by French psychologist Christophe André, who’s written some books with Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist, about what we know as mindfulness. It took me awhile to translate “pleine conscience” in my head, but it’s quite literally “mindfulness.” It turns out Christelle, too, is trying to get me to slow down and be present.

So, one of the things I’m learning here (re-learning, really) is that most of the pressure I feel is pressure I put on myself.

 

Deux mois, plus ou moin

Yes, I’m delinquent, but not much has happened. Except . . .

Renoir, Père et Fils

I probably talked about this on Facebook, here’s the blog version.

One of the attractions of living here is that Paris is 3 hours and 20 minutes away by TGV. Gare St. Roch in Montpellier is the main downtown train station, and Grand Central for the Trams, so easy to get to and from. I took a morning train that left a bit after 9h00, arriving in Paris a bit before 13h00. Note to self: Some trains are made up of two, which means that you might be sent to wait on a part of the platform that’s not yet occupied by a train coach. Patience.

I checked into the hotel right at the Gare de Lyon, and grabbed a taxi to the Musée d’Orsay, aka my favorite museum in Paris. Which was putting on a special exhibition combining work by Auguste-Pierre Renoir, painter and sculptor, and his son Jean Renoir, ceramicist and filmmaker. They shared themes, and models, and artistic sensibilities. Jean’s mother was his father’s favorite model. Jean’s nurse/governess, Gabriel, appears in dozens of his paintings. Pierre’s final favorite model became Jean’s wife, and star actress, for awhile. The swing scene in Partie de campagne was prefigured by a similar scene by Jean’s father. And so on. Wonderful exhibition, covering seven galleries, including film clips, paintings, newspaper clippings, and commentary, plus more films displayed on a large screen at one end of the main hall of the Musée.

Yes, I picked up the exhibition catalog, a habit I intend to develop. And a few postcards and bookmarks. And the catalog for another exhibit, just finishing elsewhere in Paris, Comédies Musicales. Remind me to revisit what I found interesting about the juxtapositions in that book, in the context of Michel Legrand’s passing at the same time.

Thursday, the day I visited, is the late night at the d’Orsay, so I made my way back to the hotel after 20h, and woke early Friday for breakfast before grabbing the TGV back to Montpellier. Along with an enjoyable and educational visit, I demonstrated to myself the viability of taking the fast train for a day in Paris.

Adventures in bureaucracy

Navigating any bureaucracy is easier if you understand the paper trail that the bureaucrat requires. It’s the deviations from the expected path that make it difficult, the “but my case is special” approach. In the world of software development, historically there have been two approaches: There’s waterfall, which assumes that one can plan a project completely from the start, and it should follow a predictable path. What’s required in one stage is provided by a preceding stage. Then there’s agile, which is the path of exceptions. Agile acknowledges that things change over time: Technology changes, requirements change, lessons are learned, adaptations are made.

Bureaucracies are waterfalls. Deviations are not accommodated. Exceptions are not accepted.

So: One’s visa application should fit neatly into one of the predefined buckets. Learn how to conform to that bucket and one’s path is smooth. Expect an exception, expect delays. For one applying for a long-stay visa, one must obtain said visa before requesting a change of residence certificate. It’s easy if one takes it in the right order. On arrival in France, one sends the OFII form that was part of the visa process in to OFII with a photocopy of one’s passport, visa, and entry stamp. No entry stamp, and three months later one receives an acknowledgement from French bureaucracy that one’s application has been received, but is missing one thing: The visa with that entry stamp. Without which, one does not complete the process of entering the country with said long-stay visa. Without which — here comes the waterfall !!! — one’s application to join the French health system after three months residence is held up until one provides the copy of the passport, plus visa, plus entry stamp, plus OFII stamp. And a process that nominally takes three months instead runs five-plus months.

That’s where I am: Met with the nice folks at OFII a week ago today, got their lovely stamp in my passport, sent a copy of that along with copies of everything else I had already submitted to CPAM (the health system folks) last Friday.

. . . and now waiting patiently for the next waterfall.

As Van Morrison sang, “You don’t pull no punches, and you don’t push the river.”