Speaking of Too Much Exposure…

There I was, standing half naked in a large room with a dozen or so technicians scurrying about. It took me months to get here. I wondered if this somehow capped my initiation into French society.

It all started when I arrived in France* in August 1998 to spend a year as a nanny. To qualify for a long-stay visa, I had to get a chest x-ray to check for tuberculosis.  I received a letter informing me of my appointment date: 3/2/1999. I read that as March 2, 1999 (about 6 months after my arrival – good thing for France I was tuberculosis-free).

When I walked into the clinic on March 2, the woman at the desk took my appointment letter and looked at me with a genuinely French combination of scorn, distaste, and annoyance. “C’est trop tard,” she said, pushing my appointment letter back to me. That’s when I learned – the hard way – that Europeans use the dd/mm/yyyy format, and I was a month late for my February 3 appointment.

But this was the French bureaucracy, so a new appointment only required filling out another appointment request form and waiting several weeks for a new letter to arrive announcing my assigned appointment date and time.

Hopital Joseph Ducuing, Toulouse, France

This time I was to report to the downtown hospital. The one with an x-ray machine in the middle of the large room. The one where they put you in a private room to disrobe, but then expect you to walk shirtless down a corridor to get to the x-ray machine in the middle of the large room. With the dozen technicians swirling around.

I did my best to turn my arms into a shirt. Was this standard protocol, I wondered, or just punishment for being a stupid American who can’t read dates?

At any rate, the x-ray was done, and in perfect bureaucratic style, I received my long-stay visa on the day I left France several months later.

Such was my brush with socialized medicine. Certainly, others have fared worse.

Look, ma! No tuberculosis!

Obamacare celebrates its second birthday on Friday (though most of it has yet to take effect). However noble its intentions, I have to wonder how long it will be before we have to wait weeks or months just to find out when we can see the doctor, much less get treatment. And how long will it be before we’re just another number waiting in line, instead of a patient with unique needs? With the government’s dismal track record of cost-cutting, how long before the costs spiral out of control, like they did with Romneycare?

No doubt our current system is broken. But there are better solutions than government mandates and programs.

Next week the U.S. Supreme court will decide whether the President’s healthcare system is constitutional. Here’s hoping the justices will let us keep the shirts on our backs.

 *I am so sad to hear about the terrorist shootings in my beautiful French “hometown” of Toulouse. My prayers go out to those affected.

The Broken Windows Theory

If one accepts the Broken Windows Theory, then my house is about to be overrun by thugs and hooligans.

We have a broken window.

Last week, my sweet, innocent, petite, not-quite-two-year-old daughter locked me out of the house. In my neon green running shorts. With my greasy hair in a ponytail. Without phone or keys.  And it turns out that keys and locksmiths wouldn’t have helped anyway because the child-locks on our doors prevent them from being opened from the outside.

After more than an hour of my neighbor and me begging and pleading and using outright bribery (Girl Scout cookies) to cajole sweet, little Miss C to open the sliding glass door, we decided it was time to call for help. With my pride well swallowed, I dialed the fire department’s non-emergency line. They, of course, switched me to dispatch and in no time a fire truck was on its way – lights, sirens, and all.

Miss C soon had five hulking firemen and a police officer wrapped around her cute little finger. “Come on, sweetheart, open the door!” they begged. Then she smiled coyly and sat back in her little chair. After a bit she retreated to the laundry room and came back with a soda. Clearly, she had no plans to open the door and spoil her party.

So the window got broken.

The firemen tried to bend the child-locks back, but when it looked like doing that would rip the door frame off, we opted to lose a window. With a few quick swings of a fireman’s pick axe, we were back inside the house.

Where I picked up my little hooligan and gave her a kiss.

A Blog! A Blog! We Have Got a Blog!

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog for some time. I’ve always hesitated because with all the blogs out there, who needs one more? Besides, I’m a natural introvert and a blog might be, well, too much exposure. Then today over lunch, a friend encouraged me to write one. So, since I believe in doing whatever my friends tell me to do, up to and including jumping off a cliff, here goes…

This will likely become a mishmash of topics since my thoughts tend to run tangentially. I hope, though, that this blog will improve my writing, force me to more deeply explore some of my interests, and become something of a journal of my family. We’ll see what happens!