PARIS LETTER/Lara MarloweDr Taieb summoned his colleagues to look at the X-ray. "It's an enchondroma, a benign tumour that attacks the hand bones," he said pointing at the wavy outline of my fifth metacarpal, broken into several pieces. The enchondroma had weakened the bone, so it snapped when I crash-landed after my bicycle hit a cobblestone. I headed for a hospital emergency room, and my first encounter with what the World Health Organisation (WHO) claims is the world's best healthcare system.
Dr Taieb wrapped the injured right paw like a mummy, and gave me a splint and sling. I'm a right-handed journalist, with a clumsy left hand, I explained. He shook his head from side to side, smiling. "It will hurt for the rest of your life," he predicted. "You'll have a hard time working." Tears welled up in my eyes; the cheerful doctor gave me a pat on the head and an appointment with an orthopaedist for three weeks later.
"Ah, to cause pain like the breaking of bones," the poet Louis Aragon wrote. That night, I understood what he meant.
I determined to find the best hand specialist in Paris, and arrived at the Clinique Jouvenet in the 16th arrondissement (district) at lunch-time the following day. Dr Lenoble's verdict was more reassuring; he would graft a bone from my wrist to replace the smashed one. In three to four months, my hand would be perfect.
During the five-day wait before the operation, I wanted to know more about enchondromas, and the risks alluded to in the surgery release form. Dragon-lady secretaries ensured I did not reach the doctor. "He told you all that when he saw you," one growled. No he didn't.
Many of my best friends are French. But at the risk of being politically incorrect, I don't understand why dealings with civil servants, salespeople, waiters - and now medical personnel - so often turn into a contest of wills here. In the battle with the hand clinic, I was obviously at a disadvantage.
I was told to report for surgery at noon, half an hour earlier if I wanted to talk to the doctor. What time would the operation take place? "I start at 3 pm. You'll have to wait your turn," he said curtly. My livelihood depends on my right hand; I was worried, I told him. "It's that way for everyone," he snapped.
What, I wondered, was the WHO rating for French bedside manner? In the ice-cold waiting room, anxious patients exchanged sighs and rolled their eyes. After an hour, I was shown to my room. Fortunately, a close friend with years of experience at defusing French labour-management crises dropped by to see me.
Nurse Fatiha burst into the room announcing that she was going to shave me, and that I would have to wash from head to toe. Shave me? I asked incredulously, raising my good hand to my shoulder-length hair. And how could I wash, when there was neither soap nor towel in the bathroom? "Am I speaking Chinese or what?" the nurse asked angrily.
My friend Cathy ushered her into the corridor and began mediating. The nurse was supposed to shave my (completely hairless) hand, she explained. I didn't know that in France, patients bring their own soap and towel to hospital - even to expensive private clinics.
The Monty Pythonesque adventure gained momentum at 5 p.m., when I was finally wheeled to the underground operating theatres.
Six of us were lined up in a row on hospital trolleys, under aluminium foil blankets. The young woman next to me shivered and talked non-stop while her teeth chattered. A trolley bearing an old man collided into two others. "Where's this one go?" an orderly shouted.
When I complained of the cold, they put the nozzle of a hairdryer- like contraption under the blanket, until it burned my feet. Fearing the quality of surgery might be on a par with the treatment of patients, I sat up on the trolley and announced I was leaving. The anaesthetist gave me a jab in the left arm, saying, "This will calm you down". He then used an electric shock to find the nerves in my right arm. Local anaesthesia turned the appendage into a dead weight for the next 12 hours.
"This is not a consumer orientedsociety," a French colleague explained to me later. "Customers and patients are treated with disdain here, like slabs of meat." But when I told an American friend about the assembly line procedures, he said it was good; the high turnover ensured they knew what they were doing.
In the operating room, to the tune of awful 1980s pop music, my arm was pulled through a hole in a curtain so I could not watch the delicate, hour-long micro-surgery. The doctors chatted happily, and even promised we'd all drink champagne when it was over.
Eight days later, the pain has almost subsided, and I can move three fingers under the gauze bandages that are due to come off today. Perhaps French medicine is not so bad after all; even if they never did produce the bubbly.