Je suis blessée

St Materne
Yesterday's weather: Just grand. 28 degrees

For non-French speakers, the title does not mean 'I am blessed', I only wish it did. No, the verb blesser means 'to wound', thus: I am wounded.

Jon says I like to try things out, the Préfecture (local government offices), the tax office, you get my drift, and he says I must have planned yesterday to try out the health service. I assure you I planned nothing.

We had a great day, enjoyed a lovely lunch out in Cahors and found some more corners of that town that we hadn't discovered before. We did a bit of shopping and returned home. The weather was amazing, 28 degrees in the garden here and just a hint of a breeze. However, we are (were) expecting friends for lunch today so I took my sisters famous recipe for tiramisu and assembled today's dessert.

Looking for space in the fridge and finding none since I had just filled it up again, I decided to put the dessert in the overspill fridge in the garage. On the way my flipflop caught on the bottom stone step to the garage and (and I can remember this as if in slow motion) I tripped, panicked that I would drop the tiramisu and (I really don't know how) managed to save it.

If, as I know many of you do, you are reading this whilst having your breakfast (or any other meal), you may like to delay until you have finished eating. Likewise if you are of a squeamish nature or at all sensitive, look away now and come back tomorrow.

Somehow in the rescue of the blasted tiramisu (I don't know if I will ever eat one again), I managed to cut the underside of my big toe very deeply. I struggled from the step and collapsed onto the grass shouting for Jon who was way over the other side to come and help me. I realised immediately that there was a lot of blood and it wasn't a very pleasant injury, so it was off to the hospital emergency room.

At this point in time I would like to point out to my sister that it had not yet reached aperitif hour - not far from it mind, but I hadn't touched a drop.

We arrived at the local hospital and found the emergency room. I rang the doorbell and a young lady came to see me, ushered me immediately into a treatment room and started cleaning the wound. Now, if this had been The Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford I would have been looked up and down a few times, told to wait in a queue and (at seven in the evening) been informed that the waiting time was 4 hours, if I wanted to bother waiting. Here in France I was already being cleaned up and treated like a human being instead of a number.

Within 10 minutes a very nice doctor came to look at me, collected up a kit of nasty looking implements and told me to turn onto my tummy so that he could look at my foot better. I anticipated what was coming next - it would be a needle. This time he spoke to me in English, obviously thinking that I would understand the word 'painful' more than the word 'douleureuse'.

'Eet will be a leetle painfool' he assured (?) me. 'Don't move the foot'.

Don't move the foot? You're kidding, mate. The needle hit me and I flinched. He held my foot steady and tried again. After a couple more prods he announced 'Eet is not painfool any more'. Yeah, right.

He gave five minutes for the anasthetic to work and started work on the stitches. The first three were fine, couldn't feel a thing. The next one was different. As I climbed down from the ceiling he said 'Eet is painfool?' No, no, I just like visiting ceilings, I thought to myself. The fifth stitch was worse.

'Just one more,' he said 'or maybe two'

'Make it one.' I thought. It was two. Because of the angle of the cut, the anaesthetic had only taken on half of my toe, he explained. Thanks for telling me, but I think I had already noticed that!

He gave me a prescription for three different types of pill, antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pain (give me double of those, please) and told me to pay him a visit again this morning. I'll be taking double pain killers before I let him near me again, I can assure you.

So, I'm postponing todays lunch until tonight or tomorrow, if I can get hold of the friends who are coming. They weren't home last night when I phoned. Poor Jon will be doing all the housework and cooking until I can get around without flinching again, probably a couple of weeks.

Luckily he is an excellent cook and probably much better at housework than me.

So maybe I am blessed after all.