A quiet week

The week started on a fairly upbeat note. The medication prescribed for Neels seemed to be having the desired effect and we were full of hope that the twice-daily injections would be the end of the story. However, when the District Nurse came to give the last injection she also took some blood which was sent off for analysis. The results were back the same afternoon and we got a phone call from the doctor saying that Neels should go to hospital immediately and that she was sending an ambulance/taxi to take him to Briancon, 30 kms away. When I asked how he would get back again, she assured me that the taxi would also return him safely.
The following day, after he had been x-rayed, ultra-sound scanned, poked, prodded and injected with a cocktail of medications, they said he could come home again, but unfortunately there was not an ambulance/taxi to bring him back, so could he please ask a friend to fetch him. This was a bit of a shock after the local doctor’s assurances, but all I could do was to go and ask someone to organize a regular taxi for us. Mr Barberoux Jnr wouldn’t hear of it and volunteered to take me through to Briancon himself, to fetch Neels. This family was amazingly kind, and their kindness had seemingly no limits.
There were more prescriptions to be filled, but this time, Neels felt fit enough to drive the short distance into town, although he waited in the car while I did some shopping. A strange aspect of prescribed medicines here, is that no dosage instructions are put onto the individual boxes. Instead, a copy of the prescription is returned to the patient. This seems just a little hit-or-miss to us, being used to a clear label which tells one to ‘Take two tablets with water after meals three times a day’. How many people, I wonder, take the wrong dosages because they don’t understand the doctor’s shorthand, or can’t read his writing. Ooh! Scary!
By now, although neither of us had seen anything much of what appeared to be a delightful little town, or the surroundings, we were both keen to get away. Neels was feeling stronger now and thought we should go straight across country back to Aignan and the security of having my cousin and her fluent French close at hand. So, on Saturday the 12th July, we set off. We had been told that Monday was a holiday, making this a long weekend, but somehow, stupidly, we failed to realize the significance of this. Of course, Monday was Bastille Day, France’s National Day and the biggest and most important holiday on the calendar. To celebrate this, it seemed that every French family had decided to be somewhere else and the roads were really busy. However, we chugged along at our 80 kms per hour quite steadily and the distance lessened at a reasonable rate. Although some people say that French drivers are terrible, we found them to be well-disciplined and courteous, with no evidence of the road rage which is so prevalent in South Africa.
Our aim was to break the back of the 700 odd kilometers that we intended to drive and with this in mind, we aimed for a tiny place called Homps, not far from Lezignan-Corbieres, on the banks of the Canal du Midi. When we pulled in there in the late afternoon, we both heaved a sigh of relief that the long drive had gone so smoothly. It had not been a leisurely sight-seeing drive, but along the way we had had some quite unusual views. The beautiful lake Serre-Poncon with it’s strange blue-green water; extraordinary rock formations near a place called Les Mees which looked just like a row of nuns walking along; the wild flowers which are still blooming well and in such abundance and then, further west, the fields of sunflowers more brilliantly yellow than the fields of rape which we had seen earlier in the holiday.
Finally we reached Aignan and a lovely campsite on the side of the hill at the edge of town, which is run by warm, friendly Dutch people. It is very peaceful and is a perfect place for Neels to recuperate.