I called the laboratory in a state of trepidation, “Hello, um yes, I have an appointment at 9am, but I’m afraid that I didn’t quite succeed in…well you know…?”
“No problem”, said she, “come anyway and we can give you something for it.”
So I splashed out into the torrential downpour, by the time I got to the appointment my feet were squidge-ing in my black ballerina flats. They were pronounced dead-upon-arrival.
I was five minutes late. Horrors. But there was a long line of the typical 17th, 18th and 9th arrondissment Parisians. Some shabby, most chic, clicking their tongues in the hurried and harried Tuesday morning fashion, waiting behind the “LINE OF CONFIDENTIALITY” for their turn to discreetly undo the wrappings and hand over their jars of ‘success’ to the nurse behind the counter. Or go directly to the lair of the doctor with his thirsty vials and needles gleaming dully in the florescent lights.
I duly was stuck by a needle, answered personal questions and was sent once more behind “THE LINE OF CONFIDENTIALITY”. When I finally reached the nurse she looked at my chart and leaned over the counter very confidently to ask me, convivially, to confide in her some confidential details. Then I was sent to the waiting room to leaf through a stack of outdated magazines with the rest of the clientele. Presently the nurse came and distributed in plastic café cups (plastic spoon included) our morning beverage.
Of magnesium sulfate and water.
Mmmm.
Everyone in the waiting room was patiently sipping/chugging/gagging their cloudy magnesium down and waiting for the after effect whilst reading their magazines, looking at their iphones and generally being the chic parisians that they were.
The willowy blonde sorting through her Longchamps handbag (after much twitchy shifting about in her seat) was the first to abruptly put down her magazine sit upright and dash to the nurses counter.
All was politesse in response to the desperate look on blondies face, “Ah, madame would you like to follow me?” The nurse, moving at lightening speed gathered up a tupperware and sticker bearing blondies name and zipped down the hallway to the WC and shut the door behind the anxious patient.
As the minutes ticked on, we were all getting more and more edgy. The calm and cool aura that generally surrounds the French dissipated as quickly as the importance of the “LINE OF CONFIDENTIALITY” as we crowded around the nurses station hopping up and down waiting for our tupperwares bearing our names competing with one-another in order to get the toilet down the hall and not the one right next to the waiting room.
Finally finished I left the laboratory determinedly not looking at the other patients, silently praying that I would never bump into one of my fellow pooper-patients around Paris, and trudged home to deal with griping intestines and the satisfaction that really and truly...everyone poops.
