I'm hale and hearty now, but was sick more or less continuously from early February to early April with a variety of ailments, including the aforementioned infection, followed up by a bad cold, the flu, another cold, sinusitis and bronchitis. The good news is I ran up just under 1,000 euros in medical expenses. That's good news because in the States it would easily have been four or five times higher. Doctor visits, of which I indulged in many, are 30 euros here, or about 39 Bush-era dollars. Prescription medicines cost 5 or 10 euros, instead of 50 or a 100 dollars. And I'm not even covered by the French national health care system yet, so I'm paying full boat instead of a token co-payment. (Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who has been pantsing the administration for years, is currently writing about how much the U.S. pays for health care, and how little we [or, I guess, you] have to show for it.)
I am covered by a CIGNA health plan the New York Times Co. has for its overseas employees, and I'm eager to see how well its employees can parse French-language receipts and what the reimbursement will be.
Amidst the microbial onslaught, I missed two weeks of work, had to cancel a one-week vacation in San Francisco, and was forced to pass up an REM concert.
The only pending health challenge is that I have to get a hiatal hernia repaired sometime soon. My stomach has decided to migrate north of the diaphragm, and one-third of it has made the journey. Unfortunately, hiatal hernias are so common that I get no street cred for having one, and the surgery will certainly be laproscopic, so I won't even get a good scar out of it. Oh, I also have to lose mumblety-mumble pounds, I'm told. But, we knew that.
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