Most tourists in Paris see the major museums, The Louvre, Orsay, and the Pompedeu, climb the Eiffel tower, eat some food they wouldn't even consider trying at home, and attempt to speak French with a stunning accent, send some postcards, and then come home to have all their photos doen in duplicate and filed in an album somewhere. But how many tourists get a real taste of what french society is all about, and spend some time in a parisian hospital experienceing socialized medicine first hand?

Not many. And there's a good reason. The French heavily discourage foreigners from seeing the inside of their hospitals. Usually when a tourist approaches an aid station with an interesting rash, the response is to hand tem some asprin and send them on their way. Missing limbs with gushing blood usually elicit a response of "I know I've got some duct tape here somewhere" from semi-helpful nurses at medical clinics.

To get into a french hospital then, there are really two options. The first is to disguise yourself as dirty linen, and spend the day in the dirty linen hamper going from room to room and floor to floor observing things. The disadvantage there is that imitating dirty linen all day isn't exactly easy or pleasant, and when you're pulled out of the hamper, declaring "I'm some sheets!", and tossed in the washing machine, things get dangerous; I've seen what french washing machines do to underware, and it's not pretty. Being inside the spin cycle would be akin to asking a parisian to curb their dog.

The other method is to become really unwell, and this was the strategy I took. The advantages include that you get three nutritionally complete, although aesthetically challenged meals per day, and lots of cute french nurses. The drawbacks include lots of injections, blood samples, and exposure to more sharp pointy objects than anyone other than a sous-chef should be exposed to in a day.

My malady was a leg that swelled up without warning. The first clinic I visited cleverly diagnosed this as a pulled muscle, and gave me a perscription for a fine selection of placebos. After a weekend in bed I finally saw through this rouse, and sought help from a more expensive doctor, who immediately instructed me to walk to the nearest mŽtro, make three transfers, and then walk to the hospital. Each step at this point was a new adventure in pain, and I can only imagine what my fellow parisians thought of a giant figure in yellow limping from mŽtro to mŽtro.

At the emergency room things moved quickly. An exam using a version of doppler radar revealed a blood clot in a vein above my right leg. The doctor running the scanner had a sense of humor and predicted that the problem was probably french cuisine, and that the blockage was either a small eclair, or a tiny croq monsieur. In what would become a leitmotif of my stay, however, his equipment wasn't able to see the clot itself, as this version of doppler couldn't see through the air in my intestines.

After that I was hooked up to an IV, and a machine that pushed a syringe of blood thinners into me very slowly. I also got to try out every one of the hospital's examination apperatus: a chest x-ray, an echography, a scanner which involved injecting me with some sort of warm fluid, and another with slightly radioactive fluid, which made it much easier to read my watch at night, and finally, and MRI, which was like being turned into a human torpedo, and pushed into the launching tube of a submarine for 30 minutes. I attempted to relax by replaing old Marx Brother's routines in my head, but the staff insisted on yelling "fire one" at random intervals.

After 4 days connected to my battery operated syringe machine, the doctors changed tactics and began resorting to "epiqures", which were injections into my abdomal muscles. After the injection, the muscle feels as if it has just finished a Suzanne Summers abcruncher tape, and three of these injections a day at convienent hours, like four in the morning, are a remarkably effective means of torture.

In the course of two weeks, I also had three roommates. The first was a real Parisian, born and raised in town, who told facinating stores of wating the american troops liberate the town in 1944. The second was another frenchman who loved to talk constantly. A simple question like "Where do you work?" or "Have you visited Switzerland?" would lead to hour long conversations that would usually end with him drifting off to sleep while talking about turnips. The third was a chain smoker who had difficulties abiding by the hospital's no smoking policy. To be honest, a staggering number of the doctors and nurses also had problems with this policy, but they would take their smoking breaks just outside the main entrance to the hospital, and my roommate instead took to 30-40 minute stays in the bathroom.

The doctor I had was very nice, even though he sometimes had to resort to pantomime in order to explain why he was still keeping me in the hospital after a week and a half. To be honest, I enjoyed his gyrations so much that I sometimes feigned incomprehension.

The food was an interesting experience, since each morning an aide would come around and read off the following day's menu choices from her hand-held computer. Most of these choices made no sense to me (e.g. Parisian soup), and some made no sense to the aide (beet salad vs. salad of beets). I found that ordering the things I didn't know was a fine way to augment my vocabulary. After ordering, I'd be presented with the vocabulary item the following day. Endives I wasn't crazy about, but oyster shoots were nice, and quenelles in a mushroom sauce were downright yummy. I was amazed to be served nice, fatty cuts of meat in the corinary wing, and was disturbed that the dinner didn't come with a glass of choice Burgandy, but this, I suppose, is where socialized medicine has to cut corners.

The other place is with amenities such as the phone and the television. Neither is free, and, in fact, have to be paid for in advance. Doing so while not quite ambulatory halfway through my stay, proved to be a challenge. It involved a trip to the lobby to talk to the TV/Phone people, who as it turned out, didn't accept any form of payment that wasn't cash. Cash could be found at the one ATM in the hospital, but the day I inquired, it was broken. This then required me to request permission to leave the hospital to find an ATM down the street so I could use the phone in my room. I half expected to find elderly men with rolling IV carts in line in front of me at the cash station.

In the end they let me out by having me promise to ubmit to various tortures outside the hospital, like a twice weekly blood sample, and the devine humiliation of wearing old lady's support hose for three weeks to keep my now expanded circulatory system from causing my leg to explode.

In short, the care was good, although not speedy, the food was passible, and the instruments of torture were exquisite. In retrospect, it might have been easier to pretend to be some sheets.