Though, in all fairness to the lad, m’lud, it should be pointed out that he was stuck for a lift home and the local bus service is not all it might be. In fact, the company only has one pint-sized vehicle and that only seems to trundle around every second Wednesday or so in the dry season.
As it turned out, the poor boy couldn’t get the car to start, so he had to stagger along anyway, and with the car’s radio under his arm too, but having left his banana bag and all his papers in the front passenger seat. Er, don’t bother sending for Hercule Poirot, eh.
Then there was the 36-year-old Breton chap up before the beak in Brest on Friday. He’d been heavily on the pop, too – the chap, not the beak, silly – when he drove off in his girlfriend’s car. It was pouring down and the windscreen wipers didn’t work, either, so he couldn’t see too well. But he did just about make out that the lights had changed to green and when the car in front didn’t zip away as snappily as he’d have liked, he leant on the horn long and hard. Pity he didn’t notice the little blue light on its roof.
Now French police never have been noted for their ability to see the funny side of things and these two soon asked him to play the Breton bagpipes which revealed an alcohol level of 2.08 thingummies per whatsit, way above the 0.50 legal limit. And when asked to produce his licence, he had to confess that he didn’t have one because he’d never got round to taking his test. Well, it generally costs 1,000 euros or so to pass, what with the compulsory minimum 20 lessons and so on, and lots of people just can’t afford it.
Back at the commissariat, they also discovered that he had 13 previous convictions including five for DIC but, strangely, only two for driving without a licence. The magistrate was equally unamused and gave him six months over the wall, on top of the 16 months’ porridge suspended from a previous offence.
Actually, Brittany has just about the lowest crime and misdemeanour rates in the whole of France and most of that is drink-driving or drug-related, so the few wrong-uns we do have tend, like these two, to be inept to a pathetic, almost comically endearing degree.
And I was at St Malo’s Palais de Justice interpreting the other day and one judge who’d previously done time on the bench down in Marseilles and Corsica was telling me in chambers that even the region’s very few career crooks were refreshingly honest in a fair-cop-guv kind of way.
Not that drink-driving is really a laughing matter either, of course. In fact, the last time I had any direct contact with someone DIC myself, I only woke up a few hours later in Dinan’s Centre Hospitalier and with multiple fractures and a face like a pizza. Yes, I’d been pinged up into the air while cycling down the Route de Dinard and I was only on my bike at all because our cherry-red Deudeuche or Deux Chevaux, our 2CV, had been stolen the night before.
The next afternoon, the nice young couple from upstairs appeared timidly at my bedside with a bunch of grapes to say, um, they’d had some bad news by phone and been called away urgently, forgetting that they’d left the bath running, and, er, our flat was flooded. Mme Masstairmann and I, both still in some shock after the previous double whammy, stared at each other for a minute and then burst out laughing. Well, you get days like that, don’t you?
Little did I know that I was about to get several more, though. Everything seemed to be healing up nicely but my left calf remained stubbornly swollen. Phlebitis was suspected and Mme M was told: Don’t just sit there, massage it with this cream, the more kneading it gets the better, even if it does hurt like the blazes. Well, they got that last bit right, anyway, and the leg was still searingly sore on Dinan’s cobblestones weeks after I’d left hospital. Puzzled, they finally decided to x-ray it and you didn’t need to be an FRCS to see that the bone had in fact been broken all along, snapped in two.
Oh well, it’s only pain and, had I but known it, only par for the course. In 2005, an independent report on medical incidents in France’s hospitals, clinics and care centres estimated that there had been 450,000 ‘undesirable events’ in 2004 and up to 10,000 deaths that might have been avoided.
The authorities fiercely contested these figures but another survey in 2007 concluded that 750,000 of the 8 million people treated the year before had contracted ‘maladies nosocomiales’, MRSA, and that 3,500, just under five per cent of all patients, had died as a result of their hospitalisation. And yet, alarmingly, these statistics were officially described as ‘encouraging’, MRSA rates having fallen 40 per cent in five years.
Over 160 establishments have just been warned to clean up their acts, literally. Among them, and both in the top ten of places presumably to be avoided like the plague, were Dinan and St Malo, though both hospitals were quick to point out that the report related to 2006 and that major improvements in care and hygiene procedures had been introduced since then.
Nurses working at Pontchaillou, a top teaching hospital just down the road in Rennes, admitted that they were now working under more pressure than ever, particularly after two or three well-publicised deaths in Paris over Christmas and the New Year when patients were inadvertently given the wrong drugs, or far too much of the right ones or, in another case, the emergency services chased round 20 hospitals trying to find a free bed in the flu and gastro epidemic.
Nor were we reassured by our health minister explaining that that last chap would have died anyway and that there were in fact 11 unoccupied beds in Parisian hospitals on the night in question. Euh, juste un instant, Madame la Ministre. You do mean 11, as in eleven, as in ten plus one, for an urban and suburban population of more than 10,000,000 souls? One per million? Exactement, Monsieur! Oh, well, that’s alright then.
The Rennes nurses agreed that their patients were now often more worried about the hospital than their illness and admitted that the staff were asked anxious questions that would have been unheard of a few years ago. Things like: Are you sure that’s the right drip? Or: Seems like an awful lot of tablets to me, can you just check with the specialist first?
And the hospital was increasingly bearing the brunt of other, sometimes more social ills: drugs and drink, suicides and the lost and the lonely, older patients with multiple conditions referred by GPs who no longer knew what to do with them, and even private clinics turning away the more difficult or less profitable customers.
Mind you, it’s all a case of plus ça change really because, 200 years ago, Napoleon agreed with Alexander the Great, and he died in 323 BC for goodness sake, that doctors killed as many people as generals. But things have come on a lot since then, of course. Medical science is inventing new illnesses almost daily, and before my last operation here in Dinan at the Polyclinique de la Rance, the surgeon said he hoped I’d put all my worldly affairs in order because I was going to survive it.
Kenavo!
