The story behind the stories on my blog is...as well as me being a right busybody....I was having some problems (arson, expropriation, child custody, etc...the usual in this day and age) and my doctor tried to get me to take some little pills for depression. I refused for a long time and then finally accepted, took two, and promptly found myself in an ambulance, having fallen over at the Thursday market.
Once I got to Orthez and the hospital, they took off my tshirt and hooked me up to no end of machines and then left me for four hours...with no tshirt or hospital paper gown. I have to explain that I don't wear a bra, so there I was, tits hanging out and all, wondering what was going on. There was a man in the bed next to me that they put tubes into at both ends...he pulled them out and they tied him down and redid the tubes, so I wasn't about to make a peep about even a paper gown, just in case.
Four hours later, a man came in and said, "Madame, I am the Psychiatrist (with a capital 'P'), can you tell me what you were doing wandering around town half naked? I insisted to him that I had come in with a red Waialua High School tshirt, but he didn't believe me and began to ask questions...the usual ones, age, birthdate, the ages and names of my kids, etc...with me thinking all the time that if I messed up on just one response, I'd be put away for probably forever.
And then...whew!...he pulled open a drawer and there was my red tshirt! He looked so disappointed as he said that he guessed he'd have to let me go home, unless I wanted to stay for a few days. No thanks. As I was waiting for the taxi to take me back to Salies, I asked the nurse at the desk what on earth had happened, and she said that the only thing they could think of was that, as I'd come in just as the morning shift wasbeing replaced by the afternoon shift, one team had forgotten to tell the other one about me and where my tshirt was, or even that there had been a tshirt.
There are probably people in psychiatric hospitals that are there by accidents such as these.
So anyway, I went back to my doctor and told him that I was taking no more little pills, and too bad if he thought I was depressed. And so he suggested that I write. Ha! I hadn't written for twenty years, even so much as a letter. I had hardly read a newspaper for twenty years. No TV for twenty years, either. It wasn't that I was a total social recluse, I just had other things to do....kids, donkeys, garden, fireplace...
He said write about the things I was always talking about. The neighbors, the town, the Mayor. So I got a computer and relearned all about sentence structure and paragraphs and punctuation...like riding a bicycle, you don't really forget (although someone once said to me that my punctuation gives them whiplash).
I was going to rant and rave about the Mayor and his proposed ringroad, or the attitude of the Gendarmes when my house got vandalized and burned, or the really xenophobic people in small French towns. But somehow, that didn't seem too dignified, so I just told the human stories about the people that live here. There's enough human stories to go around, and there is a skeleton or two behind each closed door. And it makes me love the town all over again.
I'd never admit it to my doctor.
Once I got to Orthez and the hospital, they took off my tshirt and hooked me up to no end of machines and then left me for four hours...with no tshirt or hospital paper gown. I have to explain that I don't wear a bra, so there I was, tits hanging out and all, wondering what was going on. There was a man in the bed next to me that they put tubes into at both ends...he pulled them out and they tied him down and redid the tubes, so I wasn't about to make a peep about even a paper gown, just in case.
Four hours later, a man came in and said, "Madame, I am the Psychiatrist (with a capital 'P'), can you tell me what you were doing wandering around town half naked? I insisted to him that I had come in with a red Waialua High School tshirt, but he didn't believe me and began to ask questions...the usual ones, age, birthdate, the ages and names of my kids, etc...with me thinking all the time that if I messed up on just one response, I'd be put away for probably forever.
And then...whew!...he pulled open a drawer and there was my red tshirt! He looked so disappointed as he said that he guessed he'd have to let me go home, unless I wanted to stay for a few days. No thanks. As I was waiting for the taxi to take me back to Salies, I asked the nurse at the desk what on earth had happened, and she said that the only thing they could think of was that, as I'd come in just as the morning shift wasbeing replaced by the afternoon shift, one team had forgotten to tell the other one about me and where my tshirt was, or even that there had been a tshirt.
There are probably people in psychiatric hospitals that are there by accidents such as these.
So anyway, I went back to my doctor and told him that I was taking no more little pills, and too bad if he thought I was depressed. And so he suggested that I write. Ha! I hadn't written for twenty years, even so much as a letter. I had hardly read a newspaper for twenty years. No TV for twenty years, either. It wasn't that I was a total social recluse, I just had other things to do....kids, donkeys, garden, fireplace...
He said write about the things I was always talking about. The neighbors, the town, the Mayor. So I got a computer and relearned all about sentence structure and paragraphs and punctuation...like riding a bicycle, you don't really forget (although someone once said to me that my punctuation gives them whiplash).
I was going to rant and rave about the Mayor and his proposed ringroad, or the attitude of the Gendarmes when my house got vandalized and burned, or the really xenophobic people in small French towns. But somehow, that didn't seem too dignified, so I just told the human stories about the people that live here. There's enough human stories to go around, and there is a skeleton or two behind each closed door. And it makes me love the town all over again.
I'd never admit it to my doctor.
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