11 December 2008 Thursday – Douleur

“Got up, got out of bed, had a shower, dragged a comb across my head”
Just some lyrics that I am working on.
When I raised the electric blinds and opened the curtains the world was white. More show fell during the night to replace what disappeared yesterday.
Unlike yesterday the sun came out to shine.
The pound continues to reach new lows against the euro with the prediction being that £1 will equal 1 euro by the end of the year. A massive drop over the last 18 months when a euro was worth only 76 pence.
I therefore changed several thousand pounds and got such a poor exchange rate that I dare not write it down here. And as I said it is scheduled to get worse.
I set off late afternoon to post the necessary cheque, which must arrive at the currency exchange by noon on Monday next week.
En route I dropped into the doctors to make an appointment to get my ears syringed. I finished the drops that the chemist gave me last week and I still cannot hear much.
The receptionist looked at the doctor’s appointment list. I can come back tomorrow I said. No she said, there is no tomorrow. I said are you closed on Fridays? No she said, but the doctor is not in tomorrow. She then phoned him to see if he could fit me in.
10 minutes later I was back in the doctor’s room. This is where it gets technical. In my UK doctor’s practice this sort of routine is done by a nurse in the attached clinic. Here the doctor does it. In the UK they use an electric machine which shoots a pulsed stream of tepid water in your ear to expel the built up wax.
He produced a metal object and proceeded to stick it in my ears in turn and scrape. It was fucking sore, not to mention dangerous. I said to him that in the UK doctors use water and he replied that they did in France too, but this often did the trick.
Before I carried out my inclination to retaliate due to the pain he was causing me, he stopped the poking and scraping and got out his little kidney dish and a plastic tube with a squeezy bulb at the end.
This finally did the trick and I now have completely clean ears.
The good news is that I can hear again normally in my left ear, but still only have about 10% hearing in my right ear. I hope that my right ear will settle down soon. I hope his zealous scraping has not done any lasting damage.
Sticking a small ball of tissue paper into each ear, I went out into the cold to post my letters in the main post office in the centre of town in the hope that this will ensure my post reaches its destination in time…
Having missed the weekly choir practice for the third week running last night, I will also miss a supplementary practice which has been hastily arranged for the men at someone’s house in Ganac at 8.30 this evening.
They will be chucking me out of the choir next..