Over Christmas, on New Year’s Day to be exact, having overindulged myself fearlessly, I developed a painful case of indigestion.
This was unusual in that the pain instead of being centered around the ribs was higher on the chest and stretched between the shoulders. I put it firmly down to the price being paid for the high life of Christmas and, true to form it responded to a Maalox tablet and dissipated.
As January and February progressed and I was back in France this new version of indigestion seemed to become the norm and I started to get a little quietly concerned. Could it (I whispered to my coward self) possibly be something else? But then another Maalox and I would laugh, and call myself a hypochondriac. Who ever heard of curing a Heart Attack with magnesium?
Then we went for a brief few days into Spain and met there my old buddy Michael. Michael is now single and (like myself) a man of a certain age and size.
He told us that having become concerned about his high blood pressure he had gone to the doctor in the Spanish town where he lived and he had sent him to a Heart clinic in the nearby city. There they had told him that he needed some treatment, in fact what amounted to a minor heart operation. This he did, all successfully.
This certainly made me realise that it was possible that I was acting either like a wimp or an ostrich.
On last Saturday week, and Sile and I decided to take a stroll in the hill behind Murviel, after a short climb I had to confess that I couldn’t go on, I was breathless and the chest pains had returned. Finally I slipped out of denial and confessed all to Sile and agreed to see my local doctor on Monday.
A brief note about the French medical system, because we now work in France and contribute to the social security system we are entitled to a valuable card called a Carte Vitale. This covers a huge amount of one’s medical and even dental expenses in France.
So on the following Monday I went to see my doctor.
He shared my concerns and organised an appointment for me with a cardiologist.
Because this is France that appointment was made for the following day.
So on Tuesday I went to meet what I now rather grandly call my cardiologist and there I had the usual tests being connected to a monitor by electrodes and then having my chest probed (externally of course) by an Ultrasound machine.
He then made his diagnosis; I had what he called a Flutter, an irregular heartbeat. He was going to put me on a course of tablets and daily injections for a week, make me take a blood test and on this basis he would decide on my treatment.
The system here is that you contact a district nurse, there a several in our village, and you then go to the chemist and get the necessary equipment and she comes and takes the blood for the tests and administers the injections.
Yesterday was the day to return to the Cardio. Having re-attached me to the machine and read the blood tests he sat Sile and I down and told us of our choices to fix this “Flutter”.
There was a procedure in which I would be attached to an electric shock machine and this usually fixed the problem- this usually only took a few hours and could happen in Beziers but, with this treatment the condition often returned.
The more modern treatment, he told us, involved, going into hospital for two or three days, having an angiogram (basically exploratory but minor surgery) and then some radio treatment which tended to fix the problem fully.
Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have to watch ER on the tele will guess why I went for the second option.
Then his secretary got on the phone and within half an hour I was booked into the Cardiac Clinic in Montpellier for tomorrow.
So tomorrow I am going into a French hospital, as a patient for the first time.
Watch this space for further developments.