‘Bonjour, monsieur! Douleur?’: My night in a French hospital

I regained consciousness on a trolley in a recovery ward. A masked porter wheeled me from there back to my two-bed room on the fifth floor. When I’d left the room earlier, the bed next to the window was vacant. Now it was occupied. Lying on his back under a blanket, his face half covered by a surgical mask, was an old man. On the floor under his bed was a pair of Adidas ‘Superstar’ tennis shoes. The word ‘Superstar’ was in gold lettering. The old man lay rigid, as if bearing pain or discomfort patiently. Through the window the sky above Marseille continued a resolute blue, as though cloud were a meteorological impossibility.

The porter lent me a hand with the treacherous transfer between wheeled trolley and bed, then hoarsely wished me a good day and departed. Enjoying the lingering effects of the sedative with which I had been knocked out, a fabulous chemical which I would be glad to know the name of, I hailed my new room mate genially.

Response nil. The eyes above the mask remained fixed on the TV. Maybe he was deaf. In a companionable mood, and still hoping to make a social connection with my new hospital room mate, even on a subliminal level, I lay back and watched what he was watching on his TV. It was a US soap opera, the chief attraction of which was the immense wealth of the characters and the size and sumptuousness of the house in which they lived. With the sound off, the acting was plywood. The range of the principal character, for example, was narrower than that of a digitally generated avatar in a ten-year-old computer game.

Now a masked nurse stuck her head into the room, reminding me where I was.