This is me at the Cannes Film Festival with the actor Ed Harris. Or, perhaps, this is me at a Cancer Institute here in Nice where I teach English to Dr. Pÿm. PYM are his initials, and everyone calls him PYM.
Dr. Pym is one of the cheif radiologists at this Cancer Institute. I have been giving him English lessons for a few months thru the Chamber of Commerce. His speciality is the insertion of under-the-skin ports into patients upper arms, where they receive their chemo treatments. I don't really understand it all, but it doesn't matter.
In his office he makes me tea every week, and sometimes he brings rice cakes, or I bring oreos or something wild and crazy like that from the States. His English level is very high, and so for 2 hours we talk about anything and everything. I bring him old Vermont Life magazines I have stashed at home, and he gives them back to me the next week and is full of questions. His mother is German, father French, and he was born in Monaco but raised near Paris. He did his military service in the French Antilles islands, and has never heard of the Wizard of Oz or Ed Harris. These are some of the salient points about Pym. I prep him before he goes off to conferences in Italy to make speeches in English about his latest research for radial arm ports.
Truly, I should be paying him. It's kind of like therapy for me. Pym seems to be a spiritual man, in the sense that he believes in some higher meaning and greater power - and for the French, who seem to have all renounced religion despite their high fidelity to any Catholic holidays that mean they don't have to go to work, that is a rare find in my opinion.
He asks me many questions about hospice in America, of which he has heard and read much, and of which there is very little in France. He tells me stories of patients he has lost to cancer, others he has helped to recover.
I help him learn expressions like "bedside manner".
Pym, and a colleague of his who was also my student recently, have both independently stated the same fact: In France, doctors do not as a rule tell their patients the reality of their health status. The practice is not to be honest, and lay it all out. One head of the hospital said to me during a lesson, unprovoked, "The French can't take it. We aren't like you in America. We don't want to be responsible for our health care, and our prognosis, because in any event we aren't paying for it. If we had to pay for it, we would be much more invested in our treatments, our prognosis/diagnosis, and our bodies' future." Pym, in a seperate lesson, said something along the same lines: "If a patient asks me if they might die, and I'm quite sure they will, I probably will not tell them the truth. It's not the way it goes here."
I told Pym about my father signing a Living Will, about his choice to return to our home, with hospice, to stop the chemo, to lie in relative comfort with Nat King Cole on the stereo. Most cancer patients in France die in the hospital or clinic, apparently, without necessarily haven't had the more frank conversations that seem to be a part of our system in America.
I don't know what to make of it all, and it's a much larger thought than a blog entry. But it's there and makes up yet another difference between Here and Home; the differences I am always trying to unravel.
