Destinations

Dans Une Pharmacie

In high school one of the French conversations we were obliged to memorize the following: Dans une pharmacie? Oui, oui dans une pharmacie et pour dessert vous pouvez-avoir une excellent glace.

This has been one of our strangest Paris trips. We have visited a pharmacie every day we have been here for something or other. First there was my accidental fall on the Pont d’Arcole less than sixteen hours after we arrived in the city via TGV from Avignon. One of the group of eight (we were traveling with three couples) was coincidentally my cardiologist who insisted I wrap my knee in an elastic bandage. Sitting at Café Flore he excused himself and returned ten minutes later with a self-adhesive bandage he insisted I use immediately. Between sips of Bordeaux I did as asked.

The next day both the knee and the opposite ankle (I had obviously twisted it stepping off the curb) were badly bruised. Topical Arnica and oral Ibuprofen were in order. As I waited in line at the deuxieme pharmacie de nos vacances I eavesdropped on a conversation between the pharmacist and a middle-aged French woman with henna hair draped in multicolored wool shawls. She had mal a la gorge. The following conversation is loosely translated:

Pharmacist: You have a sore throat? What about fever, cough or headache?

Woman: All of those and a stuffy nose.

Pharmacist: Well let me suggest some things to help you.

He proceeded to offer acetaminophen, a menthol nose spray, some lozenges and
an antibiotic. Although French pharmacists have more therapeutic responsibility than in the US usually they require a prescription before passing on the headier drugs.

When she left after paying forty euros for her medical armamentarium it was my turn. I got my Arnica and Ibuprofen quickly and left feeling I had been well served.

On the third day it was clear that a sleeve for my cheville might be useful. Finally after visiting the third pharmacie in our wanderings through the Marais I found the proper size (the pharmacist insisted on measuring my ankle) and put it on immediately with definite relief.

The next day I had developed a pruritic rash behind my left knee, clearly an allergy to the knee brace requiring hydrocortisone. Thus my fourth visit to a pharmacie.

Our fifth day in Paris, Jody announced that she thought she was getting a sore throat. After dinner I looked in her throat; it was pink not red. By morning she had begun to feel like shit but nevertheless we went on with our day. Deca, her favorite clothing store on rue de Charonne and lunch at Chez Paul up the street. Chou farci and steak tartare, une bouteille de Bordeau, tart tartin. Because of its true insouciant French clientele genuine cuisine it has become my favorite place to eat in Paris.

By evening, just before the pharmacies closed, we entered our fifth and asked for advice for her symptoms and left with Fervex, Strepsils (citron). The former, containing a hefty dose of an antihistamine, merely made her groggy and worse.

Fever struck in the middle of the night. By morning she was hallucinating. Something about being “bitten by a rat from the Seine in the middle of her back, or maybe it was a spider; having fallen victim to an old disease; like a voodoo curse for bad things [she] thought; the blanket is Frankenstein’s, made of heavy iron.” In between these disturbing thoughts I kept asking her if she knew where she was and who I was.

“Lou, averred. But the rat was so big and ugly.” I was only partly reassured that she was oriented at least to person as we say in medicine.

When Jody announced, on our walk back from Place Contrescape, that her chest hurt when she coughed and that what she was spewing was ugly I precipitously decided that she could have walking pneumonia and needed Azithromycin.

“Je suis un medicin aux Etats Unis,” I explained in yet another pharmacie.

“Pas de problem,” the pharmacien said as she took my eight euros.

By now I had forgotten about my knee despite the fact that I had ventured into a pharmacie the day before and bought a wooden cane for added stability. As we had traipsed from pharmacie to pharmacie during our week in Paris she claimed I had not tripped once.

“Maybe you should use a cane all the time,” she suggested.

Our next to last day in Paris Jody was still feeling “as if everything in my head is popping out and nose is raw from using toilet paper as Keenex.” I came back with a Vick’s inhaler, Homeoplasmine (a cream for raw skin), and soft nasal wipes with a substance the French swore would soothe the most irritated of nez. Not satisfied that I had bought enough to cure her she rose from her sick bed when her medieval fever had briefly lifted later that afternoon and dragged herself to the pharmacie around the corner from the Saint Regis, our regular morning café with a stunning view of the Pont Sully and charmingly hyperkinetic neighbor who sang and whistled every tune played over the café’s stereo (e.g. Nora Jones, Ella, Miles, Carla Bruni).

Her encounter with le pharmacien was interesting. She walked in and asked if he spoke English. He did.

“I am so sick,” she said and described the depths of her malady.

The pharmaciste then proceeded, she told me later, to point to all the meds we had in our medical armamentarium but still managed to sell her some effervescent aspirin, oscillococcinum (see Wikipedia for a discussion of this fascinating homeopathic anti-influenza medicine popular in France and approved by the FDA in the US) and a tube of Denblan (a French toothpaste and whitener purchasable on the Internet for $20).

When she returned from her excursion she said, “I don’t want to see what we have spent at pharmacies this trip.”

I did not care. It was a tragicomic, if uncomfortable and a bit painful part of life but we were in Paris.