Tuesday, July 26, 2016

doctors: a crossing cultures episode

After pausing outside her office until her phone call ended, I let the receptionist know I had arrived for my appointment. She said she would tell the doctor I was there. I took a seat in the sunny waiting room down the wide hall where others who entered after me offered a "bonjour" to the room as they sat down. I had missed that step. Oops.

Doctors' offices here in the center of a French town are often located in the same buildings that house apartments. For example, there's a doctors' office on the ground floor of the building some friends of mine in Aix live in. This can be convenient when packages are delivered when they're not home, as they effectively have a concierge in doctor's clothes to accept their deliveries. As you can imagine, though, a doctor's office in an apartment building might be configured a little differently than the strip mall/medical office building variety I'm used to from back home.

When it was my turn before the doctor, it was he himself who poked his head into the waiting room and called my name. The same thing happened the one time I went to the dentist here. It was the dentist who came to collect me. As is the way with subtle cultural things you don't realize affect what you're expecting, I never realized before that it's perhaps an American norm rather than a worldwide norm that there's always an assistant of some sort of who does such banal tasks as getting patients situated in exam rooms.

In the States, I've perhaps never been inside a doctor's actual office--the place where he or she keeps their books and papers and photos of family. If I have, it's been a rare occurrence. Normally, I only ever see the small exam rooms, usually dressed in white and sterile-seeming décor, though with occasional slightly personal touches (my childhood doctor's exam rooms were graced with those famous images of bulldogs in upper class dinner attire smoking cigars around pool tables).

Here in France, though, I've twice now been ushered into large rooms with a messy desk and accompanying desk-accoutrements in one corner and an exam table and sink and other exam room things in another corner. The doctor does his exams in the same room in which he replies to email. Novel (to me) but not super novel I suppose. I must say, though, that it feels weird to climb upon an exam table in the middle of a large room (even if it's sort of in a corner). I end up feeling exposed. It's weird how weird it feels. Because on the face of it, it's not that crazy.

When it came time to pay yesterday, the doctor wasn't giving clear instructions, just kind of pausing as he sat behind his desk after he'd finished writing prescriptions. And I was internally confused about what was supposed to happen next. When I had time to sort it out later, I realized that again, this is how cross cultural moments work: something collides with what you're expecting, but it takes some seconds to understand that this is the reason it feels like you're moving through the moment in slow motion, trying to find firm footing where you know what you're supposed to do or say next.

I asked if I was supposed to pay him or the person out front. He was probably wondering why in the world I would be so confused about all this and why the person out front would have anything to do with this and why I kept asking if such-and-such was something he would do or her. To my American self, the doctor never occupies himself with such things and never has a credit card machine right there among all his desk-accoutrements. Again, processing payment is to be done by assistants after you leave the exam room and while the doctor rushes off to do the important work of doctoring the patient waiting in the next tiny, private, white exam room, with their chart waiting in the chart holder thing on the wall beside the door. But not in France. Here the doctor handles all that while seated at his desk in a large warmly decorated (in this case, anyway) room.

This is only my second doctor's visit in this country, and the last one was two years ago. There've been lots of other slow motion cross-cultural moments to wade through in the meantime. But maybe now that I've written about it, I'll remember the unspoken rules better the next time I climb onto an exam table in the middle of a large room, and next time I'll need a little less prompting on how to conduct myself. Maybe?

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