Europe 2013: Well, Fuck.

September 11, 2013

This is not one of those entries to read if you want a happy, bouyant vicarious view of Europe. Thus warned...

I discovered today that my friend Nicola, who I'd been excited about visiting in Paris, was in a fairly horrendous accident on August 23rd. She was jogging near her home in La Croix-Valmer, near St. Tropez, when a motorcycle ran into her. I just spoke with her brother, Jarther, who said that they're expecting between months and years for a full recovery.

She's in Hia Sainte-Anne hospital in Toulon right now, and will probably be moved to Paris in about a week (about the time I will be boarding a plane for home). The good news, of course, is that she survived, and is expected to recover. It's still pretty devastating to hear.

Naturally, my destination has now changed, and I'll be heading to Toulon with all haste. Visiting hours are 1-8 pm, and if I bust ass on the freeway between here and there, I can make it by around 5 or 6 pm. With any luck, she'll be lucid and awake when I get there. If not, perhaps I can come back tomorrow. I'd really like to say hi, even if it's a very brief conversation.

The rain started this morning at about 8, and I'm always reluctant to pack up in the rain, but it sounds like it's stopped for the moment, so I'm going to get myself on the road.

----

I did get myself on the road, about 10:45 by the time I was actually rolling. I'd plotted a course down the autoroutes, France's version of the autobahn. The GPS claimed 5 hours, so of course it took seven, but I got to Toulon at 5:45 when it was all said and done.

A few impressions from the trip: I met my first squat toilet. Didn't expect to find that in France, but ignoring the fact that I forgot to check whether there was any toilet paper, it was a perfectly fine experience.

I ended up paying somewhere in the region of 30 euros in tolls for my extravagant 544 km voyage. These were, unless you count the Austrian vignette for which I paid the princely sum of 4.80, the first toll roads I encountered in Europe, and they dinged me heavily as their introduction. For the return from Toulon, I will be attempting to avoid the autoroutes where possible.

The French freeways are typically quite nice, from an infrastructure standpoint. The French drivers strike me as being hasty and a touch self-important, and frequently a bit inattentive. It was a common sight to see someone signal left to pass, then continue signalling left as they moved right, back into their original lane. French surface streets, on the other hand, range from decent to suck.

The weather improved considerably, more or less in a linear relationship with how far south I was. Toulon is on the Mediterranean Sea, so it's about as far south as you can get in France. The flora and terrain became more and more Mediterranean as well, which I'm sure is just shocking to hear.

Once I arrived at the hospital (Hopital Instructionnelle de l'Armee Sainte-Marie, I think), I locked my stuff to the bike, and met Marian, Nicola's mother, in the lobby. The place is vast, so calling it a lobby seems a bit odd. The entrance hall, perhaps. We went up the elevator, with Marian warning me not to discuss the accident.

I met Marian ages ago, once in Edinburgh (Nicola and I met in Edinburgh as students; I think we met at a ceilidh and sort of generally hit it off), and then I visited once in 1996 when my family did a trip around Europe to visit all the various exchange students' families. She still vividly recalls my visit, or at least the part where I lost my scarf somewhere between the apartment and the bus station, which made me sad because it was a nice wool one that Cori had given me for Christmas.

Anyway, we got to the room, and I set my stuff down and washed my hands against infection while Marian announced that Nicola's special visitor had arrived. She hadn't told her who I was, just that I was coming. I peeked around the corner, all smiles.

Now would be a good time to put this down for later, or never. It gets a little gruesome at this point.

The sight that greeted me wasn't pretty. Nicola was lying in bed with a few discrete tubes running away from her, but as she looked at me, her eyes were distinctly lopsided, and it looked as if part of her skull had caved in, while a section above her ear looked so swollen that I was momentarily horrified that her skull was broken, and had slumped down over her ear. Upon closer inspection, I saw that her left arm and left leg were both in casts, and her right leg was mostly bandaged. There was a series of staples (perhaps 50 or 60, if you're into the counting thing) forming a triangle from the right side of her forehead, back to the crown of her head, and down just above her ear.

Marian said, "Do you know who this is?" She said she didn't. Marian introduced me by name, and I said hello. Nicola said, her voice slightly hoarse, that now she knew who I was, and she was so moved she thought she might cry.

It would emerge over the course of a fairly fractured conversation that she still remembered that I was planning to come visit, and that she remembered a variety of things about our time in Edinburgh together. She interrupted frequently to ask if she could just have a few minutes to get up and use the toilet. Of course she couldn't, explained Marian patiently every time, her legs were both hurt, and we were all looking forward to the day when she could.

It was hard to see Nicola like that -- I'd been looking forward to a fun and comparatively carefree romp around Paris for a few days, and to find myself instead 800 km in the wrong direction, in a hospital room with a woman who had at one point been given less than 24 hours to live was still causing me to reel a bit.

Nicola said she was tired, so Marian and I repaired to the hallway outside the room, where she caught me up on the facts of the case. Nicola had been in La Croix-Valmer (where she has an apartment) visiting with friends for holiday. She was scheduled to return to Paris the next day, if I got that bit right. She was out jogging, crossing a road between the vineyard and the beach, and a motorcycle appeared out of nowhere. She didn't hear him, he didn't see her, and they collided, sending her "parachuting into the air," as Marian told it. Fortunately, he was sufficiently uninjured that he was able to call for help, and after successive waves of first responders arrived, the medevac helicopter from Toulon was called in. She was airlifted to Sainte-Anne, where she's been ever since.

The first thing they did was to operate on her head, since the hemispheres of her brain were being pressed together (whether due to swelling or something else wasn't clear to me). The doctors, at that point, gave her less than 24 hours to live, although they didn't tell Marian that until many days later. In the process of doing this, they removed about a quarter of her braincase (the part that looked sunken-in to me), and that section of skull is currently in a freezer in Marsailles. It will be replaced later, when the swelling has all gone down. The part over her ear that looked swollen to me was, in fact, swollen. Apparently the sunken-in part is new as of today, which makes it a very good sign, since it used to be swollen out. Her arms are restrained to the bed so she doesn't probe her head (where there are large stitched-up wounds and a complete absence of skull).

She's on what I suspect is a fairly ungodly amount of morphine to deal with the pain, which is contributing to the disjointed quality of her conversation. It's clearly Nicola, and she acts like drugged-up Nicola more than brain-damaged Nicola, so that's good. Still, there were weird themes and ideas that seemed to run through the conversation. Part of the time, she was clearly under the impression that she had to go to work tomorrow morning, and was worried she had stuff which needed to get done that she wasn't doing. She kept wanting to talk to someone who knew about technology as an art instruction method, and said she wanted to figure out the tech necessary to teach someone about art while they were asleep. I had mentioned that I worked at Adobe, and we think that when I named Photoshp as an Adobe product, she latched onto that as being a crossover between tech and art (her business is to teach English through the discussion of art).

Finally, around 7:30, she was clearly getting more and more tired, and when a nurse came in to check on her, we took that as our cue to vacate the room while she was distracted. Chances are she would only remember for a minute or two that I had been there, holding her hand, if she remembered concretely at all. Marian says she normally just leaves once Nicola dozes off, since it's the least intrusive way to do it.

We headed off to find the apartment that Nicola's friend Gils is renting as a home-base in Toulon. Marian was on foot, and couldn't really give me clear directions, saying instead that she'd point the way, having walked ahead while I got my stuff together. She didn't know the address, just how to get there on foot. It ended up being nearly half an hour before I caught up with her, after she'd given me the street and house number so I could get directions from the GPS.

I parked the bike in a situation I hope isn't too vastly illegal, on the sidewalk chained to a lamppost. Every bike I see is chained to something, even if it's only chained to itself. Clearly caution is the watchword in Toulon.

We went out to eat dinner at nearly 9, eventually settling on a pizza restaurant near the train station, where we traded stories: Marian was able to unload about Nicola, and dealing with the situation, and I was able to give her a better picture of what my life is like.

I get the impression Marian is pretty overwhelmed by the whole thing. I can't say I blame her. When we were at the hospital, Marian was working on feeding Nicola, which didn't really go all that well -- Nicola just didn't want to eat. I think it was a relief for Marian to have a friendly face around to remind her to eat food, and not sit alone in the apartment, fretting. I know she appreciated having a friendly shoulder to cry on, figuratively at least, and I actually think it helped that I was comparatively neutral (ie, not a family member, not a close friend of Nicola's). As she remarked, she was out of tears; I told her I thought that meant she had ceased being overwhelmed by the situation, and was now dealing with it. She liked that interpretation better.

Gils is returning tomorrow, and as he remarked, the apartment is only big enough for two. I'm on my own for the first part of the day, vacating as soon as I reasonably can (he arrives at 11:30, I think), and then visiting hours start at 1. I'll visit for a while, depending on how Nicola's doing, then start my trek back northward in the afternoon. There's not a great deal of good to be done by hanging around here for long periods of time, and I think that my presence as support for Marian was quite well-timed: her son Jarther just got back on a plane for Australia this morning, and Gils arrives tomorrow, so I was a perfect stop-gap. To the extent that she remembers it, I think Nicola is quite pleased to have me here, but then I also think she won't be terribly bothered if I have to go away (on that much morphine, I don't think anything can really bother you for long). As is probably clear, I'm not entirely reconciled to arriving and leaving so quickly, but I really can't imagine what good I can do, and my presence may actually get to be troublesome if I stay for too long.

It's not the carefree Paris romp that I'd imagined, but in the circumstances, I can't think how I would have acted differently.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.