The olympic-size swimming pool at La Stade Carcasson, Aix’s public sports facility. You can see the community synchronized swimming team with legs in the air. Yes, they have a synchronized swimming team.
It may come as no surprise that it requires a doctor’s note to play a sport in France. This goes for adults as well as kids. You want to join a soccer team? You’ll need a note. Track club? Note. Enter a 10k fun-run? Note. Triathlon? Whoa — don’t get ahead of yourself there! Something like that obviously requires its own set of forms specific to the event. Like a stamped form from a specially trained triathlon doctor.
So last week, I took Jack for an appointment with Dr. Crespu, a friendly and reportedly English-speaking physician on the Cours-Mirabeau (Aix’s lovely boulevard). The building was nice and the waiting room basic, just a row of plastic chairs in a hallway — more school corridor than ‘room.’ We arrived at two minutes to nine for a nine o’clock appointment, and Dr. Crespu arrived moments later.
She was friendly and happy to help us out, although not hugely comfortable speaking English. I tried French. We ran into trouble with certain words and phrases: track, pick-up games, ultimate frisbee. But we managed to communicate well-enough, and she understood that Jack wanted to do some sports, so she undertook a basic physical examination. Height, weight, blood pressure, breathing rate. Seems like that was about it. She wanted to know if Jack had had any problems with his foot. Or knee? It was hard to tell, because in this case our language had broken down a bit, until I remembered the word la cheville (ankle). No, she mainly just wanted to know if he’d had any problems in the whole leg region. I said no and she led us to her desk.
I should explain that this office was not like an American style doctor’s office. Actually, I’m not sure American doctors really have offices — they see patients in little examination-rooms, do a small amount of paperwork there in the room with you, and then run off to see the next patient in the next little examination room. If they have offices, they’re hidden away, or in the doctor’s home.
In this case, the examination room was built into Dr. Crespu’s office. It had a door, so you could close it off, but it was very much integrated into the space — like a walk-in closet. It had the things a typical examination room has, only maybe not quite as much stuff as you’d find at my doctor’s examination rooms in Cambridge. I think it simply contained a scale, an exam table, and a cabinet or two. In the other part of the office, the main part, she had a big, plain wooden desk, a single bookshelf with medical books, a couple of chairs, and a sculpture with various health-oriented symbols and images.
We sat down in front of the desk and she pulled out several forms, each one for a different sport. See, it isn’t like one form can really cover what needs to be said in this case. You couldn’t just say, “Jack is fit and able to participate in athletic sports.” (Although don’t ask me why). So we brainstormed about what activities he might want to do and what would be necessary medical-authorization-wise. We got soccer, running, swimming, rock-climbing, and maybe tennis.
Then it was my turn. Same deal: brief examination, a few questions about my legs and my breathing, brainstorm about what sports I might want to do. I said running (note); biking (note); swimming (note); triathlon (no note possible, see above); this biking underwater thing they do in gyms here, I’m not sure what it’s called. I tried to describe it as the thing I’d seen in les afiches pour AquaLoft (the posters for a local gym that you see all around town). She’d seen them, too. She crossed off swimming and wrote, aqua-sport, giving me a sly smile as if to say, see, we can beat the system if we try — a word like that, you ought to be able to both swim and do underwater-bike-exercise.
We were done. An hour had passed, Jack and I had about 9 or 10 doctor’s notes between the two of us, so I said thank-you and asked if I should pay at the reception desk which we’d passed on the way in. No, I should pay here. Forty-six euros (a little more than sixty bucks). I paid her in cash, handing her a 50. She didn’t have a cash register, but she had a drawer with change in it — she handed back a few coins. One hour, ten forms — I suppose it was a pretty good deal.
Rhymes with Lyric 