cimorene | cim and wax's way-too-exciting trip, or: brush with death on vacation

this is long, so it is in parts.

chapter one. where are cim's parents?

so, my parents are americans, and wax and i live in europe, so the plan was for us to meet up in paris at the hotel they were paying for. their cell phones wouldn't work in europe, though, so wax and i were supposed to make our way to the hotel using its name and address as guides. accordingly, we caught a bus and then a train into town and got off at the eiffel tower stop. (a busker was playing the accordion on the train. at the time i thought that was positively surreal - "where is that music coming from?" - but i later became accustomed to busking on the metro.) we wandered around the hotel district there, past the paris hilton and down rue de suffrens, without finding any sign of the street. at this point, my suitcase - which was not even a third full, but was still very heavy because it sucks - had already given both me and wax blisters from dragging it on its wheels. we turned on our phones, and discovered that mine would not work in france (i have a prepaid finnish sim card), so wax called the hotel. she asked for my parents by name and spelled their (extremely long, one-of-a-kind hyphenated) name for the receptionist.

the receptionist told her she'd never heard of them. specifically she told her they hadn't checked in and that they had never even made a reservation. that was when i started to freak out. my parents should have been in town for six hours already. wax and i had no way to contact them, but because our flight was delayed and we were initially a bit lost about the metro, we were two hours late, so they should have tried to contact us. my phone wouldn't work, but they had wax's phone number. if you have followed the posts about my parents in the past you will understand that i couldn't be certain it would occur to them to do that, however. i was considering calling american emergency contacts to ask if they'd heard from them, but it was still the middle of the night in america.

we wandered around that district a bit more and got slightly more lost while i got progressively more panicky and wax's hands got more blistered. we discussed stopping in a bench and repacking all our shit into wax's suitcase so that we could throw my suitcase and its unwieldiness away. we called the hotel again for directions and, after walking about half an hour down the seine, finally found the hotel. it was intimidatingly large, airy, and almost completely covered in pale marble.

it was a luxury hotel, previously japanese-owned, now owned by novotel but still catering principally to japanese - businessmen and wealthy tourists. it was the kind of hotel that i was embarrassed to walk through even when dressed in a silk skirt and high heels - i always felt i was bringing down the tenor of the lobby. to clarify, this isn't my parents' usual sort of thing, it was just pretty much the only (or perhaps the cheapest?) paris hotel with adequate handicapped access for my father.¹ when i went to the receptionist's desk and asked for my parents again, spelling their name exactly the same way wax had done, she found them in the computer immediately and called the room and handed me the phone. we could go right up! my mother informed me they had been there at least two hours, dispelling the possibility that they'd just arrived after wax called. anyway, their reservation certainly had not been lost, so basically we have no idea what was up with that first phonecall.

that evening was pleasant but uneventful, involving wandering in the vicinity of the hotel. but that brings us to...

chapter two. notre dame, or: goddamn tourists. and

wild_boys, or: adventures in paris transportation.

on friday we all got up super-early, because mom and dad had booked this special handicapped taxi-van service to drive daddy around. paris is a street of very little handicapped access and it was pretty much impossible to take daddy on the metro at all. we rode to a little island and walked down the seine and over a bridge to notre dame, all before 9 am. it was still unpleasantly chilly for several hours, but even that early the cathedral was crowded, and i remember much more about the unpleasant quantity of tourists than what anything inside it looked like. daddy could only see about half the ground floor because there's a step up into the back half. we wandered from notre dame towards another church, saint-chapelle, which is famous for having the best stained glass in the world. it was medieval, and in the small chapel elaborately painted and boasting some amusing sculptures. but what saint-chapelle is mostly notable for is that it's quite small, and the ground level of the chapel has a giftshop in the form of about, oh, four of those folding tables you'd have at a church potluck in a row. they have some medieval tarot cards and action figures, children's books on princesses, overpriced copies of the unicorn tapestry, guidebooks, handmade not-actually-medieval-style jewelry, etc. it's the kind of souvenir shop that contains only two racks of postcards, the kind you can completely take the measure of in five minutes or, if you want to skim, one minute. and my mom shopped there for two hours, ultimately buying nothing but a deck of cards and some postcards. by that time, dad had fallen asleep several times and

wax_jism,

cuddlepint and i had looked in meticulous detail at every small stained glass window, every pillar detail and every wall painting many times. my sister and i gave up and sat down on the floor.

after lunch in a cafe, my mom wanted to go to three shops she had written down the addresses of from a guidebook. she didn't have their names or contents written, just the addresses. following the map, it took us half an hour or so to walk from the gardens at cluny to an overpriced shopping district where even

cuddlepint didn't want to go into any of the shops, and we scanned for house numbers for blocks, and finally found the three shops, which mom had no interest in when we found them. eventually we discovered another cafe and waited there an hour and a half while the wheelchair van was caught in traffic.

but finally we made it back to the hotel, and the enchanting

wild_boys came and picked up

wax_jism and myself. we rode the metro through one transfer to what she described as the jewish/gay quarter. on the way there, a busker came on and looped a kind of garment between two standing poles, turned on a boombox and stuck up a muppet-like puppet of pavarotti. the muppet performed a nice little pavarotti song which was very enchanting. i think i gave him some money. in the jewish/gay quarter, we passed a lot of hasidic jews in traditional dress. i have never seen one of these in person before, so i was a little impressed. we also passed a lot of vespas, a few of which drove on the sidewalks, and lots of gay people. in fact, the restaurant at which we ate just may have been the gayest thing ever. it was certainly one of the greatest things ever.

there were giant sea shells on the wall, a fake stucco effect, holes in the plastery ceiling through which airbrushed clouds could be seen, and bits of naked male greek statues on the walls. the waitress came up and leaned over and

wild_boys had an intimate, laughter-filled conversation or two, giving us the impression that they were old friends and that

wild_boys had possibly babysat for her cat one time, or attended her daughter's christening. we later learned that this is just how

wild_boys magically is with everybody. also, the appetizer i ate was enough food to make me so full i almost felt sick, and i only ate about five bites of rice and curried turkey.

then we walked around the gay/jewish district and into some other places, i guess, rambling, giggling, talking about the food and the shop windows we passed by. we stayed out very late and then rode the subway back to bir hakeim/tour eiffel and started walking to the hotel. then we noticed some stairs across the street, at the side of the seine. wax was curious.

wild_boys had never been up there. we jaywalked and were forced to stand, in a wobbly fashion, on the painted line down the centre of quai de grenelle and almost get run over. then we climbed up the steps and found ourselves - what else but a wee holocaust memorial! i think it was a bronze statue of a clutch of sad children. the plaque said in french, more or less, that it was really awful what that entity spuriously calling itself the french government had done to some people on the basis of race and religion, and maybe some other various things, but that actual french people weren't, of course, responsible. "other things" must have included gayness, i guess. then the eiffel tower lit up in a very sparkly way. we walked to the end of the elevated section and looked down over a fence at the train tracks in a very very popular suicide spot, because you can sort of fall on some power lines on the way down to the tracks. we discussed how the sign wasn't going to do much if you wanted to die, but how it wasn't a particularly reliable way since you might just end up maimed. then we braved death to cross the quai again and had made it within three blocks of the hotel when...

wax and

wild_boys stopped at square bela bartok, a little fenced garden with some sculptures in, and pointed out a really tall skinny white tower behind it, taller than the surrounding sky-scraping hotels and flat blocks, but with no windows for most its height. was it part of square bela bartok? or outside? opinions varied. there was a cross-street going down under an overpass and skirting dangerously near a parking garage, and

wax_jism expressed that we needed to check it out.

"are you insane?" i said. "you're not really going to wander all out of our way, possibly getting lost, to see what that random tower is?"

"are you insane?" she retorted indignantly. "the tower must be investigated!"

"you say that like it's actually true," i pointed out, "but it isn't. the tower doesn't have to be investigated."

nonetheless we walked past the parking garage and some abandoned shopping carts linked together in a romeo-and-juliet-like embrace of death, and around the block, and discovered that the tower was a chimney and not attached to square bela bartok at all. then we went back to the hotel and bid

wild_boys a fond goodnight, promising to call again on the weekend if possible. there is no photographic evidence of this day because i thought my camera was broken.

interlude. the louvre, or: how napoleon didn't build his palaces for handicapped access.

wax and i overslept and took the metro, with our newfound (thanks to

wild_boys) metro savvy, to the louvre. it was easy to find the louvre and dismaying to find it so crowded. there had initially been a plan to give my parents my phone and use the phones as walkie-talkies, but that had been cramped by the need to get a prepaid french sim card for mine since it wasn't working internationally, and the minutes had run out on it - so you could call it, but it couldn't call you. also, we forgot to give it to them, and when we got to the louvre and called mom from the pyramid room [censored for da vinci code 'spoilers'] under which mary magdalene is buried, we were dismayed to hear something like "we're by nike! or we should be there when you get there!" we eventually figured out, however, that she meant the winged nike of samothrace. after a confusing detour through the egyptian wing we found it and them. they had been, they said, en route to the mona lisa for three hours, and going up and down the public escalator in the egyptian wing, because there were no escalators elsewhere in the louvre, and no ramps, just stairs - marble ones, mainly, and stone ones, since the louvre was actually one of napoleon's palaces. well, when wax and i were able to understand that they'd been wandering around that time without asking someone how to get to the mona lisa we were understandably bewildered. mom asked a nearby guard, who immediately opened a series of secret doors and took us into the italian paintings section. we came out in a long gallery and only about three minutes' walk from the mona lisa, which my sister was anxious to see. shortly thereafter my parents and sister left to catch the handicapped van. wax and i stayed to check out the roman and german sculptures in more detail before heading back ourselves. we were supposed to all be changed into fancy clothes to go out, mom had told us, to a nice senegalese restaurant for dinner. she had made reservations in advance and everything, and the van would pick us up at six. little did we know...

(and i mean this next chapter title literally:)

chapter three. the restaurant, the french ambulance service, and the intensive care wing of the french hospital.
background i assume you more or less know about my dad's injury if you read my journal

the senegalese restaurant was way on the other side of town from the hotel, and when the van finally got us there, we immediately noticed several problems.

the restaurant was too tiny for dad's wheelchair to fit through the door.

the entire restaurant was raised a foot or more above the sidewalk with a step up, so even though there were some large, table-sized gaps on the sides of the door, it was literally impossible for daddy to enter the restaurant.

when questioned in an undertone, mom admitted that she hadn't known that the restaurant was small or that it was raised above the ground - no one had checked that it was handicapped-accessible. (we were later to learn that dad was supposed to have done that from america but had spaced. it wouldn't have worked out anyway, probably - the people there didn't actually speak english.) when dad rolled right up until his wheels touched the step up and we pushed the big round table as far out the window as it would go, it still wasn't in any way over his lap so that he could reach to eat, and to boot the table was wedged in the doorframe. mom still wanted to eat there and we were hungry so wax,

cuddlepint and i filed into the restaurant obediently. it turned out that senegalese food would have been too much for us in the best of circumstances. dad ordered soup and we had salads, and the salads themselves were spicy. meanwhile, dad wasn't actually able to eat his soup. he can't grasp a spoon in the best of circumstances, nor can he extend his arm all the way or control its movements particularly finely, and he was reaching up to the table for spoonsful of stew. he spilled a bunch of the soup and finally mom left the restaurant to stand over his shoulder and feed him. most of the soup went in his lap anyway.

it was during the soup that he started to lose consciousness, and to insist that he was just sleepy and perfectly fine. the 'sleepy' episodes got more and more remarkable. yelling wouldn't keep him awake past a garbled "huh?" mom pulled his wheelchair back and made him drive up and down a bit, which he managed, but he kept getting sleepier. by the time his meal was delivered he wasn't awake enough to eat a bite alone. still he kept saying he was fine, and it was about ten more minutes, for a total of more than half an hour i think, of all of us in turns standing by him, forcing his chair to tilt back to bring more oxygen to his head, and yelling at him, before wax and i were forceful enough about calling an ambulance to get mom to decide to actually do it. the losses of consciousness were pointing to low blood pressure as the problem, which can be a fairly common occurrence in spinal cord patients and is always potentially dangerous, but usually doesn't lead to anything. the home remedy is to tilt them and elevate their feet higher than their heads so the blood goes to the brain. wax used her broken french and had the store owner call an ambulance, even though mom had already called the wheelchair van, because we thought the ambulance would be faster. it arrived in five minutes. however, when it got there, all three of the very cute little french ambulance technicians were unable to communicate with us. they didn't recognise the signs and we weren't even able to tell them in french that dad had a spinal cord injury. meanwhile the van driver showed up to interpret, but still not much communication was possible. finally it was settled the van would drive us to the hospital. dad couldn't ride in the ambulance without his passport, which was at the hotel. the van drove all of us to the hospital, then wax, my sister and me back to the hotel. we left mom wax's phone so she could call us for the exact information about all dad's prescriptions, which they also weren't carrying with them.

she told us that she needed his passport as well, though, so the three of us tromped back to the concierge and asked for a cab across town. the ride from the hotel to the hospital was about half an hour, perhaps more, and when we got to the emergency room entrance the non-english-speaking nurses at the desk took us back through most of the intensive care unit to the specific one called reánimation. we still didn't think it was anything too severe, because when i'd spoken with mom, she'd just said he was doing much better on the oxygen and everything. but when we got to the little waiting room, the first thing she said was, "did you hear?" hear what?

that he was in a coma. he'd had a lung infection, we learned, which had become aggravated over the trip and was at a really bad stage. when they brought him in he'd fallen into a coma (it still isn't clear to us whether that coma was perhaps a medically-induced one after he lost consciousness). he was intubated and okay, but unconscious.

by now it was past midnight. the hospital was mostly deserted. the one english-speaking intern had been woken up and called down to deal with us, and she took dad's medical history from mom, or tried to. a lot of the dialogue contained things like this:

INTERN: has he been hospitalised in the past year?
MOM: um, no.
ME: are you sure...?
INTERN: when was the last time he was hospitalised?
MOM: last september, i think. it may have been july.
ME: didn't you email me really recently that he was in the hospital for a few days? this spring?
MOM: did i?
cuddlepint: yes, mom, he was in the hospital a few months ago, remember? he had to stay there overnight and be checked up on. there was a bloodclot - oh no, that was a different time. he also went there for a bloodclot.
MOM: oh, yeah, oh, right.
INTERN: so has he had surgery?
MOM: no.
cuddlepint: mom, yes! the bloodclot, remember, they had to remove it? and he also had surgery for that other thing?
MOM: oh, right, of course! i forgot about that! so those two times were all. no, wait. there was another time.

mom decided to stay in the hospital overnight, and he woke up early the next morning (after maybe 10 hours unconscious?) before she went back to the hotel briefly.

cuddlepint, wax and i had an adventure on the metro when the stations closed down before we could get back, and we walked about half an hour at two am down rue de commerce and quai de grenelle. the next morning we woke up and took

cuddlepint out for breakfast - she's only fourteen and had been understandably very anxious and we were trying to keep her upset to a minimum. then we bought mom some lunch and got on the metro to take it to her, meeting her on the way and handing over the lunch and my sister. wax and i visited dad and found him awake, and reading a book. we chatted for a while and i was reassured to find him pretty healthy and alert, although he was weak and obviously tired. so we left and gave

wild_boys a ring. she met us and we went out to see poseidon, as a means of distraction, which was fairly effective. then we went back to her place, had some suspect chinese for supper and visited the hospital again while my mom was gone.

wild_boys and wax waited outside for me, then whisked me away again when i left (dad was doing better, but he was quite cold and tired) to hang out beside the canal, where many people were having picnics, at sunset. we met

wild_boys's brother alan and he offered us some fruit, and we took it easy while a soccer match went on and some other picnickers down the canal played african drums. we rode the metro back again, late, and crashed.

chapter four. how french hospitals can't dial international long distance, or: we're not the police! you can tell us!

well, the french doctors in reánimation aren't spinal cord specialists, which, believe me, do exist, and are usually in charge of spinal cord patients, because it's a very complicated kind of condition. they gave mom the impression that they didn't have and hadn't contacted a specialist, and although they had dad's home doctor's number, they told her they were unable to call him, which has something to do with the french public healthcare system. when we woke up monday, mom called me anxiously to tell me two things - one, that she desperately needed dad's doctor to call them, because they were going to give him a transfusion and she didn't know why and wasn't sure they were actually aware of what they were doing. they said he was anemic and needed the transfusion, but actually he is deliberately kept anemic (that is, thin-blooded), as are many spinal cord patients, because thicker blood increases the risk of bloodclots/embolism/death. the other thing she told me was that they'd done a blood test and it had shown that dad had had, in the past three days, "either morphine or pot or crack". skipping over the fact that these are three wildly different screens i'm pretty sure, i said intelligently: "what?" that's what she said! but apparently she hadn't questioned them enough to get much clarification on the subject, nor demanded they retest and clear up the issue. "they said accusingly, 'you didn't tell us ALL the drugs he was on'," she informed me. "they said, 'you know, we aren't the police! you can tell us!'" the test indicated he got the drug (wax and i are thinking it was probably for the morphine family) the day we were on rue de commerce, so, you know, not so much. since he was with us every second, not to mention he wouldn't be capable of either buying or ingesting it alone.

by the time we called his doctor and got to the hospital mom had dropped that subject. the doctor had called and the treatment seemed to be okay. daddy was doing well (ish) and they might let him out tomorrow or today, she said (i was rightly skeptical of this overly optimistic prediction). now she was just starving, and needed an atm, so wax and i led the way past the canal where we hung with

wild_boys, and we wandered until we found an open restaurant and bought a lot of lebanese food for lunch. then we ate by the canal, visited an atm, and took

cuddlepint to shop on rue de commerce while mom went back to the hospital. rue de commerce was a big disappointment because the clothes were above her price range and, since she is very small, too large for her. we exhausted ourselves and spent a nice evening at the hotel and lingering over a slow dinner in our favourite near-the-hotel café. then the next morning, the three of us got in a taxi for the airport, bound for munich without mom and dad, to stay with the family of my family's german exchange student.

chapter five. münchen and oberhaching, and the bavarian alps.

mom had given back wax's cell phone, after running up thousands of dollars in international calls. she'd also been giving out the number to all kinds of people, while calling insurance and travel agents and church members who really didn't need to know the news that urgently. she'd never told them she wasn't going to keep having that number. the phone came with us to münchen, leaving mom phoneless. you can leave messages at the hotel but it's a lengthy process, and she would only be there very briefly at night; and at the hospital there was no fixed line. we told her to buy a cell phone, and to call us since we had no real way to call her. my sister, who is fourteen, was going to have to fly from münchen back to paris alone, and we still didn't know what day her flight was. mom was supposed to get it from her travel agent and let us know.

the flight was a few hours, and then hans and regina (a german desperate housewife, and a german phone company exec) and lena (the exchange student) took us into münchen and up the olympic tower. this is, by the way, the sight-seeing tower where seigaku go when they visit tezuka in germany. we saw the olympic park and a lot of football fans, colourful and noisy ones. and a rock festival. and from the tower i could see some tennis courts which look suspiciously like the courts where ryoma plays that german woman. we had a hard time getting food that wasn't sausagey or water that wasn't carbonated, and we walked around a charming little festival full of statues of naked women and asian and indian bazaar-like items. then we went back to the hans and regina's cosy place in the suburbs to have some more cake (regina baked three in anticipation of our arrival: apple with whipped cream and chocolate, buckwheat with raspberries, and cheesecake). by now, we'd been there, oh, seven hours, and there was still no sign of mom. we tried to call the hotel three times that night, but she wasn't in the room. wax had gotten three calls from america for her.

the next day it was back to münchen. we saw a really awesome roccoco church, a new gothic (actually 19th century) town hall that was very, very spiky, and an old gothic church that was huge and gorgeous and seriously imposing. then wax and i both got heat stroke. wax had a splitting headache, and i got quite sick to my stomach, and we were both dehydrated. hans solicitously bought us some water in a beer garden, but although he told us they did have the uncarbonated water we three times expressed a preference for, instead he kept insisting on ordering these tiny 0,25 L bottles of fizzy water. wax and i each drank four of them, which came to €22 together, by the way. it thunderstormed on the way home and we got very wet at the trains, and finally also got a phonecall from mom, about 36 hours after our arrival.

she called us from the metro at first, waiting for a train, which wasn't a good time. we called back and forth a bit while she rode, but the noise was prohibitive so we told her to call us back. since it was past midnight we said to call wax's cell, which would ring only quietly in the attic where we were, and not the german house phone, which would wake lena's parents downstairs, probably. then wax, pointing out that we had carefully stressed that she should call the cell phone, took the house phone down two flights of stairs to hang it up in the dining room. and then mom called... the wrong phone. we scrambled downstairs to answer, but it was too late, of course, they were awake... and also it stopped ringing by the time we could get there. we called her back from the cell phone and discovered she wasn't at the hotel, but had just gotten off at the nearest stop to the hotel, bir hakeim... and walked in the wrong direction. she walked to the eiffel tower, which was probably a good ten or fiften minutes' walk, and didn't notice her mistake till she got there. it took her half an hour to get back to the hotel after she got of the metro, and meanwhile she was lost and my sister was on the phone, shrieking, "a map mom, look at a map! - cim says a bus map, they have them at the bus stops - walk to the quai! where are you?" obviously she eventually reached the hotel though. she had forgotten she was supposed to call us, and she had called the travel agent and also bought a phone. dad was doing fine, she said. he might get out of the hospital before lillian got back to paris. maybe they could fly home within a few days of the original departure date (the 23rd). when i mentioned that i wanted to be certain she would get my sister from the airport in paris, she said she didn't know when the flight was getting in even though she had already called the travel agent.

the day after that, i was feeling a little nervous about german tourism. my stomach is anxious, and i was not sure i could get adequate un-fatty, un-red-meaty food, or adequate un-carbonated water. but i need not have worried. we put on jeans and took a rented van up into the foothills of the alps. we got out of the van in a criminally adorable town called schleiersee and checked out a roccoco church from the 1400s and its matching graveyard, then rode skilifts up to a tiny hotel resort higher up called, i think, schleierberg. we had lunch there, where it was really, really beautiful, and then took some plastic toboggans down what is known as an "alpine slide". it's kind of like a waterslide, only with more fir trees and majestic alpine views. it rained intermittently on the drive back, during which we stopped in another alpine village on a lake. it was threatening thunderstorms so we didn't take a boat on the lake, just wandered around, taking pictures of beer-brewing monasteries, traditional costumes in store windows, and other things. we ate gelato. then we went to a slightly bigger town, a small city with cobblestones and a very famous row of old housefronts. the bavarian architecture is incredibly charming, featuring a sort of italian flavour to the german, lots of stucco and almost all of it painted in a sort-of trompe l'oueil style - fake window frames and whatnot round the windows, decorations at the doors, coats of arms, but also shields and portraits of the baby jesus, st christopher, etc, etc, etc.

and that was pretty much it. we had an italian dinner, a nice quiet breakfast and a long talk with regina, and then a 7hr layover in copenhagen. oh, and then we discovered it was midsummer's eve so the buses weren't running when we got back at 11 pm. we took a taxi home, where we were reunited with

shiroi_chi and with my dog. it's good to be home, and this trip has impressed on me a lot how much i really think of finland that way, now. daddy is still in the hospital as far as i know - at least, he was the day before yesterday, and i haven't heard from mom since then. my sister flies back to paris tomorrow.

1. background i assume you more or less know about my father when you read my journal entries: in 2003, he was in an accident and suffered a C6/C7 spinal cord injury. he is officially quadriplegic, with only partial use of both arms, and no sensation in his body below the nipples. he has only minimal control over his hands - a total of four or five fingers, i think, and most of his joints/tendons are calcified with his hands in a claw-like position. he is in a large motorized wheelchair, which he can drive without assistance, but he isn't strong enough to use a manual chair for very long at one time.

background on spinal cord injury for this post: patients with spinal cord injuries are susceptible to illness for a number of reasons. they can't control their bodily functions unaided and need catheters and things which are prone to infection. if the injury is high enough in the spinal cord their body loses the unconscious automatic regulation of body temperature, so any infection (that is, fever) becomes extremely dangerous to them. they're at a high risk from blood clots, and low blood pressure can be equally dangerous because their brains don't get enough oxygen.

wax's account is here. it might be funnier and also, shorter.