A bad day, I guess

 All I can tell myself is that she was having a bad day. I don't think I did anything that made it worse for her. I'm talking about the woman in charge of the radiology lab at the hospital in Saint-Aignan — the one who X-rayed my knees yesterday morning. I arrived at the hospital on time or a little bit early. I got checked in at the front desk, where a clerk examined my national health card (la carte Vitale) and my French national ID card (la carte de résident), entering some of the data on the cards onto her computer. She was very efficient and pleasant.

Then I went upstairs and sat in a waiting area (it wasn't a room but just a few chairs in a hallway) for 30 minutes. At exactly 10:30, which was the appointed time, the technician came out and ushered me into the radiology lab. She almost snapped orders at me, saying (in French of course): "Put your things on this chair." What things, I asked. "Your pants and your shoes," she barked — here it's pants and shoes." I did as instructed.  "Now come and stand on this platform. Hold onto these two handles, one on each side." The handles looked like light bulbs.

"Stand with your feet an inch or so apart. I tried to comply. She went behind a glass screen and yelled back at me: "Make sure your feet are parallel to each other." I thought they were. I adjusted their position slightly. The technician yelled from behind the glass screen: "You need to move your left foot closer to the right foot." I again moved that foot to comply. "Can you hear me over there?" she asked me.

Suddenly she came almost running from behind the glass screen toward me. She grabbed my left foot and moved it maybe a quarter of an inch, saying "If you don't cooperate, we'll never get this done."   I'm doing my best, I said. She took the X-ray of my two knees. It's true that maybe five minutes had gone by since I walked through the lab door and got undressed.

She went back behind the glass screen and yelled: "Now turn to the right 90 degrees and put your right foot slightly farther forward than the left." I did that. She came running out from behind the glass screen, grabbed my right leg, and pulled it slightly farther forward. "You have to bend your knee," she yelled. Okay, I get it, I was thinking. She X-rayed that knee.

Then she told me to turn to the left 180 degrees and do the same for the other leg. Are you sure you can hear me? she yelled. I was answering her in a normal voice, I thought. Once the second knee had been X-rayed, she said "Now turn left and face the back wall." I did that. I made sure my two feet were absolutely parallel to each other. "Your feet need to be touching each other!" she yelled. And then she pushed me from behind and said: "Your chest and abdomen need to be touching the wall!" She hadn't explained that. My big toes were touching the wall, but my chest wasn't. I was about to fall over.

And I felt like I was being manhandled. I didn't say anything, though, because there I was, my pants and shoes draped over a chair on the other side of the room. I had done my best to cooperate to the letter. It was over, and she said "Go get dressed!" I did so, and as I left she flashed what I thought was an exaggerated, rehearsed smile, and said: "I will mail your X-rays to you next week, and I'll also mail a set to your doctor. Do you understand me?" Oui, je lui ai dit. La semaine prochaine... Merci. Et bonne journée.

One odd thing: neither the woman at the front desk downstairs nor the x-ray technician had said a word about how and when I would pay for the appointment. The technician just said: "Okay, that's it. You can go now. You don't need to do anything else. Au revoir."

When I walked past the front desk downstairs, toward the front door, the first woman I had talked to earlier was on the telephone. So I just left. Maybe they'll send me a bill for their services one day soon. The hospital web site says patients can pay either by check or by bank card.