Today I visited the doctor. In France, once you turn 50, the Health Service sends you a letter advising you to visit your doctor. The purpose of this visit is to obtain a thing called a Hemoccult. In essence, it’s a test to diagnose and prevent colon cancer. One needs to collect small samples of one’s daily …er… bowel movements (for three days) and then send them off in a special envelope to the laboratory. Bizarre, I know, sending something like that through the post. I can only hope there’s more reliability for this than I’ve experienced when sending a copy of my book abroad (it sometimes gets lost, so I’m now trialling sending it direct from the UK printers).<\/p>\n
The advantage in France, of course, is that these tests are free; one simply pays for the doctor’s consultation (and is then refunded 70% of this cost). In the UK I had been informed that if I wanted to be tested, it would have to have been done privately, at a cost of around \u00a31500.<\/p>\n
The doctor asked if there was any history of cancer in my family, to which I replied in the affirmative, saying that I had unfortunately lost my brother in 2005 (he was only 59). I was immediately referred to a clinic in Romorantin, where I’ll need to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. Oh joy.<\/p>\n
We had no luck finding any suitable fencing material at the aged FIL’s farm, so I’ve ordered a 50-metre length of plastic netting online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I visited the doctor. In France, once you turn 50, the Health Service sends you a letter advising you to visit your doctor. The purpose of this visit is to obtain a thing called a Hemoccult. In essence, it’s a test to diagnose and prevent colon cancer. One needs to collect small samples of … Continue reading “28\/07\/2014”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/la-darnoire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}