Paris at a Certain Age

Playing the Odds in Paris

"A good doctor is like a good bookie", a seasoned family physician told me early in my career, "you have to know the odds." So what are the chances of a woman in her late 50's falling seriously ill during a 3 month stay in Paris? Hm-m-m-m....don't know of any risk tables I can easily consult on this topic.

What does my medical experience tell me? Shit happens. Life is unfair. Good drivers are struck by careless drivers. Heart attacks are common after 50. People on long flights get blood clots in their legs. Time to investigate travel insurance.

Twenty year olds hit the road without worrying about insurance. Back in the sixties, I joined the hippie diaspora sans insurance and drove across country to San Francisco in an old van.The odds were with me then. But now I know far too many stories of sudden medical catastrophes.

Bladder infections, sinusitis, even broken bones don't worry me (except a hip fracture, but I'm well-paddes for that). Health care is far more affordable in France. It's the hospitalizations that'll break you though. Plus the trip back. Cruise ships transport the nearly dead (complete with oxygen and other assorted tubes), but airlines insist on special expensive medical evacuation flights.

If I travelled frequently, the yearly medical evacuation policy from MedjetAssist would have been the best bet. That's all they do and they're highly recommended by many, including Bonjour Paris.

Instead, I opted for a package that covered this one grand trip. I haven't considered travel insurance for my short vacations in the past, but a 3 month stay seems like it greatly increases the chances of something untoward happening.

Investigating travel insurance takes you down a parallel track where you plan for the worst possible experience, not the best. Trip cancellation, interruption, delay: oy vay! Lost or delayed baggage: too bad I can't lose my emotional baggage. Medical evacuation: I hope they provide sedation.

And then there's health insurance. Does my US plan cover me overseas? I'm not yet Medicare age, which is good since Medicare doesn't cover you in France. And age makes a big diffeence in the price of coverage. This is where it gets trickier. Some travel plans only cover you as a secondary plan, meaning you must have other insurance that covers you as a primary plan.

It's no longer the Age of Aquarius where you take off in a hippie van, but it is the Age of the Internet where you can cruise websites and do side-by-side price and coverage comparisons. So check out: www.insuremytrip.com and www.totaltravelinsurance.com and www.squaremouth.com and www.quotewright.com.

After browsing these sites, I discovered travel insurance would cost more than my roundtrip flight did. I blew on my dice and gambled on CSA Travel Protection. Now I can go back to envisioning my ideal experience and evacuate myself from these worst-case scenarios.

Brain Fart or French Fart?

Postmenopausal language learning presents unique challenges. When a French vocabulary word refuses my summons, is it the typical brain fart of aging or a question of lousy memorization? The feeling is similar. If you’re over 45, you know what I mean: suddenly you can’t remember why you entered a room or the name of a neighbor. My friend Roger aptly characterized mid-life memory deficits when he said, “You just don’t have same day delivery anymore.” It’s true: if I pause and relax, the word eventually floats onto my tongue. But if I haven’t properly learned the given vocabulary, no waiting period will produce it. And if I don’t immediately look it up or write it down, I’ll forget the issue only to repeat the entire process the next time I encounter the word. That’s the dilemma. Brain Farts require patience. French Farts require action.

Another issue is that my French reading comprehension is far superior to my elementary listening abilities and laughable speech fluency. Some days trying to chat in French causes actual brain pain, as if I can feel neurons stretching and straining to make new connections. Fortunately it only hurts in one of my speech centers.

Location…Location…Location

Language is all about the left brain. There is a special area for speech comprehension: Wernicke’s Area. If you stroke out and damage Wernicke’s, you can still form words, clear and fluent words, long strings of words, but they don’t make any sense. That’s why they call Wernicke speech ‘coctail hour conversation’ or ‘word salad’. It’s a jabberwocky jumble of meaningless words. You don’t comprehend speech and what you produce is not true language.

It’s Broca’s Area that’s giving me grief. Broca grabs the right word and puts it in the right place to create a coherent sentence. If you blow out Broca’s Area, you understand language, know what you want to say, but you can’t get it out your mouth. And if you do manage a few words, they are telegraphic, slow and labored, and often only a noun and verb without any use of tense. And wouldn’t you know it – it was named after a French doctor, Paul Broca.

The reason it’s harder to learn a second language as an adult is that you have to build a separate spot in Broca’s Area for it. When you learn another language as a child, you use the same region as your native tongue. No wonder it hurts; I’m building a French Annex in my brain.

Bilingual folks have beefed up speech centers. Yep, their brains are actually denser. The more fluent they are, the more grey matter they have in their speech areas. And the earlier they learn their second language, the denser the grey matter. The good news is that learning a second language helps ward off senile dementia. I wonder how you say “No Code” in French?