Bedside Manner

Today I had the most enjoyable medical appointment of my pregnancy thusfar. Possibly of my life thusfar.
And yet... I had not been looking forward to it.

It was the routine consultation with the clinic's anaesthetist, the point of which is basically to discuss the pros and cons of an epidural and get the patient to sign a form authorising said epidural (so that the clinic is covered if anything goes wrong).
The anaesthetist who gave me my epidural two years ago was a grouchy old woman who shall ever remain in my memory thanks to the immortal words I heard her spout as she plunged the needle into my back: "Putain! Elle est maigre..." ("F***, she's skinny").
Nice.
Especially when you're in the late stages of labour.

However, today the consultant's door opened and an anaesthetist stepped out to usher me in and boy, this was no grouchy old woman.

I don't watch TV hospital dramas so I can't really compare him to anyone you might know... but suffice to say, this was Sexy Doctor personified.


He was blond, slim and slightly effeminate with floppy hair and puppy dog eyes. Everything my mother would disapprove of, in short.
But gosh he was sexy.

And - I swear this is not my deluded pregnancy brain playing tricks on me - I got the distinct impression he was flirting with me!

"You are a young woman in perfect health, I see..." he cooed, gazing into my eyes as he ticked boxes on my medical questionnaire.
"Y-y-y-yes, Doctor," I stammered (I was literally glowing with good health at this point).
"And you speak French so well," he added, baby-blue eyes boring into mine.
"Oui..." I agreed bashfully, and promptly lost all notion of how to speak French. The next two sentences that stumbled out of my mouth were littered with grammatical errors, naturally.

The climax (so to speak) was when he asked to see my blood group card. After studying it carefully for a few seconds, he looked up, flashed me a heart-melting smile and declared softly "C'est absolument parfait."
Was it? How exactly can a blood group be described as "perfect", I wondered briefly, before deciding that this was by the by: my lovely doctor thought it was perfect: therefore it was.

As I left and we shook hands (as is customary here), I stuttered: "Hope to see you soon..."
Is this an appropriate way to take leave of a doctor??
I fear not, but I can tell you something: this whole giving birth lark is suddenly starting to look a whole lot more enticing... ;-)