And 2010 came...

First of all, Happy New Year. It's a little late to send out these voeux (well, 18 days late), but still, this is the first post of the new year, so it only seems appropriate to (once again) say "Bonne Annee! Bonne Sante!"
So, as many of you know, 2010 wasn't so kind to my family.
As it happens, my parents, my younger brother and sister-in-law came to Paris to spend Christmas with me. They arrived on Christmas Eve and planned to leave on New Year's Day. We had a great time, saw almost everything we wanted to see (with the exception of the inside of Versailles...a three hour wait? Non merci!) But December 30, after a day packed full with a Mona Lisa sighting, an Eiffel Tower climb, and some Mexican-French food, my dad started feeling sub-par. And to make a long story short, New Year's Eve, we found out that he'd had a stroke. As the great philosopher John Mayer says, "Bad news never has good timing."
We started out at the hospital at Pontault, but they found nothing out of the ordinary with the exception of some high blood levels, so we were sent to a neurological hospital in Paris. Stephan came with us, because though the doctors spoke more English than Mom and Dad spoke French, there were still those awkward moments when the doctor would point to the ceiling and say, "Now what is zhiss called?" Needless to say, I felt a lot more comfortable having Stephan, the most solidly bilingual person I know, around.
And would you know, just as a side note, that there were no ambulances available on New Year's Eve? Not one. "It is the holidays," the aides would say with a shrug. Still, I kept thinking, "This would never happen on Grey's Anatomy."
So, back to the story, he made it to the hospital in Paris, Stephan and I sat in the waiting room while Dad had his IRM (which is the French version of MRI. I think it's almost impossibly funny that all medical things are backwards in French. An IRM is an MRI. AIDS is SIDA.) It was an odd way to welcome in 2010--drinking piping hot cups of Lipton soup from the coffee dispenser, and me trying to read The Complete Works of Isaac Babel aloud to Stephan who did his best to act interested. But 2010 came. We spent the next two weeks in the hospital, circling our chairs together, reading a book a day, watching Dad eat his French hospital meals (foie gras and duck, quenelles, a gray looking something that was labeled--quite vaguely and disturbingly--poultry. Yes, 2010 came.
And as terribly as it started, things have settled back into a semi-normal now.
Mom and Dad flew home last Wednesday, and the 9 hour flight that all of us feared (flying post-stroke is a scary thing!) went really well. I'm back teaching classes, trying not to laugh as the women claim that there really is no difference in appearance or sound between the letters b and d.
And also, it's now been a year since I left home. And while that brings with it many positive things (I now can use the metro/RER/bus system, I have a few friends, my French has improved to a point where people don't seem so inconvenienced when I speak), that also means one not-so-great thing: it's time to return to the prefecture and get another residency card.
But I'm sure that'll be another story for another day...
Until then, again, Bonne annee!