[Dutchman working in France]

Regarding health care when I arrived in France: my partner worked for a French company, therefore she was covered and I was covered as an "ayant-droit" ("person having rights"?) because I was her "conjoint". When you're from within the European Union, you have this right to put your partner on your social security card (and no, it's not necessary to be married).

We live on the Cote d'Azur by the way, and I had my ADR surgery in Nice.

Of course, I wasn't admitted to the OR straightaway. First I had to undergo a MRI, a CT scan, a Bone scintigraphy, a dynamic Xray study, and a discogram study. Result: my L5/S1 disk was completely degenerated, completely black on the MRI, and my nerve root on the left was clearly compressed. So L5/S1 had to be replaced or fused, and also there was an annular tear in my L4/L5 disk, that the discogram showed (ouch!). However, the L4/L5 disk produced a different pain pattern than the one I was suffering from everyday.

After all these tests we discussed the result with the surgeon in Nice, and we agreed to do an ADR on L5/S1 (if at all possible; with fusion only as a last resort) and to leave L4/L5 alone for now (since the discogram required a pretty high volume of injected contrast before generating any pain).

Surgery date was set for June 13, 2007.
Before that I still had to visit to the dentist to do Xrays of my teeth to see if there weren't any hidden infections and to go to the cardiologist to do an electrocardiogram and to make sure that my heart could withstand such major surgery. That all checked out okay.

As I'm writing this I am already 10 days post-op, and I will start a separate topic for that part of my story on the ADR Surgical Outcome forum.