The volume of patient traffic inside the sprawling Centre Hospitalier in Montauban is so high that they operate a system I last saw when queuing at the butcher's counter in a supermarket.

Basically, before reaching the consultant you've been sent to see, you take a numbered ticket from a machine, sit in a waiting room watching for it to flash up on a screen, then go to the booth you've been assigned.

Your carte vitale or health card and top-up insurance details are taken and noted and, due to the French obsession with paperwork, you leave 10 minutes later with a sheet of paper full of stickers bearing your details. Only then can you move on to the next stage and see your doctor.

After the marble wealth of the Clinique du Pont de Chaume, where all my previous tests have been, the Centre Hospitalier was a shock to my now much prodded and poked system. In essence it was the same as any major UK hospital - teeming with people, backed-up waiting rooms, bewildering corridors ending in shabby, badly lit dens of hopelessness.

It's not what you expect in the country whose health system is ranked number one by the World Health Organisation. I've also been used to what I now know to be private clinics and am now entering the public system. It's an odd, rather meaningless differential, since we all pay, so private and public do not have the same connotations as they do in the UK.

Few private clinics operate entirely outwith the system and broadly speaking the costs are the same, although there is no uniform set of charges. Sometimes the private clinics can actually be cheaper. They are certainly smarter and I need smart.

It felt strange to be in a huge waiting room - a holding house for four consultants - and see a list of operation charges displayed. I've only seen that in the vet's before.

By sheer chance, Eric, my wine merchant, was there with a girlfriend. I told him I hated this place and whined that I wanted to be at the clinic.

"Well, go back to your doctor and tell him that," he said. "You can choose exactly where you want to go and who you want to see. That's your right in France."

Miserably I told him I knew that but my doctor had said this surgeon was the top man in his field and as this was his fiefdom, here I was.

There's nothing seriously wrong with me - I require a minor laparoscopy to remove an ovary with a cyst. Well, it's not as if I need it or anything.

However anything that puts me under - except wine - fills me with dread and horror, and I start thinking of my funeral music and where my ashes will end up. I also feel I've been kidnapped. With no symptoms I'd have carried on obliviously but as I've said before, once the medics have got you here, you're theirs for life (or death).

When I was taken to hospital last year they didn't just mind their own business and treat me for what I was in for. Oh no, they had to have a check of virtually every other organ while I was there. On presentation of their findings they seemed rather put out that I wasn't utterly delighted. "I don't want to know," I told the doctor who was already planning a calendar of further consultations with various experts. Accustomed to dealing with a nation of hypochondriacs who are not happy unless being over-subscribed carrier bags full of drugs, he found my attitude "extraordinaire".

With the emphasis on preventative medicine and early screening, France has an enviable rate in early detection of most serious diseases. Doctors routinely immediately send patients on to consultants. X-rays, scans and nuclear imaging happen within days not weeks and you, the patient, are given the results immediately. Age is never a consideration.

I know. I know. Most of you would give your eyeteeth for such treatment. Although, used to the NHS, the sad truth is that you wouldn't want to pay the hefty social charges we pay to access it, something which, as a long-time supporter of the NHS, it pains me to say.

Anyway, after yet another consultation, I now have to see a cardiologist and yes, not surprisingly, a lung specialist.

This morning, 48 hours after they were taken, I received my blood breakdown results in the post. Armed with a French medical terms translator and Google, I can see the evidence of a lifetime of smoking. Well, either that or my cardiac function is buggered.

So, I light another fag to calm my heart which does, come to think of it, seem to be racing a little, and ponder the next couple of weeks. I could, of course, simply say, "Let's forget it, shall we?" I tried that and the consultant said we could, but the op would be inevitable at some point. Damn the French and their medical competence.

Naturally each consultant's performance is rated and available online. Excuse me while I look up my surgeon's kill ratio.