Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord

it meant that for rich people happiness was being able to feel on their own, at any rate when they were on a plane.
    Whereas for poor people, like the women on their oilcloths, happiness was being surrounded by their friends. But it’s true that you never know on a plane whether the person next to you will be a friend, so it’s best to take precautions.
    Just then, an air hostess came up from the lower deck where the seats were less expensive, and went to talk to her fellow air hostesses. They looked quite worried. Hector wondered whether it was because there was a problem with the plane, and he got ready to think about death again, though much more comfortably here than in the storeroom.
    One of the hostesses came over and asked if there was a doctor among the passengers. Hector felt uncomfortable: as a psychiatrist you are a real doctor, but because of listening to people’s problems all the time, you often get out of the habit of treating ordinary illnesses. Also, he wondered whether the air hostess was asking for a doctor because there was a lady on the plane having a baby. He’d always been nervous about this when travelling by train or plane. When he was a student, he’d never gone into the wards where women had babies. Of course he’d studied the subject, but only very briefly the night before the exam, and he’d forgotten most of it, and in any case studying and reality are not the same things. And so he felt rather uncomfortable, but even so he signalled to the air hostess and he told her that he was a real doctor.
    The air hostess was very glad, because she’d looked in the other sections of the plane and there were no doctors, or at any rate nobody who wanted to say that they were. (Hector understood why later, as will you.)
    And so, Hector left his little paradise and followed the air hostess down into economy class. Everybody in the rows of seats looked up at him as he went by because they’d understood that he was a doctor, and this worried him slightly; what would he do if they all took it into their heads to demand a consultation?
    The air hostess took him over to a lady who didn’t look very well.
    Hector began speaking to her, but it was difficult because she had a very bad headache, and she didn’t speak Hector’s language. When she spoke in English, she had an accent which Hector and the air hostess found quite difficult to understand.
    Her face was slightly swollen, like people who drink too much, but she didn’t look as if she’d been drinking. Finally, she took a piece of paper out of her bag and handed it to Hector. It was a medical report: this was much easier to understand for a doctor. Six months ago, the lady had had an operation inside her head because a small piece of her brain had begun to grow in a way it shouldn’t, and this bad growth had been removed. Then Hector noticed that her hair wasn’t her own, it was a wig. Since hair grows back in six months, Hector understood that the lady had been given medication that had made her face swell up and her hair fall out, and that the growth must have been very bad indeed. The lady studied him while he was reading the report of the surgery, as if she were trying to tell from his face what he made of it all. But Hector had been trained to have a reassuring look at all times and he said to her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m just going to ask you some questions.’
    And he spoke to her like a doctor, in order to find out how long she’d had the headache, and whether it was a throbbing pain like a heart beat, or more like toothache, and which part of her head hurt most. He examined her eyes with a small torch the air hostess lent him. He asked the lady to squeeze his hands in hers, and other things you learn in order to become a doctor. And the lady seemed less anxious than when he’d arrived.
    Asking those questions and doing those tests had taken Hector’s mind off the thought that this lady might die, but once he’d finished he was forced