I had a simple lunch, as is my custom. Then about two hours later, maybe a little less, an attack of stomach gas that put my lights out. I was on a walk in a squalling rain, wind – thrilling, glorious and dramatic – loudly belching my way around Orvieto. I was, for the hour it lasted, quite grateful for the rain. It granted me freedom to belch without qualm.
By the time I returned home, I was rather dizzy and there were fleeting pains and discomfort on the left side of my chest. I took a bicarbonate of soda. Modest gains on the stomach, nothing gained on the chest pain. The pain was periodic, and my chest muscles are tight so I’ve been stretching them as per instructions from Katrin, the magical fisioterapista. The pain seemed muscular and was worse when I applied pressure, so I rationalized it away.
In my general age-range my father suffered a heart attack. Not a bad one, and one that caught him at night with stomach problems and slight pains in the chest. So, after longer than I probably should have waited, I texted Lucianna. “Could you take me up to the hospital? Probably nothing, but I really should check.”
In my dimmer moments over the past month or so, I’ve imagined losing stamina, feeling tired. Actually looking at that, now, I don’t think it’s been so. Two things are at play: I’m spending much more time alone than I’m used to which tends to dampen my energy on a three-day cycle, and the constant struggle of communication wears on me.
I have so much more appreciation of immigrants and the huge adjustments they make just to get through the day. It’s an adjustment of more than language and custom, it’s a reshuffling of identity. I was once smart and articulate, now I cause people to twist up their eyes and peer, while they use their six words of English to finish my sentences and to translate Italian imponderables such as acqua. They’re only being helpful, of course. And when they talk to me I screw up my eyes in exactly the same way. It’s like a contest. They generally win.
So, anyway, coming off a couple of weeks of feeling a bit peaked, the symptoms of earlier today assumed a collective identity that caused me to text Lucianna. She was just then picking up her daughter, but arrived in the parking lot across from my place five minutes after leaving Sofia at home, and off we went. The hospital is in Ciconia up on a hill, I can see it from my terrace. Built maybe fifteen years ago, it replaced the hospital that was more or less kitty-corner from the Duomo.
Lucianna saw me into the waiting room, then went to park. Guess what? The staff were Italian! I somehow only faintly anticipated having to give specs and explain symptoms in my distantly second language. But I did. And they understood, well enough. They gave me an EKG. They hooked me up to a blood-pressure reading device that repeated about every ten minutes. People came in, asked similar questions as the last visitor (questions which I became worse at answering instead of better), poked here, pushed there. I realized how poorly I talk about things medical even in English. I asked someone dressed in electric blue for results of the tests; she apologized for her non-doctor status and told me to relax.
The immediate good news was that no one seemed the least bit alarmed by the results of the EKG or the pressure device. So, I lay there and worried about Lucianna’s having to wait, about Sofia’s being at home alone, and breathed and sort of meditated… or tried. People came and went wearing scrubs in one of a rainbow of brilliant colors with matching clogs. No one was trying to be nice or reassuring or to convince me they were great at their job, but they were comfortably warm. It felt like I had stumbled into the kitchen of a large house during a family feast.
However, between visits and passings through, the overhead lights became annoying. The pressure testing machine beeped at extremely regular intervals. I silently determined that I would not regret having put myself into this tedious situation, better this than a night spent fretting. After the doctor (in a suit and a lab coat) came in and probed and poked and asked questions, more time passed and I finally decided to sit up. The recline was getting old. I texted Lucianna and she wrote right back. She had taken her clients to the train station and had picked up Sofia in the meantime. Ah! That’s better. Hang.
Another doctor came in I hadn’t seen before because the pressure device turned on while I was texting with my arm bent, and took an alarmingly high result. I explained, she shut it off and told me all was well. Get dressed, the little port stuck in a vein for the blood work could come off afterwards. An entirely new fellow is a lovely orange came in and did that. Then someone else in deep red manually took my blood pressure. Then Lucianna and Sofia appeared holding a directive from the doctor – a prescription for my stomach, any further problems, call. No charge. Thank you’s all around, to the yellow people, the blue, the violet, the red, the orange, the green, and the white-coated doctors… all of them very relaxed and with various accents.
We walked through a light rain to the car. Sofia and I talked briefly about her favorite subjects in school (mathematics and Italian), and we noted that it was good to see each other. She is a princess, at least with company. When Lucianna joined us in the car, I relayed Sofia’s report on her fave subjects. Lu was surprised and rather pleased. Isn’t it always like that?
On the ride back up the rock, Lu had reason to tell me that my Italian had improved considerably over the past few months. I needed that more than the EKG. In fact, that may have been all I needed. But given how long it’s been since my last EKG, it was pretty nice to have had it – especially one so bland and unexciting.
The stomach discomfort continues, but at a much lower level. I’m told there’s a virus going around, with exactly these symptoms. Andrea just told me that my Italian has improved considerably. I think I’ll make it.