Today was epic in my own tiny, tiny world so deserves a proper post apart from the weekly diary format.
I slept almost not at all last night. I listened to the full set of Rodrigo, glorious stuff that on a good night will absorb my mind with flourishes and musical surprises. It did none of that. It was merely entertaining, and barely that. What did absorb my mind were the muscles in my lower back. They were tense. I needed to stretch them. To try would have been dangerous. I realized with a certain dread that being in bed 24/7 was no longer a treatment, it had flipped into the cause category. But I had to do something. My options were still limited to a flat on the back position, so creative posturing focussed on arms and legs, mostly on the legs. They could be crossed like a lazy lotus, propped up to create small cathedrals, set askew to mock a cathedral whose engineering was off, made to look like chopsticks, knitting needles, and border collies. They were all interesting positions, but in the end the lower back still hurt.
Word was I would be released today or tomorrow. Sometime yesterday morning that announcement changed to Saturday or Monday. That shift created in me a mild panic that cued the rest of my day.
There are things I’ve really loved about my hospital stay; the regular IV’s of painkillers that make me pleasantly drowsy, the washings, the diapers, the catheters. Yes, I’ve really loved the freedom to pee and crap whenever I felt like it, push a button, and have a pair of angels clean it up without the disgust that my warm creations deserved. It was like being a baby again.
That being confronted by a babble of mostly local accents, backed up with abrupt mannerisms and lots of shouting, would tie the Italian I have into knots was also infantile, but when trying to determine facts, request services and adjustments, and beg for water and air, it was a lot less fun.
An important aspect of recovery in the Parkinson’s Recovery Project is coaxing the Du Channel to run again in the right direction. When people experience that shift, they report it as an almost shockingly animalistic surge of power that threatens ideas of polite society. When I asked a young man if he could remove a tube that seemed to have been attached to an empty bottle all night, thus adding to my miseries, he snapped full-throatedly “No! I just changed that”, and walked away, somehow without even having to turn to alter directions. “Now there’s a man with a well-functioning Du Channel” I thought. Two hours later he decided that a port in my arm should be changed when, halfway through an antibiotic injection, I winced at the pressure. He set about installing a new one without inflicting the least pain. I told him it was very comfortable, and spied a smile behind his mask. All the same energy but funneled into a different emotional mode. Du again, but with easy and intense love.
When the doctors came in for their mid-morning round up, they were only one. A young man, again dressed in black silk on a day that was breaking heat records, he rolled in his black wheeled podium that held his black notebook computer so suddenly that I had no time to put in a hearing aid. He stopped at the foot of my bed, glared, smiled slightly, and looked at my records. “Giangiummo carpadoctrollo” he said, as neither question nor statement. “Scusi?” I mumbled back. As I tried to find my aides, he blurted the same sounds four more times, dismissed me with his hand, and wheeled to my new roommate, Giorgio where he was rewarded with a glorious flood of unembarrassed Italian from Montecchio. I finally inserted an aid as he left, and practically shouted my questions of the day at him; when do I get out, and who is removing the stitches?! He paused, said I would be dismissed on Saturday or Monday, and to ask a nurse about the stitches. “I would greatly prefer Saturday” I said. He swatted at his private mosquito and made an escape I envied.
Claudio the physiotherapist came next. As I “walked” the hall with him, he explained that walking was needed daily, but that physiotherapists don’t work weekends, and that I wouldn’t be allowed to walk without one. My panic resumed.
I couldn’t eat lunch. No appetite. I blamed the heat, but that was the smaller issue.
By four I was contemplating suicide. I could not stay the weekend. To do so would be not only counter productive but dangerous to my recovery. I brewed a host of plans. The most elaborate involved Giorgio. I would call a nurse who would rush in talking at the speed of light, and Giorgio would explain what I needed by talking her into submission. As it happened, the nurse, also with a happy Du Channel, silenced him, explained that I was trying to alter firmaments that could not be adjusted, and was gone.
My next scheme involved my base doctor, Leonardo, whose English is brilliant. “I have no power, but you do,” he said. “When your case doctor comes in tell him you want to go home. You are not in prison. He has to send you.” Who is my case doctor? “I don’t know”. There are between one and four doctors visiting every morning, and mostly all different. “Ask a nurse.” NO! (temporary Du Channel kicked in) You ask one! So, I summoned a nurse and was to call Leonardo back as soon as she came in. She had good instincts – she took her time. When she finally arrived and saw me phone in hand, she immediately refused to have anything to do with such an underhanded undertaking as finding my case doctor’s name. “When he comes tomorrow morning, tell him you want to be released.” How will I know which one is mine or if he’s even here? Giorgio got involved, tried to explain my position. Nothing changed. She left.
Then it occurred to me. I have a well-placed friend; Franco, the retired doctor who worked pronto soccorso (ER) for more than twenty years.
I called. I explained. “We’re on vacation but let me see what I can do. Call you back.” Five minutes later, “Can’t call your doctor directly this evening, but I will tomorrow morning and he’ll have everything ready for your release.”
How very Italian.
It hasn’t happened yet, but Roman is packing my bags.