On Being Sick in Italy

I’ve heard the horror stories, just as you probably have: the man who breaks a leg in rural Greece and has to stay in a hospital for weeks (no one speaks his language, no one brings food); the toddler who contracts Denge fever in Mexico and has to be flown home for treatment; the woman who catches a parasite in Africa and starts losing weight precipitously.

They’re not all urban folklore, either. A friend traveled to Florence a year ago. Two days into a three-week vacation, she fell and broke her shoulder. The hospital here in Florence took good care of her, and she hoped to be able to manage the rest of the trip. But then, off-balance because of the sling on her arm, hurrying to catch a bus, she stumbled on the uneven Florentine pavement and broke her foot. She and her husband flew home. In the end, it’s a reassuring story: She got quite good medical care at the downtown hospital, Santa Maria Nuova. And she and her husband came back to visit us this fall, to finish their trip.

Here’s my version. Four days into our stay, my husband and I ate dinner with some Florentine friends at a nice osteria in the Oltrarno. The next day, he had a bad bout of intestinal trouble. My stomach didn’t feel completely steady, either. Had we gotten food poisoning? Or were we just adjusting to Florence’s hard water? Hard to know. The next morning, we started a week of Italian classes at La Scuola Toscana (intense and excellent, by the way). By Monday afternoon, I was feeling peaky. My husband made a trip to pharmacist and returned with over-the-counter meds with strange names but clear enough purposes. (Just so you know, pharmacists in Italy have a more active role than they usually do in the U.S. You take a number and get interviewed by a pharmacist. The whole process takes some time.)

None of the over-the-counter meds helped. On Tuesday morning, my digestive tract was too uncertain to attend class. And by Wednesday morning, I was in agony. Lilliputians with lances and spears seemed to be fighting battles in my intestines, jabbing me every few seconds.

Thanks to the internet, we knew there was an English-speaking doctor in Florence. (Two, actually.) We called Dr Kerr, who had offices in central Florence, and – cue the clouds opening, rays of golden light descending, angels singing – he could see at 10:15 that morning. My husband fetched a cab and helped me hobble up the stairs at the doctor’s office. Dr. Kerr listened to me, dismissed concerns about the water, and considered sending me to the hospital for dehydration. When I hesitantly asked about the hospital, he said that, although the doctors would be brusque, the care would be very good, at about a tenth of the price of a hospital visit in the US.

I insisted that all I wanted was to go lie down, so he prescribed me a standard dose of antibiotics. (He also explained how to check into the hospital later, if I needed to.) One dose, he said, would often remedy the ordinary tourist bugs, but given the severity of my symptoms, I should probably take the whole course. The pharmacy was right downstairs. I arrived home with everything I would need: Cipro (a strong, wide-spectrum antibiotic that knocks out almost anything), the Italian version of Tylenol, some probiotics, and even a few packages of electrolytes.

I’d taken Cipro before (UTIs when I was younger), so I knew I’d feel lousy for days, and I did. But that first magical pill of Cipro put the Lilliputian swords and lances to rest within two hours. I slept and slept and slept. My husband came home every day from our Italian classes and went over the homework with me. Then I slept some more.

Meno male, as the Italians say. (Thank goodness, as our Pimsleur language program translates it. More literally, less evil.) For the next week, the idea of eating made me green and queasy, but by the time our first round of guests arrived on Saturday, I was feeling well enough that some days I could go out and about with them. Some nights they went out to eat with my husband; some nights they cooked at the house so I could join them and pretend to eat.

Logistically, then, my experience wasn’t too bad. The Italian medical system came through for me — for a perfectly reasonable amount of money. And we had scheduled six weeks here, so losing one of them wasn’t too terrible.

But illness kept intruding. In our second round of guests, Meg’s Meniere’s Disease (inflammation of the inner ear) acted up, maybe because of the noise levels in central Florence, and she had spells of vertigo. In our third round of guests, my brother Hank and his wife arrived late, looking shaken; he’d gotten very ill on the plane from Frankfurt to Florence, maybe because of food and the weird hours, maybe because of his allergy to strong scents. He’d vomited, and the airline had insisted he see a doctor before he left the airport. Once they arrived at our house, he flopped into bed and stayed there for the rest of the day. But by the next afternoon, he was feeling well enough to see a little of a city he loved.

None of the illnesses turned out to be disastrous. Yet here it is, a new fact of life: traveling in granny gear means that, on any day, sickness might be lurking around the corner (or somewhere in the body). On a practical level, we need to expect it and plan for it. That part is not too hard. What is hard is the existential level: experiencing concretely, in my body, my vulnerability and fragility. Each episode of illness — my own or anyone else’s — highlights the relentless downward pull of mortality, the limitations of time, the specter of this is what’s coming next.

This afternoon I will head into central Florence and eat a nice lunch of melon and prosciutto in the sunshine, watch the Florentine scene pass by, and chat in my halting Italian with a patient waiter. But I will no longer do those things with a glowing sense of inevitable, youthful strength and resilience. I will do it with a strong sense of a suspended sentence. I will see the axe hanging above my head. Luckily, for the moment the rope holding it in place seems pretty sturdy.

Meno male.