Moving to Italy: The Flu--Part 3

A few nights after Marino was admitted to hospital, I sat up in bed for the umpteenth time to finish a coughing fit and felt a sudden sharp pain in my back. I gasped in agony, then found I couldn't move without a severe stabbing sensation. I woke George and he helped me to lie down again with a careful shifting of my hips, but I moaned with pain for the rest of the night (which he slept right through, naturally). Since I couldn't straighten up the next morning, and the pain was just as severe, I was sure that I had ruptured some vital organ. I had always been reluctant to visit doctors, except for my pregnancies, but this time I was really scared. I had to see a doctor. We bundled up James and Matthew (the two most rambunctious ones), and left Paul and Margaret Ann with my mother-in-law. Bent over and gasping with every step, I made my way down the steep stone stairs to the car. 

The thing I remember most about that doctor’s visit was that I couldn't go in by myself. Because I couldn't speak Italian well enough to answer the doctor’s questions, I had to rely on George as he struggled to translate for me. With James and Matthew watching from a chair in the corner, I tried to describe the pain to him and hoped that he would be able to translate all the subtleties into Italian. I wanted the doctor to understand exactly how I hurt. I knew that sometimes the correct words help spark connections in a doctor's memory bank of symptoms-to-diagnosis.
The doctor directed me to sit on a chair, fully clothed, and lift up my sweater at the waist so he could see my back.

“When I sat up in bed to cough it suddenly hurt—at the moment that I coughed” I told George.

“Yeah, like someone squeezing you really tight,” George said then started to translate, but I interrupted him, while the doctor stood and waited. 

“No, no, it’s like that now, but when it happened it was more like a knife stabbing me.  And I couldn’t move.”

“I told him that.”

“Did you tell him that I couldn’t move right at the moment I had that pain?  Or did you tell him that I couldn’t straighten up the next day?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know, but it might make a difference to him. I'm sure something happened at that moment, like maybe something burst.” Once more I was frustrated with my inability to communicate properly in Italian.

George translated what I had said. I think. The boys had heard everything, and as the doctor listened to George, Matthew walked over to clutch George’s hand. James stayed on the chair but looked at me with his eyes wide and his cheeks sucked in, a sure sign of nervousness. I smiled at him and tried to pretend that I didn’t feel as if my entire back was gripped in a steel vise, with someone twirling the handle tighter and tighter. Then I sat like a third child, my head swiveling back and forth, as two men discussed in a foreign language what might be happening inside my body. I have seldom felt so powerless.

After poking and pushing and asking questions through George, the doctor diagnosed a torn muscle, or ligament. I never did understand which one, but he smiled sympathetically. He prescribed bed rest and pain killers, neither of which I was able to follow. With the children on the recovery and George driving back and forth to the hospital, I couldn’t stay in bed, nor could I afford to blur my responses with pain medication. But at least I felt better knowing that no organs had ruptured inside me.