Moving to Italy: The (Endless) Flu--Part 4

While Marino was in the hospital, his condition deteriorated. George and his mother drove there every two or three days to take him water and food, but neither of them was well enough to endure an all-night stay. Marino complained that he wasn’t receiving the medication prescribed by the doctors. When he asked the nurses for it they would say “Later,” and then never come back. Because he was so sick, it was hard to tell how much of what he said was true, and how much he just couldn’t remember. There was no one present from the family to check on what medication he was receiving and when. To make things worse, between the noise in the hallway and his persistent cough, he wasn't sleeping at all. He stayed for ten days and then insisted on leaving. When the doctors refused to discharge him because he was so ill, he made up a story about having to catch a flight back to California the next day.

When George and his mother arrived, the doctor gave them a supply of medication and syringes along with a list showing when to give what, covering every couple of hours that day and "on the plane" the day after. He also gave them a sealed letter for the doctor in California. A nurse even trained Rina how to give the injections by practicing on an orange. George told me that when he saw all the directions and the needles, it scared him badly.

He described what happened when the doctor left Marino's hallway bedside.

“Papa, I think you should stay here. They know how to look after you…” George had said.

“No. Those damn nurses never give me what I need! If I’m going to die, it’s not going to be here. You take me home now, Giorgio.”

In his anger he choked, started coughing, and clutched at his chest in pain, scaring George even more. At that Rina picked up Marino’s case from under the bed and swept his few things into it. She knew there was no use arguing.

When George realized his father had made up his mind to leave the hospital, he said, “OK, then how about we drive to the airport right now, and I put you both on a plane to California? We can call Olga and Willis to meet you in Los Angeles, and they can take you straight to St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

This time it was Rina, “No, no, I’m too sick. I can’t travel and also take care of him.”

Marino added: “You heard what the doctor said, I’m too sick to fly. And what about the smallpox shot?  They won’t let us back into the States without it. Stop talking, and help me get dressed!  I’m going home.”

George figured he’d raised his father’s blood pressure too much already. Defeated, he did as he was told, dreading what might lie ahead as he drove them back to Gabi. 

(Note: The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.)

Moving to Italy: Reflection on Language

Visiting the doctor’s office in Italy left a permanent change in me. The doctor was a kind man, and we were treated well, but my inability to convey to him the cause of my pain and how it had happened left me frustrated. But I was relatively lucky in that I had an adult fluent in Italian to translate for me.

When we returned to the U.S., I developed a new respect for immigrants who were disadvantaged in not speaking English. Not only did they have to adjust to different customs and expectations, but they had the huge handicap of not being able to listen to the local populace and learn from what they heard. Just like me in Italy, they had to struggle to understand what was being said and then grope for the correct words to communicate with the natives.

If they were parents they faced, as I had, the prospect of losing verbal contact with their children as those children soaked up the language and merged into the new environment. Some of these parents were told by teachers to forbid their native language being spoken at home so that the children could learn English more quickly. In Italy no one told me to stop speaking English around our home, and if they had, I would have objected loudly. Even so, my boys were so young that they absorbed Italian, and as I have mentioned, they began to forget English.

After that visit to the doctor, I appreciated even more Cousin Luigi’s patience with me, his willingness to wait for me to find the right words, and his ability to fill in what I might have misspoken. When visiting Gabi later in life, I found this same kindness in another of George’s cousins, Rosemma. She too speaks no English but is always patient with me. Between hand signals and my recall of words I thought I had forgotten, we have always been able to communicate somehow. (Although I am not certain how much of what we say gets lost in the gaps between us!)

Cousin Rosemma on the right.

My encounters with Luigi, and later with Rosemma, were to shape my responses to others. When the company I worked for in California hired three Hungarian engineers for six months, they spoke English with heavy accents, and remembering my struggles in Italy, I went out of my way to communicate with them. But I watched what happened when the Hungarians tried to start a conversation with others in the company. Our employees would be polite enough, smile, and answer questions, but at the first opportunity they slipped away. Perhaps it was shyness, perhaps it was a fear of not understanding the foreign accent, but when my co-workers hurried off, I recognized the Hungarian’s look of bewilderment. I had felt that same way in Italy.

I understood then, twenty years later, what had happened when we interacted with Italians in social gatherings. I had tried to join the conversation, but when they didn’t understand me, or I didn’t understand them, the back and forth flow of words was blocked, and it was difficult to continue. At an early age we learn social language skills: I say something, you reply, then I reply to your comment, and so on. If your reply doesn’t fit with what has gone before, I have to try to understand where you have taken the conversational thread.  For instance, if I ask what you had for lunch and you reply, “Mel’s Diner,” I might stop, interpret, then say, “No, not where did you go for lunch, what did you eat for lunch?”  Usually we can restart the rhythm without too much effort. Not so when one of us is struggling with the language. When misunderstanding constantly interrupts communication, the rhythm never gets established, and it becomes frustrating for everyone. Most people don’t have the time or patience to keep trying. In social situations in Italy, it was far easier for the Italian to turn to George and let him translate, or easier for me to simply listen and not try to enter the dialogue. Learning a new language as an adult is hard, much harder than it would appear if you’ve never tried it!

I encountered a similar dynamic when teaching university writing to a diverse population of students. Often they were the children of immigrants, the first ones to attend college, and they wrote of being the family translator from a young age. With a limited child’s vocabulary, they were forced to translate to bureaucrats, while their parents silently listened not understanding the words that flew past them. I would feel for those students and the responsibility they bore for translating correctly. And I felt an affinity with their helpless parents, as I remembered the same sensation with the doctor in Italy.

The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

 

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. 

Moving to Italy: The Flu--Part 2

Marino and Rina were older, more vulnerable, and they had a bad dose of the flu. Just like us, they both ran high fevers and vomited, and the accompanying coughs echoed up the stairs to our apartment. But Marino's cough gradually degenerated into long staccato hacks. When Zio Silvio knocked on the front door  to see how we were, I heard Rina shuffle to answer it in her robe and slippers. She asked him to drive down to the bar in Gaminella to telephone for the doctor. Marino was too ill for her to treat. As I coughed and coughed upstairs, trying to rest while the children napped and George snored, it occurred to me that the children were getting better, but we adults seemed to be getting worse. In my weakened state, I wondered morbidly what would happen to the children if we all died. It seemed I was assimilating the Italian penchant for the dramatic.

The doctor arrived the next morning. He diagnosed my father-in-law with bronchial pneumonia. Since Marino also had a bad heart, the coughing and the fever had stressed his entire system and had left him very weak. The doctor ordered him into the hospital in Casale immediately. Marino resisted, but Rina persuaded him that since the rest of us were ill, there was no one to care for him properly at home. He had no choice. George and Rina would drive him to the hospital that afternoon to make sure he was admitted.

After lunch we all trooped downstairs to see Marino off. He looked pale and drawn as he shuffled down the stone hallway to the front door, leaning on his walking stick. As I had noticed with George’s relatives in California, to older Italians, going to the hospital meant you were going to die. With tears in his eyes Marino kissed each of the children goodbye. I am certain he thought he would never see them again. The children were not sure what was going on, but they stayed suitably subdued as they watched him hobble out to the car in the light rain. Zio Silvio and Zio Remo stood by ready to help. After the brothers shook hands and exchanged quick hugs, George and Rina settled Marino into the back seat. We watched from the doorway as George drove slowly out of the courtyard. All three were coughing as they rounded the corner of the house. Upstairs, the children and I gathered at the window to watch through the drizzle as the car slowly wound its way down the hill, across the bridge, and into a fog bank.

Hospitals in Italy at that time were a far cry from the facilities we were used to in the States. We had visited Rina's brother-in-law in the same hospital a few weeks before. We were shocked. George’s job in California as a social worker had required many visits to L.A. County General Hospital. As crowded and run-down as conditions were in Los Angeles, he said it looked like a palace compared to the Italian hospital. The "wheel-chair" was a couple of pieces of wood sloppily hammered together on wheels. The long ward in which his uncle stayed was lined with beds, but no curtains for privacy. While not required, it was strongly suggested that a relative stay day and night to help each patient. There was no bed for this unpaid nursing help, just a chair, and they also had to provide the patient's bottled drinking water. At lunchtime, the kitchen staff rolled a big pot of soup down the center aisle. They doled out the same thing to each patient, without respect to dietary needs. If the patient wanted something else, the relative could bring it. The medical equipment looked 50 years behind the times, and to top it all off, we never saw a doctor actually touch a patient. Standing aloof in a suit and tie, they directed the nurse to perform the examination. They seemed to be afraid they would catch something. Maybe the older Italians had reason to worry.

As George and his parents drove into the city, they dreaded their arrival at the hospital.  When they got there they were even more dismayed to learn that, because of the flu epidemic, the only available bed was in a hallway. Since my in-laws were American citizens, they were charged the “foreigners” rate of $30 a day— exorbitantly expensive in 1972, especially for hallway accommodations.

With no other option, George and his mother allowed Marino to be admitted and helped him undress. Still coughing and exhausted themselves, they left him lying on his bed in the hallway and drove home.