Listen, I'm as big a homebody as a person can be. Working in my home office all day, every day, never going out except on weekends. That's my idea of wrap-yourself-up-in-a-Snuggie comfort. I didn't have to be exactly force-marched on a three-month-long world trip, but sort of. And, you know, I've enjoyed it after all. Maybe because we've changed our schedule to have longer, homier stays at fewer places in Europe: Amsterdam, Prague, Orvieto. Orvieto, where we have an actual studio apartment, is the homiest of all. I could live here. Really. I've started to nest.
So, the concept of a house call just suits my clothes.
After I'd been a housebound homebody here for three days, though, it was obvious that none of the elixirs, powders, pills, and suspensions that local pharmacists had sold us was having any effect whatsoever on my volcanic bowels. Neither the pharmacists nor the printed Italian instructions were clear about how many times and under what circumstances one should take them. Our neighbor in the next apartment, who spoke a bit of English, helped translate some of the instructions. But his interpretation contradicted everything else we had thought. Do you take three or six, after eating or before, how many hours after or before, in what combinations? The most soothing and uncomplicated cure of all was the hot-tea-with-lemon home remedy that our landlady, Valentina, swore by: "The, how you say it, opposite of sweet, you know? Kills the bacteria."
Have I said enough times that Valentina is an angel who walks the earth?
She offered to move us from the apartment to her B&B, to be closer to me, to help me. She stopped by to make sure I was still alive, bringing lemons for my tea. She extended our stay when it became clear I couldn't make it down off the volcanic butte that is Orvieto unless I purchased Depends for the trip. And judging from the expressions on some of the old women here, they probably don't even have Depends in Italy. She insisted that I call her if I felt I needed a doctor. She would even try to get her doctor to come on a Sunday. On a Sunday. Good God.
We settled on Monday as the day for the doctor's visit. Valentina said that he would come "around lunchtime--oh, 1 or 1:30--and I will accompany him"--to translate. Bill, who was by now used to being out fetching medicines for me, decided instead to stay, to provide yet another reading of what was said. Between Bill, the doctor, and Valentina, I felt so confident that we'd get an answer that I, of course, began to feel better. I wondered if I should trump up a few symptoms to justify the visit, but even my fever vanished overnight.
The next day, as the late lunchtime approached, I began to wonder if Italian doctors might be like Sears appliance deliverymen, whose three-hour windows usually mean the latest possible hour. How mean-spirited of me. Valentina and il dottore, a fifty-ish gentleman in suit and moustache, appeared at exactly the appointed hour.
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| Not him, but this is the look. |
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| This actually is him. He was at one time very active in, if not in charge of, the local basketball club, so now I know he was palpating my belly like a basketball. |
After a series of friendly but efficient "ciaos" and "buon giornos" all around, he swiftly determined that I didn't have a fever, took my pulse, palpated my distended belly as if testing a basketball, listened to its gurglings with a stethoscope, and made some detailed and rapid pronouncements in Italian. I gathered that I had either diverticulitis, several bulging tumors, peritonitis, or a rare amoebic dysentery curable only by weeks in a locked Italian hospital, tended by sisters in winged hats.
"Virale," he said, and began writing out a scrip, which he handed to Valentina for translation.
I trotted out all of my medicines to show him, and he indicated, in Italian, "Only this one." I'd been taking it, but too much and at entirely the wrong time. All the others went in the trash.
"Should she eat?" Bill asked. I knew this would come up sooner or later. He'd been waiting for this. The previous day, I had stubbornly sipped only bowls of brodo (broth), fearing that food would only make things worse. Bill kept insisting, "You have to eat!" I kept putting my foot down and rushing to the bathroom.
The consummate Italian, the doctor beamed and rose to this occasion with delight. "Pasta!" he exclaimed. "Riso! Pollo! Pesce!"
"How about brodo?" I suggested meekly.
"Oh, no, no, no, no! That make worse!"
Later on, when our maid Carmen came to clean, we doped out enough Italian and English between us for her to tell me that her son has the same virus, but worse, and that it goes away in four days anyhow.
Next time I'm this sick, screw Medicare. I'm flying to Italy. I've got a home here.
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