E. R. Pronto!

Wind, wind and more wind. It beats around the house, rattles the panes and nerves and sets the teeth on edge. I am tired of the relentless, cruel wind; and again, my thoughts turn to a time in Italy where the wind also beat mercilessly about our daylight basement apartment in Northern Tuscany. Invariably, it seemed especially worse when I was doing the laundry outside.
I'm not sure if it was the wind and cold that caused a roaring sore throat in me then, but whatever caused it, it was the worst I'd ever experienced.  It was so bad I was sure I had strep throat and strep throat in a foreign country did not sound like a lot of fun.  Going to the hospitale sounded worse, but go to the hospitale, I did.  The experience ended up in my journal.
E. R. Pronto
It isn’t easy finding the Ospedale (Os pee dall ee) let alone the emergency room in Barga, Italy if you don’t read or speak Italian. We did finally find the hospital. And we thought we had found the emergency room too because we saw a sign with the icon of a man on it, an arrow and some Italian words--one which looked vaguely like emergency. But every time we followed the sign it led us out of whatever building we were in. After following those signs a couple of times we felt a lot like the Keystone Cops and gave up on it.
We decided to ask someone, who pointed in the direction of yet another building. We arrived at where they pointed but still didn’t see anything closely resembling an emergency room. With yet another inquiry and another person pointing to yet another sign, we finally saw the word Pronto; which is evidently their idea of emergency. (Incidentally, it is also the word used to answer the phone, and I am guessing it means “ready”.) However, I’m not sure the Italians know the meaning of the word!
One thing we did finally figure out was that the signs we followed at first were “Emergency Exit” signs. (That would explain it.)  At last, we arrived in a bleak hallway and were actually met by a fairly young, cute—very cute—Italian doctore. With glasses propped up on his head, a tanned face and wearing blue jeans, he looked more like an Italian beach bum than a doctor. However, he was wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope. He asked me how long I’d been sick, and I told him more than four days. He noted that if I’d been sick that long I was probably going to make it. I replied that I was counting on it—and him.

It went down hill from there. He looked in my throat (not so bad, he said), felt my glands...Now I am feeling your glands and they are not swollen...and at last took my temperature, which was normale—naturally.

He seemed excessively nervous and apologized an awful lot.  Obviously,he didn’t know where anything was and as he slammed one drawer after another, kept muttering under his breath:   I am sorry, please be patient, I can find nothing and I know it is completely ree-dic-u-lous.

I never could figure out what he was looking for, since I could tell he didn’t think I was very sick. None-the-less I am guessing it was a syringe because he said he wanted to take my blood. Suddenly, he yelled loudly in Italian for the nurse, who was in the next room.
It was all less than professional--so much so--that now I was really starting to feel sick and wondered:   #1 if they had a clean needle and # 2 if they knew how to draw blood at all.
He repeated again that my glands were normal, I had no fever and my throat didn’t look very bad. (What was he trying to tell me?)
Here I was practically slobbering on myself so I didn’t have to swallow, and the pain was keeping me awake at night! At the moment, I didn’t care if the month passed and I went nowhere but from the bed to the toilet, as long as I could curl up into a little ball and keep warm.

He suddenly announced he would take the blaud, and we would just have to wait until the results came back. In the meantime, there must have been 4 ambulances which came and went with sick people—all old. We waited....and waited...and waited. Finally, the results were in…”As I said, Madam, no infection.”

We went back to our little Italian home on the mountainside, and I started the antibiotics my family doctor sent with me, but which I hadn’t wanted to take without evidence of an infection. Within a few hours, my sore throat  began to recede.  Oh well, I guess it only took one day out of our month-long vacation...such is a day in dolce Tuscany.

~alla fine~

A Trip Down My Tuscan Memory Lane

Wind howls around my house in the early morning ink similar to the winds that plague Heathcliff’s eerie mansion in Wuthering Heights. It lashes at the windows in hungry blasts, an insatiable desire to blow our home off its moorings. I snuggle deeper into my down comforter, trying desperately to drown out its maniacal wailings, enabled by our home’s low slung porches.
If I didn’t know better I could almost imagine Catherine Earnshaw, that star-crossed lover of Wuthering Heights, appearing at my window, her little ice-cold spectral hand scratching to come in. I bury myself even deeper into my winter bedding trying to sleep. It’s no use. The North wind’s loud moaning only drives me further from it. Yet, I am loath to rise.

In that place--between half awake and half asleep--my thoughts turn to another time, where driving snows and howling winds relentlessly blew around our home and kept me awake. Ironically, that windy experience was just about the same time of year as now.
Could it possibly be two years ago  we were winging our way to Bella Tuscany for a month long retreat in Northern Italy? Granted, February in Barga, Italy isn’t exactly peak season--for the above mentioned reasons-- but that didn’t stop us! A note from my journal about the conditions then says it best now:

Tuscan Cold

And let me tell you, it can be damp and penetratingly cold to the marrow this time
of year. I had read the winds could be deceptively frigid but I didn’t really believe
it. After all, we were really pretty close to the Mediterranean and it was almost
March. However, the books I read talking about the weather were right! Though
we had heat, our lodgings were as cold as Klondike; yet outside daffodils and
various spring flowers were poking their sleepy little heads up through the decayed
humus. The nights were absolutely freezing, but the air was crisp and clear except
for the smoke from the continual burning, which came from the Chestnut log decks
strewn throughout the mountainous hillsides. I could see that wood cutting could
have been a full time occupation in these parts.

Many people heat with wood or solar and Pietro, our host, was a very frugal Italian and
no exception. Their entire place ran off those two heat sources except for the light bulbs.
He used the energy saving kind of bulbs and even still, it cost him 100 Euro a
month to run just those. The government only gave them 3 kilowatts worth of
electricity.
Needless to say, the country is pretty much a NO Appliance zone! I did
have a hair dryer provided, but I might have gotten more air by blowing through a
straw!! We have a washing machine but all our clothes go out on the drying
rack, which makes for a lot of ironing–luckily, an exception to the No Appliance
zone.
Actually, I didn’t mind hanging clothes out because the fresh earthy smell of air-
dried clothes made it all worth it. Besides, I loved traveling through the hillside
seeing so many brightly colored clothes flapping in the breeze like so many flags
hung in neat little rows off a tiny balcony. When I get home I intend to run a
clothesline in the little courtyard behind my bathroom at the new house...

Finally, I give up sleep like a worn out lover and go to my computer to pull up pictures of that time and that place. It seems only yesterday, as I gaze longingly at photo after photo, remembering fondly a most delightful month.

Hmmmmm, I'm thinking, surely this is the stuff of many more blogs!

And so, dear reader, won’t you please humor me today as I take a stroll along my Tuscan trail down memory lane? Here, I hope to weave in and out of my blogs over the course of time never- before-postings of pictures and snippets from my journal, “A Month in Italy”.

~the end...for now~