CHIAVARI,
Italy – Talked to my cousin Ginny the other day. We haven’t talked in a while
and just hearing her voice made me realize how much I miss her. We’ve
had some good times together, traveling around, getting into trouble, getting
out of trouble and laughing all the way. What I’ve posted today is a true tale
of just one adventure in my travels with Ginny. I hope you enjoy it.
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TRAVELS WITH GINNY - THE FOOT
The
date 16 August,1999 is burned on my brain. It is the day my cousin Ginny and I
were crossing rue Hotel du Poste in Nice, France when I fell and twisted my
ankle. As even in tragedies there are bits of fortune, mine is that we were not
far from the Lady of the Rocks Hospital, which is where I ended up.
I had never been in an emergency room anywhere and so my experience with such
things is limited to watching ER on television. Needless to say reality is
quite different from the fictionalized version. No George Clooney for one. Yes
there are doctors walking around, pouty French film types, but in my opinion
the entire ER department needs to have its blood pressure checked. If things
moved any slower we would have been at STOP. I want sirens to go off, or at the
very least a few bells and whistles, some signal that emergencies are coming in
and need to be treated, but the aura of calm is overwhelming.
Most of the emergencies appear to be motor scooter
accidents. One young man they roll in is covered with twigs and branches, his
face is scratched and bleeding and his jacket is a mess. He looks as if he has
been launched head first into a very large bush. Then there were the old people
who had apparently wandered away from where they were, forgot where they were
going, and now can't remember where they came from. The woman on the gurney
next to me is clutching three purses: a gold lamè evening bag, a large
cloth bag with a zippered closing, and a beige pleather bag with a long strap.
She also has a jacket with her even though it is in the mid 90’s and the
humidity is high. She is obviously a woman who prepares for every occasion.
They wheel me into a hallway and leave me there.
After a while, two hours to be exact, a doctor stopped by, wiggles my
foot and sends me to x-ray. The bad news is that I have indeed broken a
very, very small bone in my foot. A teeny tiny bone. A bone so insignificant there
isn't even a name for it.
Nonetheless I am whisked off to the cast department.
"Ooo la la, vat 'ave vee 'ere?" asks the round and
jolly cast person. Put your foot up like dees, ho kay? First we put this beige
sock with no toes, then this bright green bandage, ho kay? Hold eet,” she
says as she goes round and round with the bright green bandage, right up to my
knee.
“It’s too tight”, I wail.
“No, no, it's not too tight, it is just right."
As the green bandage hardens into stone, my toes begin to
puff up like blue Christmas tree ornaments.
"Now, we wrap eet all up with this beige and blue
stripe bandage, and voila! a little tape to finish the package and eet is
done!"
I hate it. It is hot. It is heavy. I feel as if a God in some far off
place in the universe wants to know more about the migratory patterns of
ex-pats in Italy and had me grabbed and tagged. Get this thing off my
leg.
“We have to go home,” I say to Ginny.
The next day with the vile green cast on my leg and shiny new crutches tucked
under my arm, we take a taxi to the Nice train station.
"Go to the Tourist Information Desk and ask them were we can get a wheel
chair,” I say to her. “There's no way I can hop up and down the stairs to the
tracks on crutches." So she does.
The
Tourist Information people send her to the Accuiel (Welcome) desk. The Accuiel
desk sends her to another Accuiel desk. The second Accuiel desk sends her to
yet another Accuiel desk, and when she finds herself in front of the Accuiel
desk she started from she throws up her
hands in true Italian fashion and says Basta. Enough.
In the meantime I am holding court with a family from
Montana who had never been to Europe before and were wondering how come there
are no bugs or flies here. Ginny finally comes back with a strapping young
Frenchman and a wheelchair. Ahhhh. Success. Off we go, he pushing me in the
wheelchair and poor cousin Ginny toting all the baggage like a foot weary train
station bell cap in an old Hollywood movie.
"You go down the stairs," the Frenchman says to
Ginny "and I'll meet you on the other side of the track and help you put
the luggage on the train."
Ginny takes one look at the stairs, one look at the luggage,
and opts to go with us thinking he must be heading for an elevator. But no,
instead we head for the very end of the train platform where the Frenchman
proceeds to push me across the tracks, clutching my crutches in my arms like a
shield. Just the thing to fend off a high speed TVG train that I'm convinced is
going to come whizzing around the corner at any second.
"Stop" I yell, "Help", as images
flash through my mind of my much loved and carefully cared for body parts
splattering from one end of the station to the other. Then I look over and see
poor Ginny, loaded down like an Mongolian packer crossing the Himalayas
following the best she can, bent over under the load of bags and suitcases that
are swaying to and fro and I shut up.
Finally settled on the train I ask the Italian conductor to
arrange for a wheel chair when we get to Milan. "No problem," he
says, "I'm getting off in Genoa so when the next conductor comes on, just
remind him."
When we arrive in Genoa and the new conductor comes on, I do
just that.
"Signora,
Signora, Signora," he clucks. "It
is all taken care of."
Fifteen minutes later he’s back. "My colleagues in
Milan want to know your name."
"My name? Are they afraid they won't recognize the
person with the bright green cast on her leg carrying crutches as the one who
needs a wheel chair?"
"Don't ask," he says.
I give him my Italian Identity Card and he reads my name
into his cell phone. “Thank goodness you have an Italian name,” he says, “if
you were German or Swedish they would have hung up on me.”
Once home, I'm stir crazy before the door even closes. Ginny
is leaving soon to go back to the States so she spends the next couple of days
running back and forth to the grocery store stocking my cupboard with stuff
like tuna fish, pasta, frozen veggies and water.
"That's what Nonna did during the War,” I tell her.
"Stock up on stuff”.
Banal conversation. What I really want to know is if the
current lust of my life, the dairy department stocker at the GS grocery store,
stares at her like he stares at me when I shop there. I finally get up
the nerve to ask.
"I don't think so," she says. "No one stared
at me."
I’m not convinced.
On my own after Ginny leaves, I rent a wheel chair. The elevator
in my apartment building is a tiny thing, so I have to shoehorn the wheel chair
into it, then squeeze myself in as well. But that turns out to be the least of
my problems. Once on the street I can't get the chair to go straight. It wants
to veer to the right. And while my street has wheel chair access, they are used
by motorists as access driveways to park on the sidewalk so they are crumbled
and broken up. What that means is once I get the chair down into the street,
I can't get back up to the sidewalk. It is a nightmare.
The cast is making me crazy. I hate it with all my
heart. I am afraid to go to sleep at night for fear it is cutting off my
circulation and a blood clot is forming and speeding straight for my brain and
I am convinced I am going to wake up dead. I decide to call Francesco, an
orthopedic surgeon I know, and ask if he would please come over and take a look
at the x-rays and take the cast off, for surely it is not an absolute
necessity.
He comes over that same night. The cast has to stay.
How long, I want to know.
Six weeks.
Six weeks! No relief from this hot itchy thing until
October? It’s inhumane. It’s excessive cruelty. It’s against every
international law on the books, it’s even against the Geneva Convention rules
on torture I whine.
"Phyllis, Phyllis, Phyllis, you are the worst patient I
have ever met," he says shaking his head as he walks out the door.
In spite of the trials and tribulations of that long hot
summer, I survived. Since then Ginny and I have gone on to many other
adventures, like the time we almost got washed overboard on a boat trip to the
Cinque Terre. But never mind, that's another story for another day. Besides,
from the conversation we had yesterday, I have a feeling there are more
adventures in our future, and I for one can't wait.
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