730 in the morning.
It’s difficult to tell what kind of day it is because we’re in a corridor with opaque glass walls on one side that only show that it’s not light yet.
My father and I are experiencing all those institutional doubts you have when you’re confronted with a new system. There are already a few old hands here who show us where the ticket machine is (and before that, where the door is to get into the corridor in the first place). I sit us down where I can see both ends of the corridor and hear whatever’s being said. My father’s doubts are probably being simultaneously heightened by his lack of language and lowered by it because all he can do is depend on me (but maybe that’s another heightening factor). And mine are off the scale of human uncertainty because I know he’s relying on me to get things done.
I’m not sure my children expect me to get things done really; they know they’re safe with me but they don’t expect action. And here I am with my father totally expectant.
Numbers are being called out but they don’t bear any relation to the numbers on the board at the top end of the corridor near the consultation rooms.
We’re 61. I can’t tell if they just called 54 or 64. It’s 745 – I can’t have fucked up already. I ask the woman next to me. It was 54. We get to 61 without my nerves exploding. It’s 750 and there’s light outside. The red numbers on the board haven’t changed at all.
The nurse asks for our entry forms and I give her the set of papers that we’ve accumulated over the last three days and they’re miserably dissimilar to everyone else’s. The nurse taking the blood thinks we must correspond to a specimen bottle with a foreign name that she has in front of her. It’s not us. They call the head nurse. She tells them what they have to do, including writing out the labels by hand. They look stunned but they get on with it. They tell us to go and sit back down in the corridor and wait for our number for the different tests.
At 800 I start to realise that there is a system and how it might work. I don’t explain it to my father in case I’m wrong.
I read Valentina’s notes, written last night over grappa, over and over. But there’s no description of a system here and I try to rewrite them in my notebook to get them to correspond to what I’m seeing. There’s too much love in Valentina’s notes to fit in with this reality. Her notes have been written thinking about me, her little foreigner, in a hospital with his father but that’s not what I am now, that’s not how this system sees me at all.
Everyone is here for exactly the same reason: pre-admission to hospital for surgery (it’s actually printed on a few A4 sheets stuck to the corridor walls). Of the 20 people here, 15 are over retirement age. There’s a South American woman with a 3 month old baby; two thirty-something women; two twentyish men – the rest are all struggling to move around to a greater or lesser degree.
The tall, emaciated nurse with piles of bright red dyed hair and ring-covered fingers was checking that everyone’s paperwork was in order – she was doing the class register. With everyone present and correct the day could begin. The numbers for samples started to click through. Once those had started moving, the numbers for cardiac tests started clicking through. The numbers for the anaesthetist stayed exactly where they had been when we first sat down.
So, basically, we’re all moving from one test to another, regulated by the numbers on the board. If it really is like this, then it’s quite straightforward. If… I feel reassured but that reassurance is tempered by the certainty that nothing here in Italy is ever that straightforward. I start to think of where the complications could arise.
The nurse doing the blood test speaks to my father in English.
-Roll your sleeve up. Yes, good, like that. Where do you come from? Where in England? Oh, I go on holiday to Scotland.
-Well, I hope you enjoy it.
-Yes, Dover and then Aberdeen and Skye and Glasgow and London and Dover. Two weeks.
-I’m sure you’ll have a smashing time.
The only mistake she made was missing an irregular past simple form. She didn’t seem to notice. Neither did my father – he just go and misunderstand her.
Then the cardiogram. (After watching the numbers ticking and people struggling with the drinks machine – too much choice.)
One nurse having spoken English to him, my father assumes that all the nurses speak fluent English (albeit misunderstanding him).
-I’m supposed to be on holiday you know. And look what they’ve made me do.
-Sì, però io non capisco.
The real communication problem here is that he doesn’t understand that she doesn’t understand.
She tells us to wait outside for a moment, not to go back to the corridor. I think we’re disappointed: the corridor is becoming quite comforting; nothing can really happen in the corridor; all your energy is concentrated on the numbers, not the reason you have a number in the first place.
The head nurse tells us that we have to go for a chest x-ray. Another nurse takes us down to the basement and points us out to a lady in a reception office. We’re bumped up the queue by dint of not having to register our papers with the lady.
We listen to the nurse in charge of the x-ray rooms bossing the patients around. He’s like a package holiday tour representative. Everyone is doing something that they would prefer not to and they’re not really being as cooperative as they might. In fact, they seem rather British to me. This nurse has a tone of voice that makes everything seem as if it’s going to be the biggest laugh you’ve had all day. But he doesn’t give you long to have your laugh and once you’ve had it, you’re out and your way back to your previous existence, devoid of all this fun.
I can’t go into the x-ray room and so I leave my father to go in announcing his Englishness.
Don’t worry about that, says the tour rep, I can speak English. He would.
And then we’re back in the corridor watching the anaesthetist’s numbers click through, irregularly. This x-ray stuff has unoiled the system. People don’t manage to get back to the safety of the corridor smoothly. They get lost. They go out to smoke, to make phone calls, to get coffees from a bar with a person rather than a machine. And so the anaesthetist leaps erratically from one number to another.
61 comes up quickly and we go for the interview. The doctor must have nursery school-age children because she’s got the same cough that Giacomo and Davide and all their schoolmates have had. And which most of their parents now have. The first days back at school are an unhealthy experience for parents.
She understands most of my father’s responses to her questions, apparently. I remember at the last moment that he’s diabetic. We don’t know how much he weighs in kilos and we can’t calculate it. Anyway, it’s bound to be wrong because he’s lost an enormous amount of weight in the last two years. Why is he still giving his weight from two years ago?
She tells us to go back to the corridor and wait for the surgeon.
The minutes pass. Everyone is back together again in our little community. But seeing the surgeon seems to be a very slow process. They don’t even put the numbers on the board for this stage. My current tension is that we have a knee x-ray back in the basement with the tour guide in half an hour. With most of the half hour gone and only one person seen by the surgeon I go to ask permission to leave the corridor from the nurse. It’s granted.
I’m confident here because we’ve got the same pieces of paper (roughly) that everyone else had. We even have a slip signed by the head of the orthopaedic department. The young woman starts entering our details on the computer.
-What country is it?
-England. Britain. UK.
-Tax code.
-He doesn’t have one. He’s not Italian.
The computer system doesn’t allow you to continue your data entry without a tax code. They ring a manager who suggests inventing one. They give up and tell us to go for the x-ray. By the time we get the results, they think they’ll have sorted out the data entry problem.
We queue for the x-ray. A man arrives studying a bus ticket.
-What time does it say on this?
-1040.
-And what time is it now?
-1135.
-And how long is the ticket valid for?
-75 minutes.
-So if I get back on in 20 minutes I can go home with this?
He gets called in for his x-ray. When they dismiss him, he’s still in time. Although I think the journey has to be completed within 75 minutes.
Back in the corridor most of the people have gone and almost as soon as we sit down we’re called by the surgeon. He looks extremely relaxed and cheerful. He’s going to tell us about the surgery and its possible results so that we can sign the consent form. He describes the actual operation. We already knew that. I then have to tell my father that he won’t be able to have an erection any more and that he’ll be sterile and unable to have any children. I describe in quite a lot of detail the catheter that he’ll have immediately after the operation rather than dwell on how I won’t have any more brothers or sisters.
He gives us the details of the admission day. Valentina’s family friend arrives and gives us more detail and goes through the test results. They check the blood that’s still passing out of my father’s new silicon catheter isn’t coagulating. Drink more water, they suggest.
Everything is now sorted and we can go. Outside is sunny and warm, like 730 in the corridor never happened.
It’s difficult to tell what kind of day it is because we’re in a corridor with opaque glass walls on one side that only show that it’s not light yet.
My father and I are experiencing all those institutional doubts you have when you’re confronted with a new system. There are already a few old hands here who show us where the ticket machine is (and before that, where the door is to get into the corridor in the first place). I sit us down where I can see both ends of the corridor and hear whatever’s being said. My father’s doubts are probably being simultaneously heightened by his lack of language and lowered by it because all he can do is depend on me (but maybe that’s another heightening factor). And mine are off the scale of human uncertainty because I know he’s relying on me to get things done.
I’m not sure my children expect me to get things done really; they know they’re safe with me but they don’t expect action. And here I am with my father totally expectant.
Numbers are being called out but they don’t bear any relation to the numbers on the board at the top end of the corridor near the consultation rooms.
We’re 61. I can’t tell if they just called 54 or 64. It’s 745 – I can’t have fucked up already. I ask the woman next to me. It was 54. We get to 61 without my nerves exploding. It’s 750 and there’s light outside. The red numbers on the board haven’t changed at all.
The nurse asks for our entry forms and I give her the set of papers that we’ve accumulated over the last three days and they’re miserably dissimilar to everyone else’s. The nurse taking the blood thinks we must correspond to a specimen bottle with a foreign name that she has in front of her. It’s not us. They call the head nurse. She tells them what they have to do, including writing out the labels by hand. They look stunned but they get on with it. They tell us to go and sit back down in the corridor and wait for our number for the different tests.
At 800 I start to realise that there is a system and how it might work. I don’t explain it to my father in case I’m wrong.
I read Valentina’s notes, written last night over grappa, over and over. But there’s no description of a system here and I try to rewrite them in my notebook to get them to correspond to what I’m seeing. There’s too much love in Valentina’s notes to fit in with this reality. Her notes have been written thinking about me, her little foreigner, in a hospital with his father but that’s not what I am now, that’s not how this system sees me at all.
Everyone is here for exactly the same reason: pre-admission to hospital for surgery (it’s actually printed on a few A4 sheets stuck to the corridor walls). Of the 20 people here, 15 are over retirement age. There’s a South American woman with a 3 month old baby; two thirty-something women; two twentyish men – the rest are all struggling to move around to a greater or lesser degree.
The tall, emaciated nurse with piles of bright red dyed hair and ring-covered fingers was checking that everyone’s paperwork was in order – she was doing the class register. With everyone present and correct the day could begin. The numbers for samples started to click through. Once those had started moving, the numbers for cardiac tests started clicking through. The numbers for the anaesthetist stayed exactly where they had been when we first sat down.
So, basically, we’re all moving from one test to another, regulated by the numbers on the board. If it really is like this, then it’s quite straightforward. If… I feel reassured but that reassurance is tempered by the certainty that nothing here in Italy is ever that straightforward. I start to think of where the complications could arise.
The nurse doing the blood test speaks to my father in English.
-Roll your sleeve up. Yes, good, like that. Where do you come from? Where in England? Oh, I go on holiday to Scotland.
-Well, I hope you enjoy it.
-Yes, Dover and then Aberdeen and Skye and Glasgow and London and Dover. Two weeks.
-I’m sure you’ll have a smashing time.
The only mistake she made was missing an irregular past simple form. She didn’t seem to notice. Neither did my father – he just go and misunderstand her.
Then the cardiogram. (After watching the numbers ticking and people struggling with the drinks machine – too much choice.)
One nurse having spoken English to him, my father assumes that all the nurses speak fluent English (albeit misunderstanding him).
-I’m supposed to be on holiday you know. And look what they’ve made me do.
-Sì, però io non capisco.
The real communication problem here is that he doesn’t understand that she doesn’t understand.
She tells us to wait outside for a moment, not to go back to the corridor. I think we’re disappointed: the corridor is becoming quite comforting; nothing can really happen in the corridor; all your energy is concentrated on the numbers, not the reason you have a number in the first place.
The head nurse tells us that we have to go for a chest x-ray. Another nurse takes us down to the basement and points us out to a lady in a reception office. We’re bumped up the queue by dint of not having to register our papers with the lady.
We listen to the nurse in charge of the x-ray rooms bossing the patients around. He’s like a package holiday tour representative. Everyone is doing something that they would prefer not to and they’re not really being as cooperative as they might. In fact, they seem rather British to me. This nurse has a tone of voice that makes everything seem as if it’s going to be the biggest laugh you’ve had all day. But he doesn’t give you long to have your laugh and once you’ve had it, you’re out and your way back to your previous existence, devoid of all this fun.
I can’t go into the x-ray room and so I leave my father to go in announcing his Englishness.
Don’t worry about that, says the tour rep, I can speak English. He would.
And then we’re back in the corridor watching the anaesthetist’s numbers click through, irregularly. This x-ray stuff has unoiled the system. People don’t manage to get back to the safety of the corridor smoothly. They get lost. They go out to smoke, to make phone calls, to get coffees from a bar with a person rather than a machine. And so the anaesthetist leaps erratically from one number to another.
61 comes up quickly and we go for the interview. The doctor must have nursery school-age children because she’s got the same cough that Giacomo and Davide and all their schoolmates have had. And which most of their parents now have. The first days back at school are an unhealthy experience for parents.
She understands most of my father’s responses to her questions, apparently. I remember at the last moment that he’s diabetic. We don’t know how much he weighs in kilos and we can’t calculate it. Anyway, it’s bound to be wrong because he’s lost an enormous amount of weight in the last two years. Why is he still giving his weight from two years ago?
She tells us to go back to the corridor and wait for the surgeon.
The minutes pass. Everyone is back together again in our little community. But seeing the surgeon seems to be a very slow process. They don’t even put the numbers on the board for this stage. My current tension is that we have a knee x-ray back in the basement with the tour guide in half an hour. With most of the half hour gone and only one person seen by the surgeon I go to ask permission to leave the corridor from the nurse. It’s granted.
I’m confident here because we’ve got the same pieces of paper (roughly) that everyone else had. We even have a slip signed by the head of the orthopaedic department. The young woman starts entering our details on the computer.
-What country is it?
-England. Britain. UK.
-Tax code.
-He doesn’t have one. He’s not Italian.
The computer system doesn’t allow you to continue your data entry without a tax code. They ring a manager who suggests inventing one. They give up and tell us to go for the x-ray. By the time we get the results, they think they’ll have sorted out the data entry problem.
We queue for the x-ray. A man arrives studying a bus ticket.
-What time does it say on this?
-1040.
-And what time is it now?
-1135.
-And how long is the ticket valid for?
-75 minutes.
-So if I get back on in 20 minutes I can go home with this?
He gets called in for his x-ray. When they dismiss him, he’s still in time. Although I think the journey has to be completed within 75 minutes.
Back in the corridor most of the people have gone and almost as soon as we sit down we’re called by the surgeon. He looks extremely relaxed and cheerful. He’s going to tell us about the surgery and its possible results so that we can sign the consent form. He describes the actual operation. We already knew that. I then have to tell my father that he won’t be able to have an erection any more and that he’ll be sterile and unable to have any children. I describe in quite a lot of detail the catheter that he’ll have immediately after the operation rather than dwell on how I won’t have any more brothers or sisters.
He gives us the details of the admission day. Valentina’s family friend arrives and gives us more detail and goes through the test results. They check the blood that’s still passing out of my father’s new silicon catheter isn’t coagulating. Drink more water, they suggest.
Everything is now sorted and we can go. Outside is sunny and warm, like 730 in the corridor never happened.
