"Chi va piano, va sano, e va lontano"
---Those who take it easy live long and healthy.
Well, I should heed any Italian proverb that rhymes.
A series of back-straining activities, which sadly do not relate to my libido, had me taxi-delivered straight to the Italian emergency room this week (the "pronto soccorso", literally "ready relief").
Sure ... "relief" ... like the relief of explaining in another language what your pain is, how it got there, and why you're uncomfortable injecting yourself with medicine in your butt.
Do whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Lemme back up and explain...
Emergency rooms in Italy are (un)remarkably similar to American ERs ... people milling about with ambiguous maladies, TVs blasting poorly delivered soap operas (even if you can't understand them, you can still identify a lapse in creative dialogue writing), and hurried medical personnel who do not have time for your condition (and, more importantly, your lack of comprehension in Italian).
Still, there were the stereotypes of the culture that had to be represented in this thin slice of the Italian populace. There's the old lady dishing out sandwiches and pizza to her precious and helpless son (well, he is 40 after all), the young couple decked out in Italy's newest fashion trends (which exhaustively involve the color purple, and I find myself for the first time unintentionally ahead of the fashion curve ... oh, and Timberlands are REALLY huge here, as well), and the old couple sitting arm-in-arm heatedly discussing something that seems to merit grandiose gestures and sudden peaks in volume (probably the price of tomatoes, god only knows).
After checking in with the front desk and giving a run-down of my symptoms (which basically was an uncoordinated mishmash of broken Italian and wild gesturing that looked like an interpretive dance of The Passion of the Christ), I had to sit and wait for my name .... "Brrrrrrruuuus-eh, Dah-veed Weel-ee-ehm-ma" ... and the eyes of the pronto soccorso fixated themselves on a rather tragic figure-- all alone, no family, struggling to bend over and fetch his own coat.
Bless ... Italians can't miss a good show. They stare at you the same way children do in America- with unabashed curiosity. Only in this country there aren't fussy adults to remind them of their impertinence.
The doctor greeted me using formal Italian (which is somewhat surprising, considering my age with respect to hers ... perhaps she was merely pitying my condition as I painstakingly eased myself into a chair). In a flurry of verbose medicinal Italian, I eventually gathered she wanted to know what happened, and how she could help.
Before I knew it, I had my pants around my knees, laying face-down on a cot, with some random nurse injecting something into my ass. If the nurse had been male this could have been a very lovely Italian-fantasy, something complete with Nutella-flavored medicine and a dark, handsome doctor intent on getting to the bottom of this (wink), but alas ... I was scared shitless.
Off to X-Ray!!! Oh, it's a university hospital! Yay ... so the youngin-doctors probably had their first impromptu Charades challenge with me ... and I quickly interpreted that they were miming for me to disrobe and lay down sans pants underneath a machine that was older than both the students' and my age put together. Great.
It was one of those moments where all you really want is your mother. You suddenly realize that being 29, head-strong, and presumably independent boil down to nothing ... and you are 5-years-old again, needing a gentile head rub, and your mom's soothing reassurance. I got a little teary...
X-Ray was negative, so back to the first doctor I went.
The office was sterile and poorly lit, concrete with shades of light green and a lonely crucifix hanging on the wall. The doctor sat solemnly behind a small desk, and typed notes slowly into the computer with her left-index and right-middle fingers. She indicated that I would have to continue with the injections for the next four days.
"Wait ... what?? Is this something I can do myself? Like ... inject ... myself ...???"
The doctor said that this would be difficult. In fact, with someone's help, it was very easy to do. Just ask someone to give you a little poke on the top muscular part of the buttocks, and you're right as rain. She seemed confused that I didn't have this "someone" readily available.
The same puzzled look had come over the nurse's face when she originally called me back from the waiting room.
"Um ... Who else is here with you?"
"No one ... I'm here by myself..."
And so ... armed with syringes and tiny vials of god-knows-what for an aching back and tattered ego, what's a man supposed to do???
Simple- in this country, you would just ask your mother.
