Recently our trip to Italy included, naturally, a lot of food. Most of it was worth writing about and definitely worth your taking time to read about. Let’s start by saying the euro exchange was not in our favor when we went to Europe. Therefore, almost every single thing in Italy is expensive.
Let’s begin with Nancy’s hospital stay. It lasted 12 days. This is practically unheard of in Italy. By the way, Italy is the second healthiest country in the world. There are many reasons for this that I may or may not go into later. We’ll see. Anyway, since Italy has socialized medicine, the average stay is 3 days. You arrive, they cure you, and you go home. That’s the whole story: in, fixed, out, end of story. More about people’s reactions to Nancy’s long stay in yet another blog. Anyway, Nan’s in the hospital. The hospital is new, clean, and well-staffed. Each room has 4 beds, and therefore has 4 patients. They shared a bathroom and shower with an adjoining room and four other women. But, back to the food. A little comparison; we live in Titusville and our local hospital is Parrish Medical Center (PMC). At PMC you get a menu when you check in. When you’re hungry, you take your menu any time between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and you place your order. The kitchen checks your order against your doctor’s nutrition orders and if no changes need to be made, within a half hour you receive your food. You can order breakfast, lunch and dinner this way. Now, Nan is in an Italian hospital and things are done a little differently there. Breakfast comes at the same time each day. If you’re there, fine. If for some reason you’re not – well that’s just tough. If it’s still there when you return, you could eat it cold. Breakfast consists of a large bowl of coffee-milk and one biscotti. Lunch and dinner are served at the same time each day; again, if you’re there great, if not - well tough. Lunch consisted of a large portion of spinach. Yes, spinach: not creamed, not seasoned, not with lemon, not with anything – just spinach as it comes naked from the boiling pot. Included is a very, and I mean very, small piece of mystery meat and two extremely thin (wrapped) bread sticks. Dinner is virtually the same. The main dish is spinach. Spinach is served each and every lunch and dinner for days until they run out of it. They don’t seem to ever run out of it. Nancy, thank heavens, is not a picky eater and will eat almost anything. There were NO evening snacks of any kind. Once dinner was gone, eating was all over for that day. If you hid a bread stick or two, you could have an evening snack.
So, Nan was in the hospital for an extremely bad asthma/bronchitis bout. In order to save her from possible death from another bad asthma attack, they had to give her steroids. The steroids would affect her kidney disease and possibly cause kidney failure. They had to be very careful. They gave her steroids for as only as long as they felt it was safe. When you are given steroids, they do clear up your asthma but steroids do affect your diabetes. They cause your blood sugar to go sky high, and I mean sky high. Her blood sugar was in the upper 600 range. This is very dangerous. So, now they had taken care of the asthma/bronchitis and in doing so caused a more serious problem, the sky-high blood sugar. Nancy had seven doctors, - more on that in another blog. They tried everything, day after day. No luck, they couldn’t get it down at all. This was the reason she was in the hospital so long. Finally, out of desperation, they tried one last thing.
One morning, seven or so days into her stay, breakfast was served. The lady across from her received a tray, likewise the woman next to her, as well as the women across from Nan. Nan watched and waited. They trays were served; the kitchen worker left. Nan had no breakfast. The nurse arrived, patted Nan’s arm and in her broken English said something about her not getting breakfast, but would get lunch. Okay, that was okay. She could live without breakfast. Lunch arrived, the woman across got her tray, the woman next to her got her tray, and the woman on the other side got her tray. Nancy did not get a tray. The same nurse arrived, patted her arm and again said, “Dinner.” Two meals down, and no food in site. Dinner arrived. Do I need to go on? The lady across from her and the ones on either side of her all got trays, Nancy still did not. Another nurse arrived, came to Nan and patted her and said, “BREAKFAST.” Do we see a pattern forming here? Now, let’s remember this is an Italian hospital and, believe it or not, they speak Italian! So we had a little language problem along with everything else. Finally the doctor arrived with an interpreter. Seems they had tried everything they could collectively think of to get her sugar down, and nothing worked, so they decided the only thing left to try was the NO FOOD diet. How long this was going to last they didn’t know. Probably a few days.
Three days went by, everyone in the room ate, and Nancy did not. A nurse did arrive to pat her arm, three times a day. Now, Nan can be sneaky. She had been hoarding her bread sticks and had them hidden in her night table drawer. She had been eating one or two in the evening when snacks weren’t available. So when the food service stopped she still had 2 or 3 breadsticks tucked away. Who knew there was a Breadstick Gestapo in this hospital? She charged into the room, went directly to Nancy’s bed, looked right in her draw, grabbed the contraband breadsticks and shook her arm and hand that was holding the breadsticks at Nancy as she said something menacing in Italian to Nan all the way out the door. Goodbye any sustenance.
I might add that even after three days of starvation – this to did not work. They gave up and fed her.
Now along with the lone vegetable of the week for lunch and dinner, they served her a kind of what we thought might be ‘soup’. We weren’t quite sure, because it was a dirty brown liquid. Nothing in it – just dirty brown water. She drank it nevertheless!
One day after several days of this mystery liquid, I came in and she was sooo animated, so excited, that I thought she had been told she was going home. But no, she informed me in a most excited way that she had “A NOODLE IN HER SOUP!” I couldn’t speak; I thought she was having a psychotic episode. “WHAT?” I asked. Again, as excited as can be, she once again explained, “THERE WAS A NOODLE IN MY SOUP TODAY!!” “A noodle?” I asked. “Yes, yes,” she said, “a noodle.” There was only one noodle, but it was there. I cut it up into very small pieces and ate it slowly.” I just looked at her and decided to go out and find the doctor and have him commit her to the psychiatric area of the hospital. I was only hoping there was a psychiatric area in this hospital. To this day, I can’t help but still laugh hysterically when in my mind I recall the picture of how excited she was over this noodle. And people think that I’m the nut!
Now, let me tell you about my experiences in that same hospital. I would go and visit around lunchtime or a little later. Downstairs on the first floor was a deli. It served patients, medical personnel, visitors, everyone. I mentioned that everyone spoke Italian, did I not? Okay, I had no idea how this ordering to get food worked. So I just plowed in. I went to the deli case to see what was available. There were many types of sandwiches and wraps. Upon closer look, I saw that each and every sandwich contained some kind of ham. I DO NOT EAT HAM. There was ham in heroes, in wraps, in buns, in white bread. Ham, ham, ham as far as the eye could see – HAM! I looked and looked and finally saw something in the back that looked a little red; I thought it was salami. That’s what I ordered. After taking several minutes trying to figure out how to pay for this thing, I finally got it straight and got my sandwich.
Not knowing any Italian words for mayo, mustard or any such thing, I took the sandwich, found a seat and took off the top piece of bread only to find that it was not salami – it was, in fact, HAM, and a small piece of red pepper. I paid 7 euro for this thing, which was about $9.73 U.S! Upon further examination, this sandwich that cost almost $10 consisted of: two pieces of white bread, one thin slice of some sort of white cheese, and two slices of the dreaded HAM. Now these two slices of ham were sliced sooooo thin that together, together, you could read the New York Times through them. The whole sandwich wasn’t even one inch thick and cost me ten bucks. I ate it, I didn’t like it, I didn’t enjoy it, and it cost me $10, but I did eat it. And I ate a similar sandwich every single day that Nan remained in the hospital. Finally two days before she was discharged, I figured out how to get some mayo.
Should a similar occasion come to pass, please, remind me to never eat at that deli again!!
