This wild tale takes place approximately one week into our family vacation to Italy— one that we (I) had been dreaming about for months. Buckle in, it’s a doozy.
After spending the weekend in Genoa, enjoying the absolute best representation of pesto and visiting the city in which the kids’ grandpa grew up, we drove down the western coastline of Italy, headed to Piombino on the Tuscan coast. There, we caught a ferry that took us to Isola d’Elba, where in the little frazione of Cavo, I find that I’m always able to totally unwind and relax. One might say it’s my ‘Happy Place.’
The visit started like any other: opening up the house then heading to get dinner at Mistral, the local pizzeria. It was Sunday afternoon and this is the kids’ favorite restaurant, because the very first time they went, the servers gave them sparkly, streamer-topped straws. Not to mention that the pizza knives each had colorful handles and it became a fun activity to see what color they would receive with each visit. This time was no different and we all enjoyed our meal before heading to the Fabrizio’s gelato kiosk for dessert. La dolce vita…
Fast-forward to Tuesday, when we head to the next town over to do our big grocery shopping. While unloading the car around lunchtime, Luca looked a little pale and you can guess what happened next. We chalked it up to car sickness, thanks to the switchbacks on the road that led home. We didn’t think too much of it; we took it easy the rest of the day, made dinner at home and had family game night and he otherwise felt fine after that incident.
Wednesday rolled around and we headed down to our favorite pasticceria for breakfast before spending some time at the beach and unwinding. After a day in the sun, Luca said he wasn’t very hungry for dinner and was pretty tired so he went to rest. Our parental radar started to perk up, with suspicions that he caught a bug on the plane ride, or perhaps he is still adjusting to the time change and travel. Alessia and I headed downtown to get our evening gelato and on the way back up the hill, around 9:30, I got a text from the house that he got sick again.
Well crap.
I will spare you the details, but let’s just say that the next 7 hours were very much less than relaxing. The poor kid couldn’t get comfortable to sleep. Somehow, around 1:30 in the morning, he finally fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 10 the next morning. But this is where things took a turn.
When he finally awoke, he could barely sit up. He never complained of any specific pain, only that his stomach hurt, but this was when Dave started mentioning taking him to the next big town over, where there was a hospital. I remember staring at him with equal parts disbelief that a hospital was necessary and deference because I had no idea how to navigate the Italian healthcare system on a small island. But shortly before lunchtime we all loaded up in the rental car and began the 45-minute drive to Portoferraio where the nearest (i.e., only) pronto soccorso (ER) was.
We arrived without incident, but the hospital was on the top of a hillside with the parking below the slow incline, and the poor kid had to stop every few feet to sit on a cement roadblock that separated the street from the pedestrian zone. As we single-filed our way up to the entrance, a woman on a bicycle with a little basket in front rode by. She was wearing a peasant top and floaty skirt and it felt like something right out of an Italian movie. She rode past me, looking at Luca, and then stopped at Dave. I couldn’t hear much of the exchange, but she must have asked if Luca was all right because I could hear bits of Dave’s voice explain the situation. The next thing I know, she has told us to wait here and she will bring a wheelchair down… she’s happy to help, because she was a pediatric doctor getting ready to begin her shift! What!? She escorts us into the triage area of the ER where she downloaded the nurse on duty before disappearing behind some double doors.
We didn’t have to wait long for Luca’s name to be called and he and Dave wheeled behind the waiting room doors. Only one parent was allowed in, so best to send the one that spoke the language! Alessia and I hung out for a bit, waiting for any news. Dave shared bits and pieces as he could in between doctors and nurses coming in, including how they heard the patient’s name and began rattling off questions to Luca, in Italian. Dave had to explain that we were American and while Dave spoke a bit, Luca did not. To which the ER doctor replied (in English!) “No problem, I studied at UCLA so I can speak English to him.”
What?!? What are the odds?
They got his blood drawn and an IV in before sharing that all signs pointed to an appendicitis, though they were taking him for scans to be sure. While this went down, I took Alessia to get something to eat from the hospital bar (read: cafeteria). As she downed a small bag of Italian-style Cheetos, the sonogram wrapped and I got the text from Dave with the single diagnosis:
Appendix.
Several doctors were surrounding both Luca and the scan results and then began prepping for anesthesia. They weren’t messing around!
I finally called my parents, who I had been texting all the while but who hadn’t responded on account of it being the middle of the night in California. I think I startled my mom awake with the ringing phone and this was where I started to lose it, with all the emotion of the afternoon bubbling over. I got it together and promised to keep her apprised. As Alessia finished up, Dave texted that I had to come up and co-sign the surgical release forms. This was the first time I had seen Luca since he’d been wheeled back and I started to get teary again. The doctors told me not to cry, to be strong for Luca but honestly, that kid was pretty tough throughout the whole thing. He was exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before, along with the general rigamarole of the whole ordeal, but he did not complain much. He was stoic and had his brave face on, accompanied by half-hearted smiles.
I began to shift my focus back to the forms that were being explained to me and there was a momentary eyebrow raise on the staff’s part as I signed my married last name. It was at that exact moment that I learned that Italian women typically don’t take their husband’s name. I had no idea, but signing the same last name as my husband drew a funny look from some of the staff who were not familiar with the American custom. Had I not been sending my first born to surgery in a foreign country, one might have thought it was funny.
As we made our way to the OR, which was conveniently located across the hall from the Pedes unit, the surgical nurses swapped out Dave and me. They gowned me up in the OR prep area as Dave and Alessia sat in the waiting room and I got the full OR treatment: gown, booties and a hairnet-style hat. I walked up to Luca’s bedside, trying to distract from the fact that he was laying in a gurney, so I asked him how I looked. He stared slowly and I remember his tired voice telling me that I looked like a lunch lady, which prompted a good giggle from me and a half-smile from him. I wasn’t sure how long I was supposed to stay, so I just stood by his side, assuring him that when it was all said and done, he’d feel so much better and that he had unlimited amounts of Nintendo Switch time in his future (something on which we’d previously set a limit while vacationing).
Finally, the nurses took him back and I went out to sit with Dave and Alessia to wait. They told us it should be a routine procedure and probably take around 60-90 minutes. As we got ourselves situated in the waiting room, one of the Pedes nurses suggested that one of us go to the grocery store down the street to get some supplies. Giovanna, who I would come to know well, told us the hospital bar closed early so we should get a few things for our own dinner and suggested some things Luca would be allowed to have after the operation that he might prefer over hospital food (spoiler alert, it was juice boxes and granita). They would have a private room for him, along with a second hospital bed for whichever parent would stay tonight, along with a fridge/freezer at the end of the hall where we could keep anything we needed.
Honestly, the level of care from the whole staff was really incredible. A lot of people at home after the fact asked if I was ever nervous about my kid having surgery in a foreign country and truthfully, I was no more nervous had it taken place in America. Despite language barriers, doctors and anesthesiologists all came out to explain everything completely, as best they could in English, switching to Italian when necessary. That, combined with Dave’s level of Italian comprehension and the fact that we’re pretty sure kids are treated like royalty there, left us feeling like we got excellent care. While the nurses did not speak English, I got by with my language skills fairly well and felt comfortable enough to ask questions in Italian, with some Google translate mixed in when necessary.
As we waiting for the surgery to finish, we decided I would stay with Luca for the first night and we’d switch off in the morning. About 15 minutes in, I ran to the store to get a few items to munch on and it was then that this story takes another wild turn.
As I’m pulling my little wheelie basket through the aisle looking for a toothbrush, suddenly the walls of the grocery store begin to rumble and everyone is looking around and I start hearing mutterings of terremoto which is Italian for ‘earthquake’ so… yea.
Honestly. An earthquake during his surgery? You have got to be kidding me.
Dave sent me a text asking if I felt any shaking and said everyone in the hospital just looked at each other, confused. I quickly made my way back to the hospital where we compared the shaking feelings and tried to look it up online to find out the size. It had felt like at least a 4.0. As we tried to look for articles about the earthquake to take our mind off the fact that there was vigorous shaking while our kid was being operated on, we found news reports that it had been felt on the mainland in Piombino and beyond. More on this later…
Finally, after nearly two hours, surgeons came out to let us know the surgery had been successful. As they wheeled his gurney to the Pedes area, he was slowly coming out of the anesthesia and was definitely in pain. He was fixated on going home and kept asking to see Alessia (“I just want to see my sister…”) which nearly broke us. Dave went back into the recovery Pedes room to get him situated since Alessia wasn’t allowed back. They brought in the doctor to make sure there was nothing else to be done but got him on some pain medication and tried to make him comfortable. While the doctors had given us the post-op report more or less in English before Luca came out, they later told Dave in Italian that it was a good thing they had removed the appendix when they did. Once they began, they discovered a tiny puncture, only being held closed by a little flap and that it had been inflamed, all of which was probably easier explained in their native language than English (and probably best I didn’t hear it immediately upon seeing him post-op!)
While Dave and I figured out how to swap each other out for the the night, Giovanna, having seen the exchange when Luca first came out, quickly sneaked Alessia into Luca’s room so she could see him fast, before they left for the night. We got Luca calmed down and the pain meds kicked in, then they drove home. This was the start of Alessia’s three-day pizza binge, in which she got to go to Mistral three nights in a row. By this time, word had spread in our tiny frazione that Luca was in the hospital and I could not have been more grateful for all of local friends who checked on us to see if they could help. They were constantly checking in, even the owners of the pasticceria and the pizzeria asked how he was doing. Friends offered to take Alessia to the beach for some normalcy if both Dave and I wanted to be at the hospital and I know they all genuinely meant it when they said to let them know what they could do.
I began to settle in the room and Luca finally got some rest by the evening, but it was fitful. There was a lot of post-op checking, which meant I woke up to nurses adjusting saline drips and administering pain meds. Not to mention that Luca woke up from time to time so we watched a lot of Avatar the Last Airbender and Transformers on the iPad.
Through the evening, our night nurse, Monica, would pop in. Monica was from Cavo and would share ocean facts about the sea around Elba with Luca (with a little translation help from mom), including telling him about the posidonia, which is a plant responsible for forming underwater meadows and helping to protect the coastline from erosion.
Around lunchtime the next day, Luca was feeling a little better and Dave and Alessia returned. After we swapped, I took her to the outdoor market in Portoferraio for a quick shopping trip before catching the ferry home. With a few bags of produce and new sun hats in hand, we caught the ferry back to Cavo. The ferry seemed like an easier method of travel, since it was a 15 minute ride, as opposed to driving the winding roads for 45 minutes. I got us our tickets and we hopped on the ferry. I was drained, desperately wanted to shower and the heat was taking it out of me. Which is why it was incredibly unfortunately that, when we disembarked at the terminal in Cavo, Alessia told me she had forgotten her sunglasses on the ferry. I asked the attendant if we could get back on to get them (in Italian, which might have been my mistake) and he let us both back on board. Upon retrieval, imagine my surprise when I looked up to exit and saw us pulling away from shore, headed to the mainland, 45 minutes away.
I lost it. As I held Alessia’s hand, arm full of bags of produce, I let loose the big tears. The poor guy did not know what to do with me. I choked up and apologized… in broken Italian I overshared, explaining that I was returning to Cavo from my son’s surgery in Portferraio and I was just tired. The poor people on the ferry kept asking, “signora, tutto bene?” as I sniffled through my lowered sunglasses. By the time we hit the port in Piombino, the other 5-10 passengers in our general vicinity were all trying to tell me it would be ok. Alessia just hunkered down in my lap as I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault and it was just an accident but it was going to be ok.
As we disembarked (with all possessions this time), the attendant told me to find him for the next ride back to Cavo in an hour and he would let us on without another ticket. I thanked him profusely and we went to have a snack in the bar of the Piombino ferry terminal before we finally made it home. It was a long day, in which I earned that pizza and gelato for dinner.
I got the nightshift again on Saturday night, which worked out well because Luca got to go home on Sunday. This meant Dave could bring the car on Sunday morning instead of relying on the ferry. Giovanna was working Sunday morning and while we waiting for the doctor to come do a final exam, clearing him for release, Giovanna reminded me that it was Sunday and that sometimes things move a bit slower. If I really wanted to go home, I had to, ahem, ask “frequently and loudly”… if I caught her drift. “Hai capito?” (Do you understand?) she asked me, to see if I knew how to read between the lines, so I nodding back knowingly, and with a wink she went off to find the doctor. The whole exchange was just another example of how great the care team was, making sure we got what we needed.
Honestly, I really cannot say enough about the whole staff at Ospedale Civile Elba. Even our Pedes doctor who escorted us when we first arrived came to check in the next day. Not only did they take great care of Luca, but the whole staff made sure we were all comfortable as well. Luca’s surgery had been on a Thursday afternoon and his team made sure he had three square meals delivered to him (though his dieta leggera was less than pleasing to him, with all the bland, easy-on-the-system offerings) and all the post-op checks from the nursing staff were so appreciated. All this meant that much more when Dave told me after the fact that when the .
He was told he had to take it easy and no swimming in the sea (but sea glass hunting was totally acceptable). He was also supposed to eat lightly for the next month (!!) which meant no more pizza or ice cream, but we interpreted that advice as don’t eat the whole pizza and maybe just one small scoop and not a two flavors of gelato.
Prior to all of this, Luca’s one request had been to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so we made sure to make a special stop on our way mack to Mila before flying home. It was a memorable, if not eventful, vacation indeed.
Oh, and remember how I mentioned that earthquake during his surgery? Well, after Tuscany’s regional government president initially said it was an earthquake, he backtracked after Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology ruled it out.
So what caused the shaking?
The University of Florence said, “The hypothesis of a meteorite entering the atmosphere seems most likely and matches the recorded data.”
I can’t even…
Let’s hope next trip is a little more uneventful!
