AN ITALIAN IN HOSPITAL

Mr. Gattino should have surgery at his carotide on thursday morning 8 am. At 11.30 I called the intensive care unit to ask if everything went OK. A friendly voice informed me that they had no Mr. Gattino in their unit. I hang up and asked myself where could he be ? Did he escape from the hospital ? I was in my painting class and one of my classmates told me in a recomforting voice that her husband too had disappeared and they had found him in the parc sitting on a bank. But he had had a brain tumor and mine had disappeared with a brain in function. At least I supposed so. The girls told me not to worry and that probably he is still in the surgery room.

When I called the intensive care an hour later he was there and everything had gone well, the friendly voice even gave me a direct phone nr. I was a little puzzled that he had a phone at his disposal, in my imagination he was laying on a bed fully cabled from top to bottom. I called this nr in the afternoon and to my surprise he answered himself with a completely normal voice and told me that he was feeling well and that he had to stay there for 24 h.

When I called the next day he still was in intensive care. I couldn't even start to worry when he started to complain and pester against the whole medical world that he was still there after 24 h and that it was sooo boring ! He wanted to go up to his room. I told him to be patient and calm down. Never say that to somebody who has never been patient in his life ! He even suspected that somebody else had taken his room and that's why he couldn't leave intensive care ! After this conversation I knew that he was feeling very well !

An hour later I went to the hospital to be there when they brought him up to the 4th floor to his room. While I was reading a magazine in a little waiting room, I suddenly heard noices and then voices or rather only one voice, the opera voice of Mr. Gattino ! and then out of the elevator came the King or rather the Godfather sitting like a pasha in a wheelchair, connected with cables to a support with bottles and surrounded by 3 laughing nurses. The one who pushed the wheelchair pointed on him and said that he had complained that much that finally they gave up and were happy to get rid of him.

He looked better than before surgery and his only wish was to get settled in his room. I should have taken pictures. 2 nurses made the bed, the 3rd brought his personal belongings and all this while he was talking and laughing and making jokes. As he always talks with his hands, I anxiously watched the bottle and the cables but surprisingly they didn't get mingled up. If I had had fears to find a half dead husband, it really wasn't the case. When the nurses had left, he stood up and wanted to put his things himself in the closet, to know exactly where each thing was (instead of telling me where to put it) until I got angry because the bottles wiggled and the cables waggled and I was afraid that the whole thing would fall down.

Finally he was in his bed and waited eagerly that I leave, he wanted to watch Indiana Jones n° X on his portable DVD player.

I left exhausted ! Italians have the marvellous talent to make a comedy out of a tragedy !