Pronto Soccorso (cont'd

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Eventually, the doctor showed up, spurring a flurry of Important Activity among our previously sedate nurses. He smiled and firmly shook hands with each of us twice and I began to explain the symptoms all over again. He nodded gravely, taking it all in, and asking a few questions.

When he asked if Jay had a fever, all of a sudden his face lit up as he remembered a medical word he knew in English. "Faren'eit" He exclaimed. "In inglese, Faren'eit, no?" Yes, I agreed, we Americans used the measurement and term of Farenheit, but Jay's Farenheit was doing just fine.

The doctor escorted Jay over to another chair (he looked distinctly relieved to be out of the old dentist's chair and away from those antique instruments), and proceeded to put some metal device in Jay's nose and begin cranking the nostril open. Jay later reported that this felt not good at all.

The doctor kept asking both Jay and me questions as he roughly examined Jay's head, tsk tsking the fact that Jay's left nostril is blocked from having been broken. Then he asked Jay to open his mouth and stick out his tongue.

The tongue stud made its appearance.

The doctor released Jay's jaw and jumped back. "What's that!?" The nurses gasped and the blonde one giggled, saying with glee "Ma, e` un piercing." "Un cosa?" asked the doctor, flummoxed. The Boh' nurse went out into the hall and returned with the loud, overweight nurse (cigaretteless now) and a fourth, never-before-seen nurse to come look at "il piercing." The blond nurse was meanwhile explaining the concept of piercing to the doctor, while the Boh' nurse and the never-before-seen nurse discussed the different parts of the body they had heard one could pierce, giggling at the ribald parts.

The doctor cupped his fingers together and bounced his hand questioningly as he turned to me "But how does he eat?" he asked me. "Mangiare bene," responded an amused Jay. Both of our original nurses turned to me "But did you ever ask him why he did it?" "Boh'" I replied. The loud, overweight nurse, having had her fill of staring at Jay's tongue, bustled out again as the doctor tried to figure out how to get around the stud in order to grab Jay's tongue with his gauze.

The doctor started asking about medicines, and I dutifully informed him that Jay is allergic to all forms of penicillin. Luckily, the doctor recognized the name of the antibiotic Jay said he's used effectively before, so he carefully wrote out a prescription, shook all our hands again, and strode majestically out of the room. Immediately, as if someone had stripped out their spines or flipped off a switch, the nurses went back to lounging against the tables in a bored but resigned fashion.

I asked were was a farmacia where we could get the prescription filled, and one pointed out the window for me across the dusty piazze and said "over there, behind that building." We thanked the blonde, Boh', and never-before-seen nurses and they smiled cheerily and sent us off with a chorus of "Ciao, ciao, ciao" and watched us leave, crossing the room ringed by the dusty extended families, down the scaffold-filled staircase, across the tree-lined drive of the hospital, and down the dirt-road city streets past bombed-out buildings to find an open farmacia and get started on our day in Palermo.

Copyright © 1998 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.