There are people you want in a tight spot—and there are people you hope stay asleep till it’s all over.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
Last week, we went to the emergency room.
Last week, my friend contracted appendicitis, so we went to the emergency room.
Last week, my friend contracted appendicitis in Italy where I was the only member of our party who spoke any amount of Italian and also the only one who’d already had appendicitis, though five years ago and in a different country where I shared a native tongue with all the doctors and nursing staff, so we went to the emergency room.
I don’t stay calm in the case of emergency. When the surgeon came to me in Manassas with the diagnosis of my own appendicitis, I stopped her to say it was all right, she didn’t have to go on, that now I knew I was going to die and it must be a hard part of her job to have to tell people that, so she didn’t need to. Last month, when my son split his lip on our coffee table, I buried his face in my shoulder and speed-dialed my husband to call the doctor, or ambulance, or a United States military aeromedical helicopter—whichever he thought appropriate, because a part of me thought I might not be thinking clearly.
I was not born this way: I cut my head pretty badly as a kid, necessitating stitches, and the strongest memory I have of that night was the difficulty of deciding between the purple and red Tootsie Pops proffered to me for my bravery. All the same, I inherited it. My mom has a story about a time she had to call 9-1-1 for her father, who was suffering chest pains, but 9-1-1 told her there weren’t any available ambulances, so there wouldn’t be one coming. Growing up, I thought that was a story she told to scare us, like the way these days we read kids the story about the Elf of the Shelf, but it really happened. The day I found out, all my worst fears came to life, like if the Elf on the Shelf developed conscious thought, a functioning cardiovascular system and less than virtuous moral compass–and there was no 9-1-1 to telephone for help.
In Italy, we didn’t know it was an emergency, since my friend’s pain tolerance is apparently that of an igneous rock. For a few days we just thought his stomach hurt, though a part of him must have guessed, because he kept asking me how it felt when I had appendicitis, and I kept telling him not to worry because he would know if he had it. I’m only now realizing the magnitude of that lie. It’s funny, that when one of your organs is preparing to explode inside of you, it’s set to register as “could be diarrhea,” or “maybe it’s cramps.” When I had it, the first doctor I saw also failed to recognize the symptoms. She misdiagnosed me with a condition I couldn’t hear over the ringing escalating in my ears but was treated with a shot in a place I didn’t know they could legally give shots. It wasn’t till hours later, at the hospital doubled over a midsection that did then, indeed, feel to be on the brink of eruption, that I was X-rayed, then wrestled into a gas mask and onto the operating room table. From my friend, I found out that it could have been worse: For appendectomies, the Italians order you hairless navel to mid-thigh, which is something he told me more than one time. He was especially repetitive on the point of the nurses using single-blade razors and no shaving cream.
That first doctor billed me for $60, by the way. When I threatened to sue—tipsy on red wine, over Christmas dinner, and only to immediate family—my dad paid it.
I would like to be a more levelheaded person. The summer I was hired to work as a lifeguard, I was going to be so cool—so controlled, so in control, so CPR-certified. Instead I contracted mono in late May, and was zero parts cool about it. When I got pregnant I told myself I’d stay cool when my water broke; I had a specific fantasy about packing my bag and putting it in the car before waking my husband to drive to the hospital. That didn’t work out like I had planned, either. We don’t keep a gas mask at the house but it probably crossed my husband’s mind that night as something to look into.
As you might expect, he is an exceedingly cool person. The time we knew we were to miss an important international flight out of Paris and were seated separately on the shuttle belatedly bussing us to the airport, we weren’t halfway there before he turned and flashed me an Excel spreadsheet’s worth of backup travel itineraries. There was also a night before we met when a squirrel got into his house through the chimney and he chased it with a broom. His dogs, who did nothing to help, went down the road after it and he had to cut through his neighbors’ lawns at 2 o’clock in the morning. Then he retrieved the dogs, carried them home. They went back to bed.
All of this is to say I was the wrong person to be the only Italian speaker in an Italian emergency room’s waiting room.
For a long time, we weren’t sure they knew we were there, which feels about par for the course in an American emergency room. Italians, however, aren’t an evasive people. Unlike in France, where I was laughed out of a restaurant for not knowing the French words for various cuts of rooster, in Rome I once recited the alphabet in Italian and I’m pretty sure I’m mayor of Rome now.
Having come in through the wrong entrance, we’d been bustled past various wings and rows of machines that made 16 kinds of very small coffees. We were seated in hard plastic chairs and told to wait for an unspecified amount of time. The Italians, usually so eager to discuss paint drying, grass growing, or their own unfalteringly static approval of the pope, actively avoided eye contact. Very young and elderly people delivered by ambulance kept jumping in line. For a while that seemed reasonable, until it didn’t, when my friend’s eyes started to glaze over and I began desperately scanning the room for Tony Soprano types, or anyone amenable to making a quick buck in exchange for thinning out the herd.
Deep down, my friend and I knew my ability to order pizza and water in a restaurant was never going to prove helpful in talking about urine samples and white blood cell counts, but being able to speak a little bit of the language made me feel somehow responsible, like I should have been scanning the ingredients labels on all the foreign food he’d been eating.
Eventually I couldn’t take anymore. I stormed up to the intake desk with a broken diatribe about the whole country’s lack of professionalism and inattention to detail. The receptionist answered politely, in perfect English, and asked if we wouldn’t mind filling out the many detailed forms, all of them flawlessly translated for our benefit and convenience. She was gracious, which made it all so much worse.
“Tu parli bene italiano,” she said.
Thank you, I answered. I didn’t speak it so well, but was trying to learn, in case of emergency.
In case of emergency, @CitySprawlNVMag is on Twitter.
(September 2014)