Racing through Oxygen, Roads, Medicine, Time

When things aren’t going well, it’s logical to think that they could only get better. The post on last Monday recognized the day’s difficulty but professed that “tomorrow would be another day.” And so it was. But that day Niko didn’t get any better either, still had a fever, and then, Wednesday night, around 11:45pm, alternated the barking cough of croup with wheezy inhalations, and it wasn’t going away. Tomorrow was another day, but not exactly in the way we were hoping. He’d had croup before, but this time was much worse than any other and our attempts to calm it at home were not working. Niko wasn’t getting enough air. 

            I’ve become a more aggressive driver over here, but at that time of night there were few other motorists to challenge my path. Suddenly very focused, we sped to the hospital in about six minutes when during the day it would take fifteen to twenty. We rushed right into the ER and the little boy was quickly given an oxygen mask with adrenaline. Of their six categories of severity he was put on the next to highest.

            I don’t want to dwell too long on that night, or on the fact that he has stayed sick for quite a few days after that, too, or that on the following Friday I got hit with the flu after a couple of weeks with a sinus infection. We set up a visit to Rome awhile ago and so it’s been a countdown to see if Niko and I can get better enough fast enough to make the trip, now two days away. I continue to be impressed with our pediatrician, who during Niko’s latest checkup to gauge the progress of his lungs also listened to my own health story and wrote me a prescription! Che bello!

             More and more tourists are visiting Lucca these days, the weather is getting sunnier and warmer, magnolias are in bloom and the pollution seems less oppressive than in the winter. So much to see and do and our time left is drawing short. We always would say, “oh, we’ve got plenty of time to do X,Y,Z”  but now, with three months to go, we realize that we can’t do everything, that our time is limited and choices must be made. In Italy for a year without visiting Rome? It would be a bit strange. So here we go, to the capital, possibly to return with plenty of stories and pictures to post. Isn’t it fascinating, as the sun sets, wondering in what ways “tomorrow will be another day?” Anything is possible.

Monday

My dream faded as I became aware of the morning. Had I been punched in the face? Had too much to drink the night before? I risked a quick glance from under my eyelids and saw that the crack of light that usually escaped from our otherwise room-darkening internal wooden shutters wasn’t yet present. A yawn and slight body stretch. No, nothing broken. I turned onto my back. A heavy head, but I then remembered that no, no alcohol was consumed the night before. I reached over to push the button that backlit my watch. Five o’clock. For the next couple of hours I lay there, awake, and aware of the slow start to my Monday.

            If you’ve ever lived in a foreign country, chances are good that at a few points along the way you experienced some resistance to your new culture, some sense of, say. . . exasperation. But even if you haven’t, I would venture a guess that all of us have had those days where, although there are no catastrophes or seriously life-changing events, everything seems to go wrong. Like Monday.

            Nikolai had been home sick for three days with a high fever and we were starting to feel the effects of worrying about our little guy and caring for him. Once more Monday morning the thermometer read 40.2 C, and again he was listless and clingy and didn’t have an appetite. We kept trying to call the doctor but apparently she was going to be on the evening shift. She was our third pediatrician since October and this was something like Nikolai’s eleventh health issue that had kept him home from school. All told he’s missed half of school since mid-September and on Monday it was immediately apparent that another home day it would be.

            At various other times this year I’ve had my moments of perversely enjoying the necessity of waiting in endless lines only to then have to wait in another endless line, realizing in that and other situations such as getting jostled repeatedly in a crowd or getting cut time after time in less formal lines (and what was a line, anyway?) that that’s just how things happen here, that I was experiencing but a couple of the so-called cultural differences and somehow getting a first-hand view into a different way of perceiving and acting in situations which I, as an American, had a different way of perceiving and acting in. It was all quite fascinating.

            On Monday, however, I had no such perspective, and it’s probably a good thing I waited to write this until Tuesday.

            Italy is expensive. Lucca, at least, is no cheap place to live, as we were finding out more and more. I’d learned to avoid translating euros to dollars after a couple months of incredulity, but even in euros our costs looked sky high. Monday morning, after we got back from a trip to the post office to pick up a package and were charged sixty-five euros just to take the package (which bore its own hefty postage from the US), I happened to notice a slip of paper in the entry way with the letterhead of Niko’s school. Another notice of payment due for his lunch, and of course it was in euros but for some reason I quickly reverted to my currency translation ways and calculated that his barely eaten meals had amounted to one-hundred twenty five dollars this month besides the enormous sum we’d already paid for his year at this institution when all of the public schools said they were full back in August. Oh, and we were late to pay again. I found a line in the letter that seemed to refer to us, in bold and underlined, saying that parents need to get in the fee on time.

            That Monday wasn’t just about Niko being sick, either. I was feeling draggy and hyper at the same time, and directionless, so many plans and projects to work on but unable to start any, my various knee and hip problems bothering me more than usual, the incessant pounding and rumbling of motors from the construction site next door driving me insane. Finally, in mid-afternoon, I decided I needed a break and told Lauren I was going to head for a jaunt on my bike down by the river.

            Before leaving I decided to check my e-mail. I should’ve known better. Another notice from Niko’s school! This time they were also requiring payment, but now above and beyond what I had dreamed of. This time it would be one-hundred fifty dollars because the heating company determined that they went above their allotted amount for the winter and per Article X Number 123 they were passing on the cost to the parents. Another bill I hadn’t looked at peaked out from under the computer. It was our very own energy bill for just over two months. After looking at the figure, I knew that at all costs I had to get out of the house for some exercise. While we don’t keep the house baking hot we admittedly haven’t gone the Italian way of suffering as long as possible before starting to heat the house, of using hot water bottles at night to allow house temperatures in the low 50s F, of wearing three sweaters during the day. So now we would pay for keeping this high-ceilinged house warm enough so we didn’t shiver to the tune of twenty-five hundred dollars. Yes, you read that correctly.

            I had about an hour before the pediatrician would start her office hours at four, when we would bring Niko in to see if he had something more serious than a bout of the flu. Out on the bike, weaving around traffic, I eventually made my way to the Serchio. Go to the right and follow a paved path (which it turns out is actually a very narrow road with no shoulder) or go to the left on the dirt/crushed stone path. Yes, you guessed correctly, I went left. Sure, it was a bit bumpy, but there were no cars. Although my hip still hurt to turn the pedals, and my knee wasn’t much better, I think I started to feel my forehead relax, started momentarily to forget about Niko being sick, to stop wondering if this time it was something worse than the Scarlet Fever, Strep Throat, several day Diarrhea,Vomiting episodes, or Asthma complications he’s already had here. I was inching—rolling—towards relaxation. But boy, it sure was bumpy, and especially from the rear. After a few more seconds I looked back at the tire. Sure enough, I had a flat. After removing the rear wheel, unseating the tire and removing the tube, I began searching for the puncture and eventually found it, the result of a thorn from a bush that was still sticking through the tire casing. I patched the hole and attempted to inflate the tire once more but my frame pump from twenty years ago just wasn’t cooperating. A man passed on the trail with his little dog, nodding to me and smiling, saying something about getting stranded himself. A couple of kids walking with their grandparents and dog glanced in my direction and headed away. I tried this and that before remembering about Niko and seeing that I would already be late. After forty or so minutes in an operation I normally could take care of in ten I had the wheel back on and the tire pumped up and ready to go. The man with the dog walked back past me and said I should stick to the road, that this path had lots of thorns. I thanked him for the advice, readied to mount my bike, and saw that the tire had become flat again. Out of cement and patches now and without a decent pump, I was stuck.

            When I eventually made it home, it turned out that Lauren had gotten in touch with the doctor, who said to come by at 7:30pm. We got Niko in his footy-pajamas, brushed teeth, and headed out. There were several people ahead of us at the Pediatricians, but when we came in our doctor indicated for us to sit right outside her office. Maybe since we’d called we would get to go right in at 7:30pm, going in front of the others who were already waiting? We heard snatches of conversation from inside, several times increasing volume in the way that would make you think they were wrapping things up, here’s the prescription, take the drops two times a day for five days… Finally, when the door did open, the doctor ushered in another family, and so on. One hour later we were finally admitted to her office.

           

          Thankfully on off days there is always the next day to look forward to, and sometimes it’s even possible to admit to oneself that absolutely everything on that off day wasn’t so horrible after all. I couldn’t, for example, close without saying that those grandparents, out for a walk with their grandchildren and dog, had returned from their journey and saw me walking my bike down the nearest road. The grandpa was also a cyclist, he explained, though he said he didn’t do it too much anymore. I explained what had happened, that I’d already patched it once but that apparently the tube had more holes and that my pump was nearly shot. He told me to relax, that he lived just down the road. It would be okay. The eight year old boy and five year old girl were extremely interested in this man who spoke in a funny accent that their grandpa was helping, the girl stealing glances now and then, the boy asking his grandpa about the bike I was wheeling and recounting his own experiences with bikes. When we got to their house and I’d taken off the wheel and extracted the tube again the grandpa offered me one of his own, first checking it for holes in a tub of water. In the ensuing re-mounting and pumping up of the tire he literally pushed me out of the way at times so he could try his own methods. By that point in my turn of fortune, though, I’d recovered enough to recognize it just as his way of action, gestures completely normal that would probably go unnoticed by any Italian. When I profusely thanked him he brushed it off and laughed, saying that of course he would do that, that it was completely normal, that I must be joking to offer him so much thanks. I also couldn’t go without saying that this Pediatrician, this third one, is a great doctor and spends enough time with each of her patients, which does mean longer wait times but much-needed attention once you do get in her office. Niko has seen her a few times now and says, “I like that Doctor!” And, somehow, she has refused payment for her services every time we’ve gone. By the time we got in to see her Niko’s fever had gone down and he was joking around, bouncing on and off my lap. She checked lungs, ears, throat, and concluded it was just a bout of the flu and that he should be better by tomorrow and if not to bring him right back. 

       It had been one of those days and I looked forward to resting my head on the pillow and pulling the covers up, looked forward to a solid night of sleep and the dawn of a new day but by that point, I had to admit, things weren’t so bad after all here in Lucca. Bills would eventually get paid, Niko would eventually recover, and we still had three months of new days, each one holding its own set of situations—not ones we always planned or hoped for, but ones from which we would surely continue to learn.   

Sounds, Smells and Soapsuds

         When I started this blog I didn’t have a clear idea of its audience. Would it be directed towards family? Family and Friends? Any cyber-surfer who happened upon it? As it took shape I opted for all of the above. I would put in photos of us and details to make it worthwhile for family and friends but also include something in each post that anyone might be able to relate to such as, for instance, what we all encounter at times dealing with our home.

         We found a house with a giardino just outside Lucca’s walls whose rent closely approximated what our tenants would be paying back in New Hampshire. Already we felt lucky since most housing around here is in the form of small apartments and rare is the yard for the kids to play in. Another factor going for this house was its location: close to the walls and historic center but also in a residential neighborhood with a pizzeria, bar/gelateria, bakery, butcher’s and bike shop all within a five minute walk and, in tourist season, safely removed from the crowds.

          Built roughly one hundred years ago and, like most dwellings around here constructed primarily of concrete blocks and plastered walls with rounded orange tiles on the roof, the house fits in with the neighboring apartment complexes and houses. From the outside you’ll notice narrow, tall windows with functioning green shutters to close when you’re away, when it’s storming, or in the summer during most of the day to keep the sun from roasting everyone inside. The double wooden doors at each entrance also reach quite high and, when both are open, provide a berth wide enough for even the largest friend or piece of furniture to enter or exit the premises.

         The first thing we noticed upon entering the house were the tall ceilings, two of which featured paintings of flowered borders framing an idyllic country girl carrying a bundle of grapes or a literal cornucopia from the harvest. The floors were all tiled or some sort of stone, lending a sonorous reverberation to our speech. There were the enormous bookshelves with glass doors, some antique desks, the tiny kitchen. It was all a bit disorienting coming from a low-ceilinged smaller house made mostly of wood. It seemed very different but also exciting, new, foreign. A home that would surely work splendidly for our family for the year.

        After some time in a place you begin to see its drawbacks though, no matter how great it may appear at first. We heard our every footstep on the hard floors. The reverberations of our voices became loud echoes and, while making the harmonica sound less like a toy and more like an instrument, turned the kids’ fights into World War III. Our location also happened to be one hundred meters from a train track and fifty meters from a busy roundabout connecting the main route to the highway and the city’s periphery road. Getting accustomed to the cars passing and honking took a couple of months while getting used to the daily stream of busses and semis changing their gears, braking, rumbling and shaking the house, that took about four or five.

         Then there was the sewer gas. Mainly it came from the upstairs bathroom on the floor where our bedrooms are located. The stench ranged from tolerable as long as you weren’t there too long to nauseating. Its source was hard to pinpoint, but the time it started all of a sudden while I was cleaning up after a workout the answer was clear. The shower drain. Pleads around town for help and advice were mostly answered by, “it’s like that here” or “I have the same problem”. I believed them at first, wondering how they could possibly live like that. Surely Italians had at least as capable an olfactory sense as did I, if not much, much more acute given their acumen and acclaim for gustatory pleasures. I went ahead and bought all of the chemicals they advised me to dump down the drains, dumped diligently and hoped for the best. But no lemon-scented ammonia, no liquid plumber, no WC NET Professional Scarichi Domestici con agenti biologici (mint scented!) would finish off the stench so easily.

         We called the plumber. He took a look and said it would be too hard to fix, that it was simply like that (at least according to my comprehension level of Italian in August). Were we just spoiled Americans to want to be able to breathe freely in our home? Maybe it was just something we’d have to grow accustomed to if we didn’t want to cut our sabbatical short and leave the country. We resigned ourselves to the maliferous odor. The days and weeks went by, we tried not to spend too much time upstairs (besides those rather important hours spent in bed every night), we tried to ignore it.

         It became more and more apparent to me, however, as another month or two passed and my frustration level grew that this was not just a simple “bad smell” problem, but that there had to be something fundamentally wrong with the system. This had occurred to me back in July, of course, but after the plumber had said there was no fix and everyone else had admitted that that was just how it was I’d backed off and tried to accept it. After awhile though, that just wasn’t going to be good enough. I had to do something.

         Three months had gone by since his first visit before we finally got the plumber to come back. I showed him some diagrams on how a plumbing system should work. He agreed that that would be the best system, ideally. He and his partner were joined by two others who set up a scaffolding two stories high outside and set about chipping into the wall. Soon they had exposed the piping and drain of the shower, (which, surprise surprise, had no trap). After another jaunt up into the attic the plumbers confirmed that there was in fact no vent stack for the house either. So my suspicions were confirmed: we’d been inhaling noxious gasses for four months. Having said that, it is true that we probably wouldn’t have so appreciated having normal air to breathe in the house had we not had foul air first (okay, perhaps I'm trying a little too hard with that attempt at looking at the bright side...). You’d think that here in Italy, birthplace to the concept and implementation of plumbing, houses would all be equipped with such technical innovations as the vent stack and the ‘S’ bend (trap) in drains. Apparently not. Over the next few days the teams worked together drilling a hole through the ceiling and roof, setting up the vent and installing a trap. The next day—finally! finally!—the stench had been staunched and set free to travel up through the sky, never to return again.

         Then there were the suds. In a future post I’ll write about the wonder of bicycles here in Lucca but in the meantime I will tell you that after five months we’d finally had it, not so much with having to bike everywhere as with not having a car. It just so happened that on Sunday night I was doing the dishes, thinking about what to pack for my train ride to Nice the next day where I would be leasing a Peugeot for the next 175 days (our plan had been to buy a used car here in Italy but we later found out we don’t have the right to do that as non European Union citizens and as temporary residents here in Italy). The owner of the house stopped by to pick up a few possessions from the basement and my wife took the opportunity to point out where a leak had sprung from the washing machine. The owner took the machine apart and started trying to fix it when I heard the loudest and most terrified screams from our son I’d ever heard before. The kid can be loud when he wants to and we’ve heard uncountable cries and rages in his nearly five years, but I swear, this one topped them all. Oh, and I should probably confess where we’d left him while we were in the basement working on the washing machine leak. Yes parents, you guessed it. The bathtub.

        

          The day before Niko had discovered how to make the bubble bath infinitely more bubbly and so much did he revel in his bubbly, soapy world that we didn’t think twice about letting him run the jets to give him his suds. On the night in question, though, after Niko had tired of the jets apparently he ventured to turn them off himself (a button easily reachable from inside the tub). We pieced together later that upon doing so the jets did stop but with a terrible crash, something instantly burst and the water and bubbles rushed immediately out from both somewhere underneath the tub and over the top onto the bathroom floor and out into the hallway, bringing with it a purging of the contents of the drain (not pretty). Niko was terrified and scampered out of the tub and into the hallway, which is where I found him, naked with soap suds all over, screaming for his life, and when I’d wrapped a towel around him and picked him up all he could say amidst his sobs was, “I wanna go back to New Hampshire, let’s go back to New Hampshire, I don’t like it here! Let’s go home!” We later set about opening the tub. The owner called the plumber to come take a look and see if he can fix the tub (he’ll be here after Christmas).

One minute before leaving home in New Hampshire for home in Lucca

     We are very fortunate to have this home and it will do just fine for us during our year in Lucca. There’s no denying that we do look forward to the day we’ll be back in New Hampshire in our cozy home near the woods and lake. In many ways, however, life at home in Tuscany really isn’t quite so different as back in New England. No matter where you go, the roof may spring a leak, the lights may go out, but eventually routines settle back in and life goes on. In the meantime, until the plumber comes to save us again, the kids will be taking showers.