Seventeen
ARRIVAL - JULY 17, 1988
It was early in the morning when my friend Krissy ran to get help. Since arriving in Italy a few weeks earlier, I had struggled with extreme fatigue and a low grade fever. The weekend before, my fever spiked during an excursion to Florence, but settled back down the next day. I was seventeen, studying abroad for the first time with a group of older college students from the State University of New York - Stonybrook. This was the trip of a lifetime. At first, the energy of my enthusiasm was brighter than the brain fog and far outweighed the strength being sucked from me by a mysterious illness that I refused to acknowledge. I never let on that something was wrong, or that I knew I was getting worse.
When Krissy returned to our room, I was unresponsive. She had been unable to wake me for breakfast and noticed the skin on my face was pale and yellow. I was only wearing a t-shirt and underwear when two men entered our room and helped me get out of the bed. Krissy found some shorts for me to put on and the next thing I knew I was in a taxi. Carlo Mazarese, one of the professors who was also my high school Italian teacher, gave the cab driver instructions, while the other professor had his arm around me. My teeth felt furry, my face greasy. There was no time to prepare or say goodbye.
I don’t recall much of anything between the taxi ride and the diagnosis at the hospital. I have no memory of our arrival or the examination, but I do remember the hallway near the admissions desk. The floors were white marble. The hall was quiet. The furniture was basic and sparse and there was a peculiar odor lingering in the air. It would be the last time I would see the admissions desk before being quietly escorted to the second floor room that I would share with two strangers.
My diagnosis: Mononucleosi infettiva. Epatite. Milza ingrossata. (Infectious mononucleosis, hepatitis and enlarged spleen.) I had clearly been infected prior to my departure from the States. Probably months before and the virus had insidiously progressed to my liver and other organs. Flying home, the doctors in Rome and back home agreed, was not an option. The possibility of a ruptured spleen on an international flight was deemed too dangerous. Instead, I would spend the remainder of my summer abroad experience alone at the Ospedale of San Carlo di Nancy in Rome, being treated until it was considered safe enough for me to board a plane. The decision to admit me and experience that followed changed me and my view of the world.
DAY ONE - TEETH
My room was located on the right side of the building. I would learn later that it was designated the ‘liver ward’ and that I was, by far, the youngest person on the floor. The narrow room included three beds, and mine was in the middle. I guessed the woman closest to the window was probably in her forties. Her hands were placed neatly at her sides, her brown hair was long and messy. She was asleep when I first arrived and she was asleep the day I left - I never once remember her waking up during my entire stay. On the bed in the corner, closest to the door, was an older woman, easily in her seventies or eighties. Her wide, crooked smile caught my attention, as she struggled to sit upright in her bed. She welcomed me, waving her arms towards the bed next to her, and she began joking with the staff. I could not understand her, and then I noticed a set of teeth sitting in a glass of water on the table next to her.
Across from the row of beds were three tall metal lockers, just like those we had in school. The staff pointed to the middle locker and asked me, in Italian, if I had anything I wanted to place inside. I didn’t even have my purse. After turning back the sheets of the empty bed and helping me in, the staff person left. My professors approached me and assured me that everything was going to be fine. They would contact my family and fill them in, then send over a classmate with some of my personal things. The campus was only a few miles away from the hospital.
After they left, I allowed myself to relax into the pillow and look around the room. Was this a dream? The tall window was wide open, and a warm, humid breeze pushed its way inside. It was mid-July in the city of Rome and there was no air conditioning. The woman on my right continued to sleep peacefully - completely undisturbed. The woman on my left was staring at me, smiling. Questions - she had so many questions, only my two years of Italian and her missing teeth were not enough to help me understand her dialect. In the far corner of the room, next to the window, was a small, white porcelain sink. The floor, I noticed, was the same white marble from the hallway where I was admitted. The door to our room was open and I could hear voices and squeaky shoes. The aroma of a hot lunch slowly became stronger and soon a nun dressed in a full habit arrived pushing a cart.
She pointed to the small square table with three chairs that was directly in front of my bed and encouraged me to sit there. The old woman pushed her teeth into her mouth before climbing out of bed and walking slowly over to the table. I noticed through her nightgown that she was short and frail, and she was clearly excited to have company at a meal. The other woman continued to sleep. The nun spooned pasta with tomato sauce onto a plate. A piece of meat. A roll. A piece of fresh fruit. The cart moved onto the next room and I sat eating in silence, being watched by a cheerful old woman.
DAY TWO - YELLOW FEATHERS
The sun was barely peeking through the window when I noticed a different nun was standing over me, tapping my hand and indicating that it was time to get up - that I had somewhere to go. Confused and disoriented, I pulled back the sheets and let my feet dangle off the side of the bed. The nun now looked confused, pointing to my bare legs and continuing to insist that I get out of bed. She opened my locker, which was still empty. My friends at the University had not yet visited with my personal things. I stood there, in the same t-shirt and underwear I had worn as pajamas back on campus. The nun looked me up and down, shaking her head and mumbling to herself.
She then opened the locker next to mine - the one that I assumed belonged to the woman who never woke up. She quickly pulled out a robe and threw it over my shoulders before I could protest. “Put it on, quickly!” she said in Italian. “We must go!”
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I was hurried down the hall where a line of patients stood waiting. I looked down and saw that I was swaddled in a banana-yellow satin robe with yellow feathers adorning the collar. This cannot actually be happening right now, I thought. This must be a dream… But, it was not. I was, in fact, wearing a stranger’s banana-yellow satin robe with yellow feathers. The old man standing in front of me turned around with a curious, but furrowed brow. I grimaced, arms folded tightly in front of me trying to cover my neon-yellow self.
After a while, I could see what was taking place down the hall. Each of us were being escorted individually into a room for a test. I watched as each person, one by one, walked in. Eventually, it was my turn. I felt as if I was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and wondered if my whole walking skeleton could be seen by the technicians. The test, it turns out, was a cardiogram - and every new patient would receive one the first morning after admission.
When I returned to my room, breakfast had already been served and mine was waiting for me on the table. The woman near the window was still asleep, so I quietly opened her locker and returned the yellow robe. The old woman laughed and indicated there was no need to be quiet - that nothing would wake her up. Just then, the nun returned - chastising me for not owning proper sleeping attire. I put on my shorts, sat down for breakfast, and hoped that my classmates would soon arrive with a change of clothes and an escape plan.
DAY FIVE - PIETRO
The first several days I remained in a haze, partially brought on by the virus and partially by the stifling heat that invaded my room by mid-afternoon. Each morning, a small team of doctors would visit. None of them spoke English, but each of them had the bedside manner of an old friend. Their examinations weren’t rushed, especially when the time came for them to try and explain what they were observing and what the next steps would be.
It was around day four when I was informed that my symptoms were worsening instead of improving - and the doctors were concerned. I don’t recall how I came to know this, but in reviewing my diary entries it is clear I fully understood what was being relayed. My throat burned and felt nearly swollen shut, my fever persisted, my body was a heavy carcass. I was unable to stay awake during the day and even slept through some meals. Each afternoon, around two o’clock, I noticed the sheets under me would be soaked through with sweat. Although the shower was located across the hall, I couldn’t pull together the strength to use it. My hair felt heavy and sticky and visits from friends were anticipated with a blend of joy and embarrassment.
Soon, I began receiving I.V. treatments and twice-a-day injections. This was in addition to three oral medications I was taking every eight hours. I didn’t know what was being pumped into me and I didn’t care. I knew my academic experience and sightseeing in Italy would end here. This was my new classroom.
Without television or radio, my mind was allowed to wander without a path for hours at a time. It was hard to believe that just a few weeks before this I had taken full advantage of the local social life taking place in the surrounding neighborhood. The bar inside the hotel where our school was located always had a thriving mix of local teens, international students and tourists. It was shortly after I arrived in Rome that I made the acquaintance of Antonio and Alessandro, the hotel's two baristas who were roughly my age. Alessandro was tall and timid, with a small scar above his upper lip and a noticeable lisp when he spoke. Antonio was a smidge shorter, with friendly eyes and a boisterous personality. At one point, he introduced me to his friend - Pietro. He had come to visit Antonio at work and we struck up a simple conversation at the bar during a break from class. Later that week, Pietro invited me to take a walk around the property. This was an ideal opportunity to practice my Italian, I thought, but I found myself distracted by the canopy of oddly shaped pine trees overhead and the high-pitched zip of motorbikes in the distance. This place was so different than home. As we were walking, Pietro stopped and picked up a pinecone from the ground. He pulled off a few of the brown, woody scales and picked out a few of the seeds.
“Have you ever had pignoli?” he asked - tossing one of the seeds in his mouth.
Pignoli? Does he mean pinoli? Those tiny, aromatic nuts I’d seen sprinkled on Italian pastries? He took a step closer, opened my hand and placed a few in my palm. As I lifted my head to look up at the tree above us, I was surprised to simultaneously discover the actual origin of pine nuts and how delightfully clever, and successful, young Italian men could be in their efforts to steal a kiss.
A few days after this, I was gone. Pietro accompanied my friends to the hospital. He approached my bed, confused and concerned, and he tried to understand why I was there. I did my best to explain my illness - and then, reluctantly, how it could be transmitted through kissing.
The old woman sat perched in her bed, watching our conversation like a soap opera. She didn’t say a word, but it was obvious she was enjoying the scene. Pietro visited frequently, sometimes bringing a friend of his, sometimes bringing me flowers. One day, the nurses allowed him to take me for a walk outside in the hospital garden. The pace was slow, as I balanced myself between his arm and my I.V. pole. It felt good to walk and to notice new things, to be visited, to giggle.
While Pietro never tried to kiss me again, he continued to come by. Looking back, I think we were both equally enamored with the process of trying to communicate. Perhaps we also felt unexpectedly important. We were teenagers from different cultures, speaking different languages, before the advent of today’s technology. The simple adrenaline rush of in-person awkwardness and the hormones of youth were enough to keep us coming back for more.
DAY SEVEN - THE SHOWER
Most days my routine was the same. It began with a handsome nurse named Massimiliano operatically singing my name as he walked through the door at dawn. Half asleep, I would reluctantly roll over, pulling down my underwear to receive my first injection of the day. I remember describing them to my parents as ‘elephant shots’ - the size of the syringe seemed more in line with what should be used on a large, wild animal. Some mornings, he would twist a towel tightly and jokingly whip me on the butt just as the needle was about to be inserted - a method of distraction. I can’t smell too awful if this cute nurse is willing to flirt with me, I thought.
Then, the team of doctors would come for my daily examination. Then, breakfast. I remember a moment when I was brushing my teeth at the small porcelain sink across from the woman who never woke up. My mouth filled with foam, I walked up to her and took a close look at her face, wondering how on earth she was even still alive. She looked so healthy. Between my first meal of the day and my second, there was always a long pause. As I began to regain my strength, I found myself sleeping less and using the time to sit and observe - the sounds, the smells, the voices. I would write in my journal while the old woman would try to engage me in conversation. She never had any visitors, and as hard as I tried I could barely understand her questions.
Lunch would come followed by the mid-day heat wave. I discovered that if I pulled back the sheets for an hour or so, and sat elsewhere in the room, the sweat would evaporate from them and I would have a dry bed to sleep in at night. So, I moved the third chair from our shared table (the one that was never used by the sleeping woman) over to the window of our room.
Of all the rooms in the hospital, mine had the best view. In the center of the main courtyard was a large fountain, and around it two paved circle paths divided by grass. Visitors and patients would sit by the edge of the fountain, enjoying the occasional spray of water or an ice cream from the vendor that was stationed a few feet from the entrance gate. Sometimes there would be children running. Sometimes there would be a woman or man, sitting alone for what seemed to be too long. I would sit at this window for hours at a time, watching the people and imagining their stories.
One day, I noticed two men lounging on the grass near the fountain, both dressed in street clothing. I recalled seeing them at the fountain on a previous day and I wondered if they were visitors. Maybe one was a patient. It was hard to say. One was stylishly dressed and the other one pudgy and loud. I watched them as they engaged in a lively, passionate conversation. Politics, I guessed, was the topic although I couldn’t hear a word. Then, one of them lifted his head and looked directly at me.
I sat back in my chair and squeezed my I.V. pole. Perhaps he didn’t see me. The lights in our room were off and I hoped that a shadow might now be covering my face. I waited a moment, then leaned slightly forward and noticed both men were now standing up, looking towards my window. I was a spy and I had been discovered.
The men smiled and waved, laughing and moving closer. I smiled and sheepishly waved back.
“Ciao, bella!” the pudgy man shouted.
“Ciao,” I replied
He insisted I come down for a conversation, and I declined. In true Italian fashion, he pleaded and begged for me to come sit by the fountain. I leaned my elbows on the window sill and rested my chin in my hands, like a poor maiden locked high in a clock tower. I tried to explain that I could not join them.
Something I said must have given me away. The pudgy man and his friend began to whisper to each other. They could tell I was not Italian and began scheming a plan.
On my lap, I had been holding my journal and a pen. I quickly ripped out a page and scribbled a simple message, then folded the note and cast it out of the window.
“Buon giorno. Sono Americana. Non posso scendere adesso, forse domani. Pazienza! Valeria”
(Good day. I am American. I cannot come down now, maybe tomorrow. Be patient! Valerie)
The men watched the note float quickly down and into a thick set of shrubs that hugged the building. The stylish man laughed as he watched the chubby one climb through the bushes in search of the message. The note mysteriously disappeared and the men begged for me to send another.
I was thoroughly entertained watching these two strangers, who remind me now of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, as they tried to coerce me to join them. I said goodbye and waved (albeit dramatically), left the window and returned to my bed. The old woman smiled and rolled her eyes, before settling down for her afternoon nap. I had become her daily entertainment, but now I, too, was exhausted and ready for some rest.
About an hour into my sleep a nurse came and woke me up. I had a phone call waiting for me in the hallway. It must be my mother, I thought. Or my friends - they were on an excursion in Venice. I held the phone to my ear and immediately realized it was neither my mother nor my friends.
“Ello? Ello?” the voice asked.
It was the two men from downstairs. They had found the note in the bushes and had tracked me down via the church operator. The conversation was short, and those standing in the hallway observing it were very tuned in. Surely, by now, I had become the gossip of the liver ward during my first week - this young foreign girl with visitors and boyfriends and phone calls and no decent pajamas. I could feel their eyeballs staring at me.
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After ending the call, I returned to my room. No longer tired, I decided perhaps today was the day to take a shower. Most patients were taking advantage of their daily afternoon rest, so I concluded that this might be the best time to bathe without the line of people before or after me. I grabbed the tiny, thin towel provided by the staff when I arrived and a bar of soap. The door to the shared bathroom was open. Inside was a commode, a sink and a bathtub. When I turned to close the door I noticed it did not have a lock. I placed my towel and clothes on a chair in the corner of the large room and climbed into the well-worn clawfoot tub. As in many old Italian bathrooms, the bathtub was deep and included a handheld sprayer - but nowhere to mount it overhead. I saturated my hair with water and soap, trying not to spray the room. There was no shower curtain and I felt every breeze coming through the window. Lather after lather after lather - the bar of soap was quickly shrinking. The hair on my legs was now long and soft - thank goodness my parents couldn’t see this. After a thorough rinse, I turned off the water and squeezed my hair.
Just then, the door to the bathroom started to slowly open. My towel and clothes were just out of reach, and the bottom of the tub was wet and slippery. I quickly covered my lower lady parts with my hands, then my breasts, then squeezing my thighs together and wrapping one arm around my chest, I turned around and tried to cover everything else that was hanging out.
“Scusi! Scusa! Mi scusi! I am, um, hello! Scusi! I am showering, please! Hello?” I rambled on, dripping wet, tripping over my words.
Two tiny older ladies were slowly walking in, one assisting the other, completely oblivious to the wet, pale-skinned, American woman standing bareass naked in the bathtub across from them. I continued to call out in a mix of English, Italian and probably a combination of Chinese and Swedish.
One of the ladies looked up, as if she had heard something. Then, the other one looked up. Four eyeballs staring at me, frozen. They then slowly assisted each other in a carefully choreographed pivot turn and walked out as slowly as they had walked in, closing the door behind them.
I returned to my room clean and dry and humiliated. The old woman watched me as I climbed into bed and asked if I had a good shower. My journal sat on the table next to me, so I grabbed it and began writing. No one, I thought, will ever believe all that happened today.
LOSING TRACK OF TIME - MARIE
It’s hard to know exactly when it happened, but at one point I stopped writing the date or even the day of the week at the top of my diary pages. I suppose it may have been because I started writing in my journal multiple times a day, from early in the morning until the middle of the night, and it became impossible to keep track of anything in real time.
This is also when things within me and around me started to shift. I began to develop deeper relationships with people in the hospital. Some of them were other patients, some of them staff, some of the relationships were real, others were partly imagined.
The pudgy man’s room was across the courtyard from mine. I realized after several days of closely observing his comings and goings that he was, in fact, a patient. From my window, I would watch the team of doctors enter his room and circle his bed. Sometimes, I would watch him as he leaned over the ledge, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Other days, I noticed he would visit a patient in the room next to his - a young, blonde man. Occasionally, he would send me a friendly wave and I would wave back. It was nice to be noticed.
There was also the cleaning man. He would come into my room to mop the floor or remove the trash, always with a pleasant greeting. I came to know his schedule by watching when his Vespa pulled through the front gate. He would park it around the corner and skip up the front steps, helmet in hand. Every now and then, he would look up at me and wink. One day, he came by our room unexpectedly. It wasn’t time for a cleaning, he just sat on the edge of the old woman’s bed and started chatting. I couldn’t understand much, except that he was asking me some kind of personal question. The old woman scowled and insisted that now was not the appropriate time for a visit, pointing to the bowls of ice cream we had both just received as an afternoon treat. She shooed him off her bed and he cheerfully left the room.
Something was changing, within me or maybe within the room. I no longer felt like a foreigner, or a teenager, or a patient. I was no longer a stranger here - I belonged here. The old woman at one point revealed her name. It was Marie. Whether her actual name was Marie or whether she was trying to anglicize the name Maria I never figured out. Our conversations became more frequent as I noticed she had a never ending fountain of interest and patience as I would try to communicate in her language. This is where my desire to truly know Italian was born. Marie had a story, a life story. And, she had all the time in the world to share it and a young girl as her full-time audience...only I couldn’t understand so many of the important details she needed and wanted to relay. Marie was open and eager to pass on her wisdom, her ideas, her questions and I could only decipher and absorb a small fraction of them. So, I would let her talk and instead of focusing on the stories, and how much I was missing, I focused on her - her bright eyes, her layers of wrinkles, the spots on her skin, her thin white hair, her deformed fingers. Looking back, perhaps I knew that I would not be able to take her stories back home with me - but I would be able to remember her in other ways. Visual memories of a woman who shared a part of my life when I was seventeen. A woman who inspired me to fall in love with a country and a culture. A woman whose face I can still see and kindness I can still feel thirty years later.
One night, around four o’clock in the morning, Marie woke me up. Her eyes were wide and she was standing next to my bed, shaking me with a look of concern on her face. The room was dark and she turned on the light, asking me if I needed help. Apparently, she had been startled by the sound of me crying hysterically in my sleep...but she soon realized, after standing over me, that I was not crying but laughing through a funny dream. We giggled and she swatted at me before turning the light off and returning to bed. We were no longer roommates. Marie was now my friend.
THE CHAPEL
Like most Italians, Marie was Catholic and this was a small, Catholic hospital located on via Aurelia - a busy street in a neighborhood not far from Vatican City. It was established in 1932, and at the time I was a patient there nearly half of the staff were carefully trained nuns who tended to many of the non-medical aspects of patient care. I remember one of the nuns would come in each day to carefully make my bed while I tended to my very important daily window observations. One day, one of the sisters asked me how I was feeling as she pulled the dirty sheets off my mattress and shoved them into a laundry bag. Assuming she had some influence with the doctors about whether I was healthy enough to be discharged, I turned from the window and enthusiastically announced that I was feeling wonderful and felt that I had fully recovered. She smiled and walked up to me, guiding me away from the window. She placed a stack of new bed linens in my arms and announced that if I was feeling that much better the time had come for me to change my own sheets and make up my own bed - including a lesson on how to properly do so.
The days were growing longer and hotter. I came to know the schedules of everyone who walked through the courtyard. The staff. The nuns. The visitors. The patients. There must be more to this place than what I could see from this window, I thought. I knew there was a chapel located somewhere in the building, although I had never seen it. Other patients would talk about going to Mass and every now and then Marie would disappear for an hour or so. Eventually, as my strength improved and my friendship with Marie grew, she invited me to join her. I was not Catholic, but my grandmother had taught me enough of the ‘rules’ that I felt comfortable enough accepting her invitation. I was also desperate for a change of routine.
I put on my t-shirt and shorts and slowly pulled my I.V. pole with me down the hallway. The wheels were squeaky, but Marie’s slow pace made it easy for me to keep up with her. The chapel was on the floor below ours, so we needed to take the antique elevator down. It should be noted that the elevator was the slowest one on planet earth and I wondered why any engineer would set the mechanism to move at the pace of a ninety-nine year old tortoise.
The chapel itself was very small. Baroque in style, there were no more than five or six rows of short pews, with an aisle down the center. In the very front pew were a row of nuns, chanting in Latin. Marie and I were late, but we were among the only people attending the service. We slipped into one of the middle rows. The air was warm and smelled musty of old wood. I followed along with the standing and the kneeling, knowing full well that God was here and He didn’t care if I couldn’t speak Latin. Marie was content, sharing her space with me. This was her happy place.
As I began to take note of the architecture and beauty surrounding me, something began to move. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye, but by the time I turned my head it was gone. Then, the floor below me began to move - slowly swaying - followed by the walls and the ceiling. The room began to slowly rock left, then right. Marie stood still, facing the altar, eyes closed deep in prayer. The voices of the nuns flowed in perfect harmony, undisturbed. I quietly excused myself and walked toward the door, holding onto the ends of the pews with one hand and my I.V. pole in the other. A wave of nausea filled me and I headed outside to the front steps for some air. The sun was a blinding spotlight, the air coming from the stone steps was hot. After a few minutes, I turned around and re-entered the building, making my way up to the second floor - although I don’t remember how I got there. I only remember knowing I had made a mistake and I prayed that I would make it back to my room without calling attention to myself. No, no…no one needs to know. I will be fine, I will…
The next thing I recall was waking up on my bed, with Marie and medical staff hovering over me bickering at each other about whether or not I should have been permitted to attend Mass. That same day my I.V. pole was switched from one that had wheels to one that did not, and I was now required to ask for help anytime I needed to leave the room. I never saw the chapel again.
BECOMING TAMMY FAYE
The hours of each day passed both faster and slower than the day before. Injections and meals and doctor rounds happened at precisely the same time every day. Scents and sounds and heat all seemed carefully choreographed. Coffee and rubbing alcohol. Birds and motorbikes. Warm breezes and sticky hot air. No one needed a watch in this place - every minute was already set. Keeping track of time did not matter.
One morning, after my daily injection, my nurse Massimiliano winked at me and commented on how the color was returning to my face. It was true, my strength was returning. The rest and care being given to me was restoring my health and friends bringing me tuna salad sandwiches and tangy Orangina were contributing to my improved spirit. Perhaps I was looking less like defrosted death and more like a blushing teenage girl. It was hard to know, as the only mirror was above the sink in the corner and I had stopped looking into it. If I didn’t see my greasy hair or shiny, sweaty skin I could avoid the internal self-judgment that came with looking as disgusting as I felt. But, maybe Massimiliano was right.
I rubbed my butt cheek, which was still stinging from where the needle had been, and walked over to the sink. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and looked into the glass, where my reflection was staring back at me. This, I thought, is an improvement? I rolled my eyes and started to make my way back to my bed. The doctors would be coming soon for their daily evaluation and I didn’t want them to see how long it took me to walk across the room. For sure, the team would use that as reason to keep me here longer.
Just then, it came to me. I opened the door to my locker and pulled out the tote of personal items that my friends had couriered over to me several days before. Rummaging through I pulled out the small bag of makeup and returned to the sink. I could do this, I thought! This will definitely work!
With just a few minutes to spare, I raced to apply the layers. Foundation. Powder. Blush. Eyeshadow. Eyeliner. Mascara - lots and lots of mascara. Marie watched as I added a quick hint of pink lipgloss. Grabbing everything from the ledge of the sink, I stuffed the cosmetics into the bag and tossed it into the locker, pulled the rubber band out of my hair, and climbed back into my bed. Marie’s eyes were wide, like the cat who had swallowed the mouse. I shushed her as the team of doctors entered our room. They were still discussing details from the last patient and finished up their notes.
Marie was examined first. Nothing was out of the ordinary - other than her peculiar silence. Whenever the doctors arrived, they were always joyfully welcomed by her. Often jokes and teasing were exchanged before they moved on to me. But not today. Marie sat upright in her bed, a small grin escaping her tightly pursed lips. The doctors did not seem to notice her quiet demeanor and soon moved on to my examination.
The team surrounded my bed, as they did each morning, checking my pulse, my feet, and the glands behind my neck at the base of my skull. When the time came for me to open my mouth and stick out my tongue, I did so with bright eyes and an eager smile.
“Well, well, well,” the doctor started. “You are looking very good today.”
“Yes, yes I am! I feel good. I feel very healthy - very good. I feel very, very good,” I stammered on in broken Italian. “I am healthy and I can go home. I feel very good.”
The doctors smiled at me and completed their examination. I leaned against my pillow, butterflies filling my insides as I watched them discuss my case. I now wished my Italian classes in high school would have covered medical vocabulary as it would have been much more useful than all of the effort put into learning correct grammar at a time like this.
The most senior physician returned to my bedside. I felt as if my hopeful smile lit up the room - this would be the moment. This would be the moment when I would be officially discharged. I would call my friends and my parents, pack up my locker. I could still have time to explore more of Rome. I was ready. I was so ready.
The doctor leaned over me and carefully placed one hand behind my head. His other hand slipped under the crisp white bed sheet that was resting loosely over me. I watched as the sheet was gently guided to my face and then pressed against my nose and eyes. As he pulled it away, I saw the clear imprint of my face transferred onto the white canvas. Lips, cheeks, eyes. The men grinned softly, almost sweetly. They were not laughing or making fun. In their eyes I could see a blend of compassion and humor. One by one, they patted me gently before moving on to the woman who never woke up. I would not be leaving today. I had been defeated.
Marie’s lips remained tightly tucked in as the doctors left our room. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh or cry or shout out some unsolicited comment. I looked at the image on the sheet and instantly recognized it. It was Tammy Faye Bakker.
TO BE CONTINUED….
