Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Many thanks

I would like to just send a quick update, and a note of thanks. I got a great response to my donation drive, and now have more than enough to cover all the immediate upcoming expenses plus have some in reserve should anything further unfold. Meantime, we still haven't moved any further forward.

Between wasting most of the week waiting to get the computer back, catching up on work time lost, and waiting for the $$s to clear from PayPal into the bank, (remembering of course that because of bank machine withdrawal limits, one can't take out the whole required amount in one day, but have to do it in batches over a few days...) there's been no way so far to make the trek into the City and across town to get the MRI results.

If the odyssey of the Apple Store was anything to go by, it's going to be a bit of a palaver (which is British Understatement for a "damned nightmare"). Meanwhile, the stress and worry seems to be catching up with me and my back, has remembered that I am Officially Old and has reacted by totally seizing up as of yesterday morning. I can hardly walk across the flat and have been hobbling around using an umbrella as a walking stick. Pathetic, I know, but amusing enough in its own way.

Fortunately, my doctor is also an accupuncturist and knows how to fix me, AND I now have enough dough to pay him for it. So, win! I'm also almost ready, after a week of taking some medication that I couldn't be bothered to identify, to go re-take the cellular test, which is scheduled for Friday. So, one way or another, all will be clarified by the end of the week.

Today I also found some drugs in the bottom of the pharmaceutical shoe box left over from the last time I buggered up my back in August and it worked well enough in clinical trials to get me to the supermercato and back today (with help from a friend) so I'm gonna give it a go tomorrow. I hate having to go into the City at the best of times, (gypsies, traffic, noise, morlocks, other people,) but it has to be done.

Life is just damn complicated and bloody inconvenient at times. I wish there were somewhere we could register formal complaints about it.

For some reason that I can't really figure out, however, I've stopped worrying about recurrence for the moment. Maybe all the other stuff, none of which really rose above the level of irritation and huge inconvenience, was sent by God to take my mind off things and give me stuff that I could actually deal with fairly competently.

Or maybe I've come to some kind of peace with things and just figure we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Who knows?

I've learned in the last few years that there is never any point in this country in hurrying. It doesn't accomplish anything except a peculiarly Anglo type of sputtering aggravation. Things happen here at their own pace. Fussing over it is like trying to shoo the tide back.



~

1 comment:

James C. said...

So glad to see things working out better for you! It's worth a Te Deum or two, that's for sure.

Several years ago, my brother and I were staying at a hotel in the Florence suburbs. We got back to our room one night around 9pm, and when I pushed the key in the lock, the lock went right through the door! The deadbolt held fast, so we were locked out.

My brother (a loud, assertive sort of American---one of those) marched downstairs to the desk and told the innkeeper to ring the locksmith. Of course---this being Italy---the locksmith had his phone turned off for the duration of the night.

So the innkeeper turned to me and my brother and pointed at two battered old couches in the lobby. That was where he expected us to sleep---in the clothes we were wearing---until the next day, whenever the locksmith felt like coming in to fix our door.

For my loud American brother, this was totally unacceptable, and he thus began a heated argument with the innkeeper (all in Italian), trying to cajole him into knocking in our door or at least finding us another room.

No dice. Voices rose and hand gestures grew wilder and more creative as the minutes went by. I remember the innkeeper repeated insisting in Italian, "What is the hurry?" My brother began to pound the desk for emphasis, and the innkeeper pounded back.

Finally, after 15 minutes of this, the innkeeper threw up his hands with a great flourish and said his first English words of the night:

"If you no like, go call Obama!"

And with that, my brother gave up, and on the lobby couches we slept till the locksmith came at noon the next day.

True story. It's the Italian way: Go with the flow of chaos, inconvenience and dysfunction. Why hurry and why worry? No matter how much you fret, it won't change things anyway. Diet isn't the only reason why the average Italian lives to be over 80.