Cashmere Kate

Thanks for all your comments. I've decided to go through with these tests this time, then hopefully I can just get a prescription and not have to worry about them again! I'm not in a rush so I'm not going to try and buy them from the pharmacy - I still think it's a bit stupid that they make so much fuss before giving the pill to you but anyone can just go and pay for it with no questions asked!

gelato

I guess my question would be - if these eminent doctors work in both the public and private hospitals- why not just go to the public hospital for free? When i was extremely sick with a life-threatening illness and had open heart surgery I had the top expert on my type of heart problem operate on me and other really top cardiologists treating me at the hospital FOR FREE. Laying aside the fact that they can't treat really serious medical problems like I had in private hospitals, what advantage (apart from a private room and nicer decor and food) would I have had from a private hospital? Unfortunately I've also had a non life threatening but still serious illness here and went to the 'day hospital' at a public hospital and got great care there too. And I've never had to wait more than a few weeks for any of my non-urgent medical appointments either. And as you said, at least in Rome, it's best to stay away from private hospitals for childbirth as they have outraegeously high c-section rates.

If you can't get an appointment with a certain doctor in the public system you can always go private and pay out of pocket for that one appointment or a few appointments. It's a lot cheaper than paying hundreds/thousands a year for private insurance.

I will say, though, that this is regional. Maybe in certain regions the public hospitals aren't as good or the waiting lists are longer.

Lorna at Vicenza

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging through some old stuff looking for a certificate of mine to show my daughter. I didn't find the certificate but I did find a copy of an old letter that I wrote to a friend in 1993 describing my stay in the local Italian hospital.
I thought I'd post it here. Remember it was back in 1993 but every word I wrote then was true. It was amazing to read it all again. I'd forgotton some of the smaller aspects of that stay in hospital.


Dear ........
I had another stomach upset, virus, gastric flu. That's what I thought I had although I've alway been fit and healthy. Not normal to have quite so many stomach upsets in two or three months and this one was getting worse. I'd already had Thursday off work and on Friday I had the most awful pains and I had started vomiting frequently too. I couldn't keep even a drop of water down so I decided to call my Doctor out to my flat to get some medicine to stop me being sick and anyway, I needed a doctor's certificate for work otherwise I wouldn't get paid.

The Doctor came that evening and after poking and prodding my swollen abdomen causing me to cry out in pain, she told me in no uncertain terms that she was sending me to the local hospital in the morning to have some blood tests done and to see a specialist. Ivo came with me the next morning. Blood tests done, results collected and off to see the specialist, a surgeon I discovered although he looked more like a Grizzly bear. Long shaggy hair and beard, a sprouting, thick tuft of hair sticking out of the open neck of his white coat, scruffy jeans on and a pair of sandals. Very hairy toes too. As he was examining me I was wondering to myself whether he looked more like a Grizzly bear or like Jesus and I was also convinced I'd get sent home with some kind of medication and recommendation to rest properly so I wasn't prepared for him to say,

“Right Signorina – send somebody to get a bag of your stuff. I'm keeping you in for three or four days to run a few more tests.”

'I can't do that. I live alone. I need to go home and get my own stuff.'

“Just send somebody. Surely all you need is a toothbrush and some pyjamas. I want you on that ward as soon as possible.”

'But, but, but, all my family is in England. I need to ring somebody and tell them what's happening. They'll worry if they try and call and don't find me at home over the next days. They don't speak Italian. My friends here don't speak English. I have to tell them. I have to go home first'

Besides which, I knew damn well that there was no way I was going to stay in that horrible, old hospital with just a toothbrush and a pair of pyjamas for company. He was a surgeon for God's sake. He must have known that every Italian lady is like an Irish Granny with a new nightie, dressing gown, vest, knickers and toiletry bag stored away somewhere for such an emergency ....... and every Italian young girl has an Italian mother, Grandmother or Aunt who will get these things for her in such an emergency.

Me? I sleep in an array of old, baggy but comfy, oversize tee-shirts. I don't own a pair of slippers. My floor is lovely and cool on bare feet in the summer and in the winter it's a warm and cosy little flat anyway so I just use a pair of thick socks. I was hardly going to go into hospital with a man size Les Misérables t-shirt and a toothbrush that had probably seen better days and who was I going to send to rummage around in my knicker drawer? I could have got somebody to ring home for me but I wanted to pack my own bag and to do that I had to get out of that hospital so I played on the family angle, and to tell you the truth I was a little shocked, near to tears anyway and I wanted some time to gather my thoughts. I'd only wanted some stop sick pills and a certificate for work. I think I was still under the impression that Jesus Grizzly Bear was being over zealous until he said,

“Okay, I'll give you exactly one hour and then I want you back here! It's my opinion that you have a seriously swollen appendix and this can go one of two ways. It will go down with proper medication or it will get bigger - in which case we will have to remove it – or it could be a cyst.”

That was enough to panic me and galvanise me into action but my first stop wasn't the local ladies' clothes shop. It was the book shop where I spent a huge amount of money on two of the fattest English books I could find. It didn't take long. There were only about 9 books to choose from and I'd already read 5 of them. A quick stop at the market got me a pair of new slippers and a nightie (ugh) and then home where I bashed my neighbour's door down. She's that lovely Australian girl from Melbourne I've mentioned before and I knew she had a smart dressing gown that she could lend me. I fired off a few calls to home, my boss, my Doctor, tried not to cry and I was more or less ready but unwilling to go back to that lonely hospital.

Once back there, Tania and Ivo weren't allowed to stay very long before they got kicked out and I was left with a nurse taking my temperature, blood pressure, more blood and another one sticking a drip of antibiotics and glucose or whatever into my arm because I hadn't eaten anything for over 2 days. The rooms are not single rooms and there are no curtains around the beds. It all felt a bit old and scruffy. There was a girl in the room who'd had her appendix out the day before and another girl got admitted in the middle of the night for observation after bashing her head in a car accident and being sick everywhere. Just as I was finally about to drift off to sleep, the nurses bustled in at 6am with thermometers for everybody. Drifting off for the second time that morning I was rudely interrupted by a nun walking up and down the corridor reciting Ave Maria. Loudly reciting Ave Maria. I thought it was just because it was Sunday morning but the other girl told me that a nun comes round early every morning – and she did. She does one Ave Maria, then a prayer for the sick and then another Ave Maria. Later that day a white robed priest came around the wards asking who wanted Holy Communion, and one day we even got a monk walking in and out of rooms complete with long robe, bald head and a rope belt. You'll think this is all made up but it's not. They all drove me mad. After a few days in there I really wanted that priest to come back. I wanted confession. I wanted to confess to harbouring wicked thoughts of sticking syringes into the eyes of nuns at 6.30am each day and cutting out their larynxes. Six bloody thirty in the morning! Breakfast wasn't even until 7.30am, if you were allowed any. I wasn't allowed anything to eat all Saturday and Sunday and breakfast when it came on Monday was a huge disappointment. It was either milky coffee or watery, hot lemon tea made from powdered package stuff and a dry bread roll to dunk. I loathe coffee and I hate hot lemon tea.

Some of the student nurses had been coming to my bed asking for help with their English homework so I begged one of them to just bring me some boiling water and a drop of milk in the morning so I could make my own tea and then I told Ivo that when he visited me that evening he had to bring me some decent tea bags. That useless bugger went home and asked his mother if she had any tea in the house. The mother doesn't really like me much, she doesn't like any girl much, and she is of the opinion that I am a jittery, highly strung girl so she came with Ivo during visiting hours bringing with her not normal bloody tea, not even the Italian excuse for decent tea or that awful Lipton's. Oh no! That nasty, interfering, nobody is good enough for my sons, old bloody cow brought me ...........Chamomile tea and herbal tea for its calming and soothing properties!

'Priest! Get in here right now. I'm about to murder my boyfriend's mother and it's also debatable whether he'll live for very much longer!' Jesus bloody Christ! All I wanted was a cup of tea. Not too much to ask surely? I hadn't eaten for days and only the ocasional drop of water had been allowed to pass my lips.

Food when it did come, came on a trolley pushed by a very formidable and cross looking woman. The kind who thinks she's more important than she really is and the buttons look like they are going to pop off her uniform when she puffs her chest out. She took one look at the footnotes on our beds and said, “light diet then for you lot” and proceeded to plop one dollop of runny looking Smash type mashed potato onto plates for us. This sloppy mess came with a cheese triangle. I'm not joking! One crappy cheese triangle and a dollop of bile looking Smash. We were given exactly the same thing for lunch the next day with the welcome addition of a little broth with tiny pasta bits in it for a first course. None of us managed to finish the cheese and cat sick potato.

The hospital certainly isn't run with any patient comfort in mind. Like I said before, there are no curtains around the beds, no day room or tv room, no voluntary workers coming round with trolleys selling newspapers and biscuits and juice and puzzle books. The doctors on ward duty only acknowledge you if they have to, and if they don't, they look at the notes on your bed, add something, tell the nurse to adjust your drip and move on with not even a 'buon giorno' or 'are you feeling a little better today?' Doctors and nurses lift up nighties to check scars, stitches and dressings without a thought for the patient, and the other people on the ward discreetly look away or pretend they are busy adjusting their pillows and blankets. My drip was changed from one arm to another by a nun/nurse and I told her from the start that it was hurting and tingling like mad and the previous drip hadn't felt like this. She told me 'don't be silly girl' and left me there complaining to thin air. After half an hour the pain inside my arm was like a million bee stings and my arm was three times its normal size so I called the nurse, who must have finished her cappuccino before deciding to answer my buzzer. She had to remove the drip and find another vein back in my other arm for it. That bloody nun hadn't even got it into the vein so all that liquid had been building up under my skin. Result? The biggest 5 inch bright blue bruise all down the inside of my arm that hurt like hell every time I accidentally knocked it or brushed it against my side. I had told that bloody excuse for a nurse that it didn't feel right but I had already learnt that you cease to be a human in that place and become just a thing in a bed and woe is you if you ask for anything, need anything or don't really want to spend all day in bed. If you can't move about then tough shit. I could move a little as my drip was attached to a long pole that was on wheels. I couldn't get to the newsagents which was 3 floors down near the hospital entrance but I could shuffle to the end of the corridor each night. Shutters were pulled down and lights went off at 9pm each evening so I used to toddle along to the end of the corridor each night with my book and my drip on wheels and sit in a chair there where the lights were kept on.

During my stay there I had other tests done as well just in case I did need an operation. I had an ECG (think it's called that) and one day a nurse plonked a litre of water near my bed and told me to 'get it all down ready for your ultrasound scan later'. I dutifully obeyed never expecting her to bring me another one and tell me to 'get that down too and don't go to the toilet'. I asked her how the hell I was supposed to do that and she just said, 'squeeze'. Later I painfully made my way down to the scan room (alone) and lay on the bed with my eyes screwed up tightly, my legs crossed, my toes crossed, my hands scrunching the paper sheet into ribbons and praying this would not take long. The bloke there looked at my notes and then started to move his machine around. Oh Jesus, please, please, please Lorna don't piss yourself. Hold on. Hold on.

Scan bloke must have seen that I was in agony and started speaking to me in what I presume he thought was English. What is it with certain people that look at your name and nationality and never once think to ask you if you can speak Italian? He was talking to me like I was deaf and dumb, really slowly, using his hands and trying to get his ugly mouth around unfamiliar words and still making no sense whatsoever. By this time I had my very own skin crossed and not just my legs to stop me from weeing all over the place so I screamed at him,

'I can speak Italian. What? What? What in God's name are you trying to say?'

He told me that I was clearly uncomfortable and that I could go to the loo to relieve myself of two or three glasses of urine in order to feel more relaxed. After drinking two litres of water in a very short space of time how the hell does one stop at letting out two or three glasses? But I wasn't going to argue with him and I was off that bed and in the loo before you could say 'piss'.
I don't think I stopped at three glasses either. In fact I'm pretty sure that Niagara Falls has nothing on the noise I was making in that bathroom. Once that dam was open there was no stopping it.
Enough water must have stayed inside for the scan to work anyway and I was given the all clear.

On Wednesday May 26th 1993 I was allowed home at 6pm with instructions to keep to a light diet, rest and to go straight to A&E if I ever got the same symptoms again as I could be one of those people with a rumbling or grumbling appendix. Luckily for me it hasn't grumbled since.

Now I remember why I photocopied that letter to my friend. After writing that little lot out by hand, there was no way I was going to write it all out again for other friends and family.

I have been back into hospitals as a ward patient twice since then. Two different hospitals to give birth. There are still no curtains around the beds (and no gas and air) but there were no priests, nuns or monks either. I'm not sure if they have all been banished to the hospital chapels or if they are just not welcome on the labour wards and maternity wards.

internationalbefky

Oh my god, that letter has terrified me! I'm scared to death of getting ill over here - currently got a cold that turned straight into a cough (I'm asthmatic so they always do), feel like I've been run over by a lorry, and I don't know how much it'll cost to get some amoxycillin if it becomes infected - the first week I arrived here I bought some paracetamol for a headache and it cost me 4.50! For s*dding paracetamol!
When I lived in Portugal I used to get the Pill over the counter and I think it cost me 1.60. I was half expecting to get thrown out of the pharamacy for asking for such an unholy thing (Portugal being a good Catholic country which still celebrates the feast days etc) but they were great! But 15 euros for it? Gucci must have designed the packaging or something for that price!

gelato

Lorna - your experience doesn't sound that different from mine. I was in hospital for 7 weeks the last 5 of which were in a 6 bed room with no curtains etc. As I said Italian public hospitals are not necessarily pleasant places BUT I was cured of my illness. I didn't die and I'm still here to read BE and look after my kid thanks to quick thinking doctors who performed life saving emergency surgery. I got excellent medical care (albeit with a minimum of hand holding) and for that I'm eternally grateful. And I made friends with the nurses and some of them were great.

I really didn't expect a TV, a private room or a day room or volunteers with biscuits. And that's not so important to me that I'm willing to spend thousands and thousands of euro each year on private insurance. If I had lots of money maybe I would but money is tight so we use the money for other things.

All I can say is - don't be afraid of public Italian healthcare - at least if you're in the centre or north. The important part (actually curing patients of their illnesses) they seem to do quite well.

37100

Come up our way. We have a brand spanking new hospital with double en suiterooms, air con, free local calls and wi.fi etc. We need you! With 38 operating theatres heaven only knows how they are going to fill the place! They are also about to start work on a new baby and mother wing. One thing the haven't done though, is provide a car park.

Lorna at Vicenza

I'm not sure what I was expecting Gelato.
I had no doubts about the academic expertise of the doctors though.
I wasn't expecting the nurses to play Scrabble with me but I wasn't expecting to become quite so invisible either and the nuns and priest and monk were a big surprise.
Once the medication stopped me being sick and I had no pain I felt fine so the days spent in bed felt endless. You can't help dozing on and off during the day so sleep at night was hard. I was only 22 anyway and not used to going to bed at 9pm. The nurses didn't like me trundling down the corridor to read but they didn't stop me.

Chloe was born in a different hospital and the maternity ward was in the oldest part. Funnily enough there was a kind of day room there where the mums could chat, read, watch tv or listen to one of the nurses talk about breast feeding etc. It had some fairly decent chairs in there and some of those doughnut type cushions for the mums to use. Chloe was born on a Friday night and the ward wasn't busy at all so I ended up in a room alone. The nurses were fab and let OH stay with me all day Saturday and all day Sunday and Chloe and her cot could stay in my room as much or as little as I wanted. They even let a couple of my friends in to see me even though they'd got the public visiting time wrong.

Alex was born in yet another hospital and the nurses there were like SS soldiers and wouldn't even let me into the nursery to see my own baby. Alex was born Sunday morning and I left that place on Monday lunch time and came home.

Very glad you got cured and are fighting fit and healthy. My moans are trivial compared to what you must have gone through.

Isakat

[QUOTE=gelato;9139325]Lorna - your experience doesn't sound that different from mine. I was in hospital for 7 weeks the last 5 of which were in a 6 bed room with no curtains etc.


Somehow the privacy bit with curtains around your bed has not cought up here. I do not know what that new spanking hospital in Verona is like, but I had to suffer the indignity of having my waters broken in full sight of other 2 women, even as a private patient.

gelato

I guess I've kind of gone native but I kind of got used to no privacy when I was in the hospital. Being in a 6 person room in cardiology most of the other women were elderly and had (what appeared to be) alzheimers or dementia. My main problem was trying to sleep at night with all the noise they made. There was this one 90 something year old woman who muttered to herself (all 'poor me' stuff) all night. Curtains wouldn't really have helped much.

They were very strict about making all the visitors leave if they had to perform any medical procedures (or change anyone's nappy) during visiting hrs.

I found out after my operation that the cardiac surgeon who treated me is famous internationally and the best in his field in Italy on my specific problem. the operation was a big success. The other doctors who treated me were also very good. That's what's important at the end of the day if you ask me.

duffer

there's a spanking hospital? do the nurses' wear rubber? you got a tel no?

Isakat

I knew you would not resist Duffer.
Sorry' spanking new' not new spanking-my English is getting worse since we moved here.

Lorna at Vicenza

That's certainly true but there's also an emotional and physchological side to being in hospital which is all too often overlooked.
Having your private bits exposed infront of a room full of strangers and feeling like a slab of meat is not exactly ideal.

gelato

Lorna - yes not ideal (I also had that experience after giving birth to my daughter here) but, also, to me, not worth thousands of euro a year for private health insurance just to avoid that (although isakat said that even in a private hospital they didn't seem to care much for patient privacy so there's that).

I'm not trying to say that everything is perfect in public hospitals here (far from it) and I definitely had moments of despair when I was in there which might have been alleviated if a kindly volunteer had come around with some biscuits. A private room might have been better for my sanity too. But, after all my experiences in the hospital here, I've realised that the actual medical part of Italian hospitals is not so terrible. If I were rich, maybe I'd buy private health insurance (although with my medical problems I doubt they'd take me) but if you have limited funds, like we do, I can think of tons of better uses for your money.

37100

No, public hospitals here are far from perfect, but let's not forgot that the NHS is also far from perfect. My elderly aunt in for a 'women's op' was put on a mixed ward! And they made a very good attempt at killing my mother because of bad care from nurses. From experience, when you are seriously ill, you don't care about a bed curtain and modesty, you just want someone to help you.

Emmis

Just to give me 5 cents worth, I've lived in a whole bunch of different countries from the UK to Australia, and Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland in between, and I have to say, despite the painful bureaucracy and crumbling buildings, the healthcare in Italy was the absolute best I've ever experienced. Incredibly (also annoyingly but hey surely it's better than being blase'!!) thorough and I always felt "secure"... with both my children and my own health.

And that was only through the public system. I have a lot of friends who are doctors in Italy and they are incredibly knowledgeable, to the point of being able to go through a blood test and telling which foods and vitamins you need to increase/decrease for each individual analysis!

Of course as in every country I'm sure there are some awful doctors there, but my experience was incredibly positive. And I miss it now!