La Dolce Vita….Gone Wrong

Imagine if you will a birthday holiday under the Italian sunshine, good food, wonderful sights to behold.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, when you add 4 children into the mix there is room for a lot to go wrong we’ve discovered.

If you scroll through my instagram feed you’ll see that this particular break in search of la dolce vita had already got off on a slightly wrong foot.  At this point in time we are now only 48 hours into out Italian holiday and the day had gone relatively smoothly.  We had enjoyed the pasta making course and eating at Tortuga Toriciano, there was fun in the sun by the pool until the mosquitoes became unbearable for some eating them alive-that is one thing I wasn’t expecting in Italy and lizards; it was like stepping back in time to a life lived long ago in Côte d’Ivoire.

So there we are in the lounge of the villa we had booked, three children doing maths, the other running around jumping on the sofas and me with a book that I had fully intended to read.  I think I may have managed a page in the 15 or so minutes we had before we started living through a horrible slo-mo clip from some parental nightmare of a film.  From jumping on the sofas, the littlest one went to the kitchen.  I then saw her running back to the bathroom just through the door of the lounge and then the next thing I knew she was beside me at the sofa choking, unable to breathe clutching her throat.  I start doing the whole back whacking routine not knowing what she was choking on while the husband starts running around shouting about A&E and getting panicked.  Finally I manage to dislodge the obstruction and she tells us she swallowed a coin.  Hubby is still talking A&E and I am at this point more chilled.  This is partly as in any severe crisis I am actually very very calm having had plenty of practice in my life (give me a minor level small issue though and those could tip me over the edge), and partly because I try to remain out of hospitals as much as possible and was thinking this coin was maybe a smaller denomination like a 1 cent or a 5 pence piece and it would just merrily make its way out of the body.

Of course, that could never be the case when abroad in a country where your depth of language knowledge barely extends past a good day and a thank you.  No, this couldn’t be that simple.  A short while after declaring that we didn’t need to rush off to the hospital and let’s just take a moment to recover and assess she starts vomiting, and vomiting and vomiting.  By this point I have conceded and we start gathering up supplies for the car, kitchen roll and a WHSmith bag from the airport top of the list.  We all get into the car for a one hour drive to where google tells us the nearest A&E is.  It’d be great if I could say that this part went smoothly, but it did not.  the electric gates wouldn’t open, Little One is still vomiting away in the back and so, so tired, and I’m trying to keep her awake just so I at least have assurance that she’s still there.  Ten minutes later along with the caretaker’s help who speaks no English and the gates finally open.  We had to stop at a co-op for something foil trays to catch more vomit as the bag was too full, and the husband decided to phone the 999 equivalent just to be sure we should take her all the way to Florence.  Turned out there was a hospital with emergency facilities just 20 minutes away so they sent us there.  I thought, for some reason that he had been speaking with the hospital direct at some point during this conversation and they were expecting us so had the background info about the coin.  They did not.

I get to the window and started saying my husband rang a little while ago about our daughter swallowing a coin.  I got a phone flung through the hatch open to google translate (whatever did we do before its existence??)so I type it all in and get told to come in behind the screen.  I am pointed in the direction of the computer screen with the instruction, “write!”  I look and due to speaking a few languages quickly deduce that I need to fill in her details.  Every time I wrote our home town in, it got deleted with a, “No!  London, England!”  Thus ensued a little stand off of, “No, not London.”  And me typing in the town again.  Eventually she googled it and it was allowed.  I then got asked for her documents, “I don’t have them.”  Because when you are rushing out the door in an emergency the last thing you are thinking about is documents.  I then got asked for photos of said documents and again I didn’t have those, so I had to write the details on paper.

Someone comes and waves for us to follow and off we go down some corridors and then I’m left with a small but formidable looking woman.  I get taken into an x-ray room, given a heavy radiation blocking apron to don, and then I get instructed to hold the Small Thing’s arms above her head, then behind her back etc, all while she’s still throwing up.  We get seated out in the waiting area again, and left there.  Suddenly this little woman comes rushing back out, grabs the Small Thing starts pulling her pyjama bottoms down, looking in her night time pull ups. Not a word had been uttered to me at all (not that I’d have understood in Italian). Then we were both summoned (dragged) back into the x-ray room and again I was instructed to hold her arms this way and that while her bottoms were stripped down, but no apron was supplied to me this time.

Still not knowing what on earth was going on, we get taken back to the A&E waiting area the others are sat.  No one has said what if anything they’ve found.  Next thing I know we get called back into the initial room we started in at A&E, and the door gets locked and needs start appearing with still no explanation as to what they’re doing, so I’m starting to feel the mama bear rise up.  Finally they said they found due, due, 24 millimetre.  So I thought they were telling me they’d found a 2 euro coin, which they did think they’d found, but they were saying two coins which I didn’t find out til later on.

“She needs sedating now.”  That was the next thing said.  “We need to get the coin out.”  I am sat there assuming they are sedating in the literal English sense of the word and they’re doing it in there.  But then she says she needs surgery, the coin is only just close enough to reach it via her throat and if they wait any longer it will block off her stomach completely.  “Don’t worry, she won’t remember as we will give her some ecstasy.”  Bewildered, I’m still sat there in shock that what seemed initially to be a benign A&E procedure is now turning into something else, and there’s talk of being admitted onto the ward.

There’s forms to fill, good byes to be said to Daddy, but the other 3 children have to remain alone outside, and then we are whisked off to a whole other part of the hospital.  On a corridor somewhere I am given shoe and hair covers and a gown to put on then we proceed.  We enter the theatre room which was very different to ours at home and much smaller-so when they tell you you can’t have two birth partners accompany you into the theatre room if you are birthing your baby by caesarean because there’s “no room” (but they can allow a bunch of students or outside camera crew for TV shows in) they’re lying, there’s room, trust me!

The anaesthetic gets administered and I sing her off to sleep, then take my place outside, about 15 mins later the surgeon comes out with a lidded cup with a pound coin inside, and then disappears back into the room.  He and another worker leave a little while later and I waited another 20 minutes to get back in.  She still hadn’t woken up yet and that took a while.

We then got taken up to the paediatric ward at after 11pm, and settled into a room with another mother and little one.  I was shown a fabric seat that folded out into a bed like a futon, in the cupboard was a wool blanket and pillows.  I chuckled to myself thinking about NHS health and safety protocols and what they’d make of this bed that was not able to be wiped down with a clinell wipe.  Of course, I didn’t get more than a minute of lying on this bed as the Small Thing woke up and I spent the rest of the night awkwardly lying on the edge her bed keeping her calm, trying to explain why she couldn’t have water or food, and continuously disentangling her from her drip tubing and the blood pressure wires as she slept fitfully.

Toilet trips were fun as well having to get her drip freed up to take in and the flush was unlike any I had ever seen before.  You turned it on like a tap and it ran with a slow force and then you turned it off again when everything was gone.

More than a little fed up with the whole ordeal

I was super grateful for the woman with the little girl in the bed across from us.  She was born in Bradford and her parents had moved to Italy back to where her dad came from when she was six.  She was a gift from above helping me to navigate the Italian health system and interpret between us and the medical staff. I was equally grateful for our friends living near Siena who were able to come to our aid with the older three who weren’t allowed on the ward. They were kept well entertained with park visits, lunch and riding the escalators up and down the nearby co-op. We couldn’t have done it without any of that support.

We finally got released in the afternoon of the following day, all a little shook up and shocked and me more than ready to catch the next flight out of town but trying to keep the show moving for the sake of the children.

And there is our tale of the not so good life while in Italy. I never for a second thought this would be the content of an initial blog post on this website; some may say I should’ve been blogging for the last few years but that’s a separate matter entirely…

May this be a warning that coins and drinks don’t mix (that’s how the coin went down the throat we have since discovered when Small Thing told us what had preceded the evening’s shenanigans ), and if you think you’ve hidden all coins from small, inquisitive hands, check again lol.

The offending article.