Dislocation, Italian Style
“SCUSI,” I said, calling a nurse in the same tone of casual deference used to summon a waiter, trying to ignore the pain that was blaring like a siren in my mind. It was a glorious day in Milan, and I had planned to spend it having lunch with a colleague, visiting a favorite museum, shopping for shoes. Instead, I found myself staring at the emergency room ceiling in the Ospedale Gaetano Pini, which the ambulance driver assured me was the best orthopedic hospital in the north of Italy. “People come from all over to have surgery here,” he said.
It seemed safe to say that few, if any, had come as far as I had. The first time I dislocated my artificial hip, in Pittsburgh, where I live, the hospital staff had propelled me from E.R. to O.R. with an all-hands-on-deck sense of urgency. Now I’d done it again. But the attendants in Milan seemed to be in no hurry. They moved among five of us lying broken on our gurneys and asked desultory questions (any allergies?) as if we were making conversation on a train.
A guest in a country not my own, I was determined to be respectful and congenial. Two nights earlier, I’d been out to dinner in Venice when the American couple at the next table asked a woman nearby to stop smoking. The offender obligingly exhaled in the opposite direction while noting that we were outside, for God’s sake; the wife continued to wave her arms as if clearing the air after a stovetop grease fire. Even in this hospital, it was clear that there were local customs at work, and I intended to abide by them. . .
Edward T. Hall, the cultural anthropologist who advised members of the State Department in the ’50s, wrote that you can live in another culture all your life and you will never completely understand it, but you will come to understand your own. You might think that sickness and health would transcend the differences that put people from disparate countries at odds. But over three days at the Ospedale Gaetano Pini, I came to realize that my assumptions when it comes to medicine are completely in keeping with my bedrock American outlook on life, which, like it or not, revolves around money. As a consumer, I go into every transaction, even surgery, with an expectation of the service I’m entitled to and feel shortchanged when I get anything less. . .
Just before I left the hospital, the resident who knew the Mayo Clinic dropped in to say goodbye. I hope we haven’t given you a bad impression of Italian medicine, he said. I assured him that I was grateful for everything they had done.
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