What scenic, quiet family holiday is complete without a mad dash to find a hospital? I mean if you attract plane crashes, you may as well seek out a hospital every time you do something...
We started off in Prague, where we met some of our family to go exploring the beautiful city. They were lending us their car so that we could drive through to Italy and stay in Tuscany. We drove very slowly through Czechoslovakia and Germany as it was pelting with rain, following our little navigation system lady who was telling us to head-on, straight ahead through the rain and cold (summer = 11 degrees here), we stayed the night in Bolzano and in the morning we headed off to Tuscany through Florence and Sienna. We decided to take a leisure stop on Lake Garda and it was absolutely stunning.
From the morning on, my mom kept on complaining of a headache, but who pays attention to that kinda thing? At lunch she decided, since she's in Italy, she is going to have an authentic Calzone but because she was feeling sickly, she missed out on the wine in favour of water. Off we went on our merry way through the treacherous coastal (not really coastal just an extremely curvy, high, full of tunnels and bridges and mountains road, ask charles how much I hate these types of roads). My mom and I were freaking out because of the sheer drops on each side and although it was beautiful but we were pretty nervous.
We headed into the Tuscan and Chianti regions and my mom kept on complaining more and more of her headache and now she knew her pressure was quite high (her normal blood pressure is low, so she knows as soon as it goes through the roof) so we stopped at a pharmacy to get her blood pressure tested. The pharmacists gave us some drops for her blood pressure which was now at 156/90 (her usual one is 110) and old me to ONLY give it to her IF it doesn't come down within the next hour, after she drinks some lemon water and puts her feet in warm water. Look I have NO IDEA how thats suppose to help but apparently it does. So, at this stage we'd been driving for the last two days and were very keen to get to our resort which was apparently around yet another friggen bendy bend in an idyllic tuscan country side. We drove on, in hope that we'd get there and she can rest and feel better. This is where we were extremely wrong.
As we drove on, her pressure and now a full migraine were getting worse and worse, making my dad and I more and more nervous by the minute. The Garner GPS lady, lets call her Nancy, was telling us to turn left and right into unpronounceable Italian names (all you can say is what in goods name did Nancy just say when you hear: "In two hundred meters, turn right into Via del Sasso di San Bernardino") and when we were about ten minutes away from victory it all of a sudden told us: " Turn right onto an unpaved road" and whadaya know? There it was a ghastly gravel road, running right next to a sewage pipe, not unlike the one you see in Dainferm. I was highly skeptical that we were on the right road as a an international resort wasn't going to be down a very steep gravel road next to a sewage pipe heading STRAIGHT down a very steep hill, even if its in a beautiful surrounding and especially if its at 8pm at night. (Thank God it was still light)
My mother, who is clearly in pain by now and needs urgent medical assistance is begging me for the drops that supposed to bring her pressure down (she faints at 160 and I was trying to avoid that) my dad is worried that Nancy is leading us astray, and Im worried that my mother is about to lose consciousness and we're miles away from doctors or any civilisation and that we're about to go off a cliff on a pretty Italian country side. Surely, we come to a dead end next to a farm house which was probably built in the late 18h century and hasn't been refurbished since, one wing completely dilapidated (doubt they have heard of cars, as we spotted a cow or a horse at the bottom of the house) one wing housing a family as I spotted a my little pony, just like the one I head when I was little, outside the door. There were no signs of life besides for the horsey animals, and my mother, outside of the car is doubling up in pain, sobbing uncontrollably. I give her the drops in hope that they make her feel better, and we pack back into the car to head back up the hill. So now, we have a spooked me, trying to keep calm and the situation under control (Do not let her know you have no cell phone signal is what I'm thinking) my dad who is battling to get the car to get traction on the gravel to go up a hill and the back of the car is swaying dangerously close to the edge, and my mother, who is in so much pain she looks like she is about to start tearing out her hair, she has stopped sobbing as she is in too much pain and she now has spazms in her neck and throat (making me think her throat is about to close up) she looks dangerously like she is about to pass out, and I am hoping that she does so she can stop feeling the pain.
Oh yes, and Nancy, our dearest Nancy, is telling us " Now navigate off road" errrm, offroad into what Nancy? An idyllic oblivion? Errrm no thanks...
We eventually pull back on the main road, now heading straight for the first town, straight obviously meaning very bendy 60km/h on a windy hill one lane no emergency lane road. My mother can not even look straight in the back seat, is in so much pain she can not utter a single word, my dad and I freaked out spot an ambulance. OH MY GOD. Seriously, an ambulance? We start CHASING the Ambulance through the hills,I'm hooting, my dad is flashing, but I don't think they care, after all the Italians are full of life, and we're just celebrating life here, aren't we?
After they show no sign of slowing down my dad overtakes them and we flag them down. Oh but we're in Italy and English is not a commonly spoken language in the country side... We show them my mother, they don't know what to do : "Doctor!!" I shout, "Hospital!!" errrm, "Si, si" they answer, but they not trained, so they direct us to Monticiano a one street town 4kms away which has a first aid doctor, we race my mom there, who's struggling to breath, see and live at this stage, and is in so much pain, I doubt childbirth compares. We drive into town and head on to what looks like a green cross sign, YAAAY I spot another ambulance and we rush to find the doctor and the paramedic chilling outside. I guess not much happens in this town. We carry my mom upstairs into a tiny doctors room and they start asking me a million questions. In Italian. I T A L I A N. I can understand tres petit Francais, a bitjie Afrikaans, gosh I can speak fluent Russian, but not Italian. Ciao and Gracia is as far as my understanding goes. So now I have to explain, to the doctor that she has a had headache, ok I can act that one out, high blood pressure? Boiling blood? errrm not so much. So I start drawing them ---> and the actual pressure 156/90 and the drops (I even drew those) and what she ate and how much time's passed since I gave her the drops... 10 minutes latter a dashingly handsome tall man runs in with a paramedic and says "Whats up?" in an almost American accent. I almost melted. He had then and there saved my mother (who was still not able to concentrate or speak and was in clear pain) but she was saved as I could now tell them everything.
They put my mom on a drip, gave her some medicine to bring the pain down, brought down her blood pressure and after about an hour she was smiling and giving me an occasional giggle at my jokes on chasing down an ambulance. Apparently she wanted us to stop on the side so she could lie down in the tall Italian meadows so she could kick the bucket outside and not the car. Not so much mother. Not on my guard.
Oh yes and we brought Nancy to the correct resort, as predicted it really wasnt on a gravel road...
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