After a few days of IV antibiotics, the pain started to subside and the next part of our trip was looming fast on the horizon. Being only a humble family physician and not a big-earning Sturgeon, our flights were cattle class, and non refundable. With our daughter about to turn 18 and threatening to leave home any time soon, (with her -it’s a threat, if her brothers said the same, we probably would celebrate and change the locks) we were looking at this trip as being perhaps our last full family vacation and so we had planned to cram a lot into the three weeks. We hadn’t bargained on a hospital stay in Norn Iron, but I was confident I would get better and this was a problem I’d successfully treated in patients many times before. They usually got better fairly quickly, and a relaxing few days camping in beautiful Tuscany might be just the tonic I need. Three out of our four kids are teenagers, and all are big and ugly enough to carry their own bags and help out their recuperating father. My wife is as strong and capable as she is beautiful and so I felt confident that everything would be OK. My Norn Irish Sturgeon didn’t seem quite so sure, but was relatively happy to discharge me with instructions for a follow up colonoscopy when back in Canada, and a prescription for a full further week of oral antibiotics.
I have had a long and illustrious/tempestuous relationship with the phrase “It’ll be alright”. These days uttering it tends to make my wife break into a cold sweat, but when it comes to medical matters, she tends to trust me more than in “cut the red wire” type situations. My glass half full optimism has, more often than not led to me spilling the glass in some spectacular fashion. Not that that ever dulls my optimism- which has been classified as legendary, just one step below eternal.
So camping it was.
The last time we had been in a tent as a family, it was levelled by a tornado and we all nearly died(not even kidding, whole other blog) but extensive googling told us that Tuscany was not in the European Tornado alley.
My optimism had informed me that earthquakes and volcanoes were somehow less of a risk and so we had booked a cramping site near Vinci where Leonardo was da. Cramping is a cheaper version of Glamping, with less spacious, less glamorous, more poorly equipped and less comfortable accommodation but did I mention cheaper? – so, yay.
Having learnt to drive in Devon, England where the roads are just old horse and cart trails with added tarmac, the windy roads to the mountainside campground were a welcome relief from the featureless straight and wide prairie highways of southern Alberta we had become accustomed to.
Of course an Aston Martin would have been more fun than the tiny diesel Peugeot rental car we had hired but a manual gearbox can make up for a lack of horsepower, and only half of the children were car sick by the end of the journey, so we’ll call it a win. We were glad we had opted for the more frugal option of two small cars for our family of 6 rather than the more expensive mini bus, it would have been far less fun.
We arrived at dusk and by the time we had done check in etc., we had to pitch a tent in the dark. The tornado camping was back when our youngest was a baby and the other kids too young to really learn the ropes and so pitching a tent was not in their repertoire of skills. So, dad had to do most of the grunt work which left me sweating and in more pain, but nothing that a couple of glasses of Tuscan grape juice couldn’t deal with – one needs something to wash down the pizza with. Tuscany was in the middle of a hotter-than-usual-Italy-in-August heatwave and so the temperature didn’t dip much below 30°C overnight, not particularly conducive to a restful sleep. I was awake already then at 3 am when the increase in abdominal pain, loud stomach rumbling followed by the instant tightening of my anal sphincter told me it was time for a rapid ascent of the hillside to the bathroom. The time of night and the heat also meant I didn’t have to stop to put on anything other than a T-shirt and shoes but stumbling around the tent in the dark and the bending over to unzip the door nearly ended in disaster. The zip stuck twice and the straining to get it loose required conscious sphincter control to avoid an unholy mess in the box with cups, plates and camping stove by the door. I made it out eventually and the hill climb began in earnest. The light on my phone lit the way and I made it, breathless to the bathroom just in time. I will spare you all of the details of the next few minutes, but this experience was brought to you by the words Agony, Tears and Ricochet. I attempted to leave the bathroom three times and had to return for more of the same before I had made to the main doors to the bathroom. I was grateful none of my fellow campers had weak bladders and no one was around to overhear or oversmell what was happening. By the third time, I had also worked out the correct angle of approach to avoid the ricochet and so clean up was faster. Having evacuated what felt like it must be everything I had eaten over the last 45 years, I decided there couldn’t be anything left to do and so set off for the tent once more. Without the urgency I had for the ascent, the descent should have been more straightforward. I should also explain at this juncture that for two years prior to this I had been suffering with a persistent vertigo problem that has not abated. More on that in a later blog post.
Suffice it to say that my balance, especially in low light conditions is not what it once was, and what it once was, was clumsy with a side of oafish. As I picked my way down the hill, I gathered the kind of momentum that is great for skiing, but not great for a pair of well worn slip-on Crocs on dusty gravel. I’m 6’3” and weigh, well let’s just say I’m not big on salad. This meant two things in this situation. One, I am attracted to the ground in a gravitational sense. Two, it took a long time for my head to reach the rock that my size 13s had slipped on. Long enough for me to ascertain the following… This is going to hurt. There is no way for me to do this gracefully. Thank the good Lord that I have nothing in my bowels or bladder.
When I woke up, there was a sizeable goose egg on my occiput, scrapes on my elbows and I had a wedgie that took considerable effort to free myself from. I had clearly slid a fair way down the hill on my back, because it didn’t take me long to crawl back to the tent and roll myself back into my bed. The pounding in my head and the cramping in my bowels were not keeping time with each other and that mismatched rhythm mingled with the overwhelming heat meant that as dawn broke over the hillside, I had not achieved any more sleep. In addition, the atomic wedgie had negatively impacted an area that had been sensitised by recent bathroom events. Uncomfortable would be an understatement.
The rest of the day was fuelled by a heady mix of Gatorade and Italian espresso (not in the same cup, obviously because - ew). We made some attempt to do the tourist thing. We found our way to Vinci, intending to visit da museum but were foiled in our endeavours when we discovered the town had been taken over by some strange Italian cosplay festival. I wondered if my concussion was responsible but the rest of my family could also see the people streaming into the village dressed as knights and demons and medieval peasants. This meant that we either had to pay to enter the village as well as the museum, or come back the following day. The campground had a pool and a restaurant and no dress-up box, so the decision was easy.
The second night in the tent didn’t include any trips to the bathroom but also didn’t include much sleep, due to the incessant heat. We therefore decided that in order for me to actually recuperate that I needed somewhere more comfortable and found an Air BnB in a nearby town that had air conditioning. The first night I spent there, however did not yield much more sleep than in the tent, because the owners had opted for mattresses made from granite. I figured that this was what it would feel like to wake up on an autopsy table. Necessity is the mother of invention and the following day, a mattress from the tent, on top of the granite mattress in the Air BnB gave sufficient comfort and while the rest of the family visited da museum, I slept for a full 24 hours. My bowels didn’t get the memo however and the pain would not subside. As we flew back to England, I did not need a crystal ball to tell me that more medical attention was in my future.
Comments