Wednesday morning I got up after almost no sleep again. My sinuses were completely blocked, making it hard to even swallow. In the morning, however, each of my nostrils cleared for a while, giving me a sign of hope, but it didn't last. Sorella Millet set up an 11:30am appointment for me downtown with Dr. Bacci, a GP whom she knows and likes. I took a taxi down there, not feeling alert enough to drive and too weak to take public transit. Meanwhile Dee and the Balzottis headed out to Lidl for food for Friday night and then to the campus. It was my first time out of the apartment door since the prior Thursday morning. Sorry to go into all this detail, but you have to understand how desperate I am feeling after so many days with very little sleep.
Dr. Bacci looked at my records, examined me, asked lots of questions, and then said that the house-call doctor on Sunday had done a good job, prescribing basically what he would have recommended. Nice to know. While talking with him, my sinuses were again squeaking/honking, which I pointed out. He looked startled and said that he had never seen/heard such a thing before, and he is older than I am! I feel so special. He added a decongestant to the antihistamine, plus prescribed a steroid nose spray to help with the swelling in the sinuses.
The taxi ride back home, like the one there (round trip fare 50€), was smooth and relaxing. Not! This is Rome. The good news is that all the jarring from the bumpy roads may have loosened some mucus in my sinuses 😀. I had the taxi driver drop me off at the pharmacy down the street from our apartment, where I attempted to fill the prescriptions, but neither was in stock. By then I was exhausted, feeling a bit feverish and unable to breath, with my teeth and my sinuses hurting. I almost had a "fruit salad" moment, which refers to a story from our family lore where my mom burst into tears at the end of a tough day when her waitress announced that they didn't have the fruit salad my mom had ordered -- the straw that broke the camel's back.
But I kept it together, stumbled back to the apartment, took some Tylenol and Advil to try to relieve some of my symptoms, and had a bit to eat. I called the young Sorelle below us, sending them a photo of the prescription (such things are fairly lax here) and asking them to buy the stuff on their way home for lunch. They were angels, very happy to help, but one of the items was not in stock either. They dropped off what they had bought and I paid them. As the afternoon went on, I kept feeling worse and worse. I called Dee to see if she could pick it up for me. I even asked her (only half jokingly) if she would check what the Delta luggage policy was for urns of funeral ashes: check, or carry-on? She sensed how out of it I was and immediately made the call to close the Institute for the rest of the day and come home to take care of me. Turned out to be a very good thing. The Balzottis were out at a doctor appointment of their own, so she left them to make their way back home on the subway, after she bought some stuff at the pharmacy around the corner. She overbought for me and for some things for her to bring home, but that was all good.
By the time she got home, I had taken my daily antibiotic which seemed to have calmed things down a bit. That has been the pattern: feeling worse until I take that pill, so apparently it is hard at work against the forces of evil. She cooked for me (another goose omelet -- maybe that's why my sinuses honk? 😉), got me to down some warm lemonade, and had me try a machine she bought that vaporizes a saline and steroid mixture into a mask to open up the sinuses. Not sure whether or how much that helped, but by evening I was feeling much better. I was very grateful to her for coming to my rescue.
Ugo got involved, asking if there was anything he could do. He is very concerned, and he was supportive of Dee's call to come home. The activity would have been small that evening anyway. We really don't want to end our time here together limping like this, but we are doing our best.
Our daughter Chiara sent us a report on her visit to her grandfather in the hospital on Tuesday, together with Dee's sister Donna. He was very sleepy and disoriented, at one point authorizing her to pay up to $900 to repair something in one of his apartments. She had no idea what he was talking about, but he loves to be busy fixing things. Poor guy.