We arrived at the main Naples train station around 10:30 PM, soaked in sweat from the labor of carrying all our packs on the 20 minute walk. Naturally, the station had no air conditioning, and at that time of night, no open restaurants or shops, just a few fellow travelers awaiting night trains and a handful of scattered addicts and homeless persons. I was able to procure a bottle of cold water from a vending machine immediately before we boarded, and good thing I did. Unlike our hour train ride from Rome to Naples, which featured a bar car, this 9 hour train had nary even a vending machine, and no potable water. The first clue that sometime was going to go really wrong was that our car steward had no record of our reservation. I had the ticket in my email, which was on the up and up—I’d bought it from Trenitalia the very day it went on sale—but there was no record of it in her system. As the train was due to depart, she bundled us up the steps and into a reassigned cabin.
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| Hot times in the sweltering, stagnant station |
Our cabin had twin Murphy bunks that dropped from the ceiling and two bench seats that converted into beds. Each held a pillow and sheet packet and a tiny plastic bottle of water. We made up the beds and I hoisted our febrile little Juliet into hers, where she fell asleep immediately. James chatted annoyingly for awhile before eventually drifting off. Erica read while I laid there hoping the air conditioning would hit its stride. Sleep eventually came for her, but not for me, and I spent the night dehydrated, taking small sips of cold water and mentally tabulating our depleting water stores.
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| Roomies |
At about 4:30 am, a tremendous banging outside signaled that our train was being loaded onto the boat ferry to cross the Straits of Messina into Sicily. That the train goes on the boat was a major selling point of this leg of the journey for the kids, but they were both asleep and I was groggy and just anxious to get to Palermo. The second sign that something was wrong was that breakfast was delivered to us at about 5:30 AM, which is extraordinarily un-Italian. (I say “breakfast,” but it was only a small orange juice box and a little muffin thing in plastic wrap.) Evidently, Trenitalia had sent all ticket holders an email previously, detailing changes to the itinerary; work on the northern Sicilian train line necessitated a substitute bus route from Messina to Palermo. But because they’d botched their own reservation process and lost our reservation, we never got one. By the time a porter came and kicked us out of our cabin, the bus we were meant to be on had already left. Unceremoniously dumped onto the streets of Messina, we were forced to cobble together an alternative route to Palermo. Meanwhile, that fever just kept creeping up.
From Messina, we caught a train to Capo D’Orlando, a hour down the line. We debarked into a crowd of large folks, also displaced by train maintenance, a crowd large enough to make one worried about competing for bus seats. Presently, a Trenitalia employee appeared and bid us to follow him through Capo’s streets to what ended up being a bus depot. We all followed, as of this were a perfectly normal thing to be doing. When we arrived at a line of busses, I began to show my crumpled up ticket to a driver, mentally trying to summon enough Italian to explain our predicament, but he didn’t even look at the ticket. He just shewed us on the bus, and away we went. Sadly, the bus did not take the main road to Palermo. Instead, we farted along the slender coast road, stopping every few K to let old nonnas and nonnos on and off. Juliet mostly slept and crabbed while James read and I typed the previous entry of this blog. After four hours we reached Palermo, where we had about 5 minutes to grab our luggage from the bottom of the bus, sprint into the train station, buy a ticket for the suburban train to the airport, hop onto it, and grab a seat. We just made the train just in time, and it was predictably hot and disgusting. After an hour we arrived at the airport.
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| One of the various legs, I dunno |
Decision time: do we get our car and drive back into Palermo to the pediatric hospital because it’s only 35 minutes away? Or do we drive on the San Vito through the mountains and take our chance with the local clinic while I still had some energy (after not really sleeping on the train) and daylight was on our side? We resorted to scouring google reviews of the various options. Palermo’s Childrens hospital owns a stellar 3 out of 5 stars, so that was the tipping point. We drove back into Palermo.
Was it the wrong choice? In hindsight, probably, but I’m not sure it was the wrong one at the time. Palermo is a smaller, equally squalid Naples, full of faded grandeur and dog—possibly, just maybe human—feces and graffiti. The Palermo children’s hospital is sandwiched between several Norman-era sites that comprise a bona fide UNESCO world heritage sites and looks just as tumbledown. I don’t really think it becoming to dunk on what is a seriously strained and struggling public health institution, but daaammmmnnn. At least put some toilet paper and soap in your bathroom. That’s basic hygiene, guys, come on. Other funisms from our visit include:
A.) The doctor telling Erica that Juliet needed to eat something simple, like crackers, then asking Erica if she had any because the hospital didn’t.
B.) The nurse getting blood on Juliet’s clothes when she removed the iv, then asking Erica if she had anything to wipe it up with.
C.) While James and I waited outside in the parking lot, a little boy and his mom came out with a bedpan.
The boy filled it with pee and then took it back into the hospital, presumably for a urine test.
At this point, any concerned parent is beginning to wonder whether the better play is to pull the ripcord on the whole vacation. But for (what is obviously) strep throat? That seems insane. So we played our last remaining card and took her to the local clinic which operated on the very odd, though kind of Sicilian, schedule of 8PM to 8AM. I won’t say this clinic was any cleaner, per se. It was still very, embarrassingly dirty, and at one point I noticed they didn’t even bother to cover their medical waste trashcan, and I definitely espied some tissues filled with bloody sputum just lying out in the open at the top of the overfilled can like this was a battlefield hospital tent. But being a smaller clinic, it had less overall grime, mathematically speaking. The young doctor took one quick look at her throat and immediately pronounced it strep, and, goaded by our handing him multiple pre-typed out passages on Google Translate about Juliet’s inability to handle straight-up Augmentin, he prescribed a milder form of the drug which kids tend to tolerate better. Yay! Hooray for this guy! and guess what? That worked. It’s several days later and the kid has bounced back spectacularly.
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| Bloody sputum not pictured |
The little moral of the story is don’t get sick in southern Italy. I won’t cast aspersions on the doctors themselves, they do what they can with what they have, but the facilities, their standards, and just the entire medical culture surrounding care, are appalling—and should be embarrassing—for a first world nation. It was clear from our interactions with staff, too, that they were used to dealing with patients who accepted the status of things. Despite a total lack of organization and obvious professional mis-steps happening all around, none of our fellow patients’ families said or did much advocating for themselves. They mainly just stood around in the heat and sweat and smoked.
Next time, I’ll have a happier report. San Vito is great. Toodles!
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