You might recall, that when we spoke last about our fall trip to Italy and Switzerland, the fair and industrious Trudy and I were wrapping up our last day in Florence. But then a little distraction came along, and the travelogue was suspended.
Let’s resume, shall we?
Before we leave Florence behind, how about a little study in the shapes and geometry of the place.
Full disclosure: Trudy’s skeptical of compilations of photos like these, but then I am at the keyboard, aren’t I?
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Hours came and went. The sun rose and set. Doctors visited in the morning. Nursing shifts came and went. The Fair and Industrious Trudy never left my bedside.
Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Days of moments in which the only task was to get to the next moment. The next meal. The next medication. The next walk down the hall.
And on Monday they pulled the drain. They pulled the tube. They pulled the IV in my right hand. They pulled the IV in my left hand. And they finally let me go.
More to come, but I confess that I’m happy to be past that.
I am out of the hospital. Still waiting on full results. But am recovering in relative comfort at home, cared for by the Fair and Industrious Trudy, two dogs and a faithful son, with well wishes coming in from down the street, across town, and across the country.
So let’s get down to business…
Appleton, Wisconsin. Some time in the 1960s. I’m pretty sure that’s where we were, visiting friends who had moved there.
I remember nothing from the trip other than I was very, very sick. They had me in a bed upstairs, in an attic it seems, for I recall some steep stairs at the end of a long room. But my recollections are unreliable. The only thing I remember clearly is that I was delirious.
The delirium was so complete, that I remember having some kind of Fantastic Voyage in which a large white blood cell was oozing around me.
It would be years before I would figure out what that was all about: the white blood cell was my tongue and the oozing were my efforts to swallow. I know this, because years later as an adult I got very sick and when trying to swallow I found myself instantly and completely thrown back to Appleton, Wisconsin in the 1960s.
When you’re sick, a delirious brain can play games with you.
…which is why I asked you here today. As you know, I’ve just emerged from a week in the hospital. And I have stories of delirium to share.
After the surgery where they took a hunk out of the back of my tongue, they slipped a feeding tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that it wasn’t particularly comfortable, leaving aside the fact that their first attempt (as I lay unconsciously oblivious) was a failure, and they had to first jiggle and finally remove the first (kinked) tube and thread a new one down as I sat upright and fully conscious on the bed.
Now, a tube going down your throat is not a normal thing. And in the darkness of those hospital nights, as I drifted between semi-sleep and semi-not-sleep, my brain just didn’t know what to make of it. The best it could do was translate things into something it knows. And for two horribly confusing nights, my brain was trying to figure out why my throat software had a malfunctioning class constructor.
In this case, there were three constructors involved: two on one side of my throat and one on the other side. And it’s this last one that was causing my brain the most anxiety, because for whatever reason is was in the wrong place, or it was doing the wrong thing, and all my brain wanted to do was rewrite the code to fix the dang thing so that it didn’t hurt so much.
For two nights, that’s all my brain would think about.
As the days merged with nights in the hospital, pretty much the only thing I was concentrating on was managing the pain. The nurses were generally good at this, but sometimes just before a shift change, after too much time had passed, while I was semi-sleeping, my brain would start interpreting the pain as a malformed HTML tag.
The tag should have looked something like this: <a href=”http://mdanderson.com/pain.html“>pain</a>.
But it was missing the href attribute. Instead, the tag looked something like this: <a>pain</a>. It was missing the reference to the true location of the pain, and as a consequence things were all messed up.
Problem is, knowing this didn’t seem to help. Because no one (including the nurses) came in to add the missing href attribute.
And so for several days, in the delerium of recovery my brain was silently screaming for someone just to fix the dang tag.
“Something’s not working right,” I said to Trudy, sitting up in bed.
It was pitch black. She had been deeply asleep, and she didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about.
After all, of course something’s not working right: I have throat cancer!
But that wasn’t it. My brain was struggling to interpret some new signals from my body.
Since we had come home, I was drinking Tylenol-3 every 4-6 hours, and that stuff just doesn’t go down easily. On top of that, I had been on the feeding tube so long, that I had a lot of food in me, and … well let’s just say that it was running out of places to go. Or for the medicine to go.
And every once in a while, I would wake up with a gurgling bubble of nasty, stinging, codeine-y something coming up my throat, making it impossible to lie flat on the bed.
Clearly this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to lie flat when you sleep, and my brain was trying to figure out what was going wrong.
Actually, my brain had figured it out. It had, while I was sleeping, Googled the problem and figured out that there was just missing a line from my startup script. There was an if-check that my script didn’t have, a check that would detect the presence of these bubbles before they popped and append them to another variable before… well… that was the solution: add the missing line to the script.
But it wasn’t helping. The bubbles kept percolating up. I couldn’t sleep because of it, and I was exhausted.
“Ben, you have a strange father,” Trudy said after he finished reading.
Maybe so. But I think I’ve worked thru most of the deliria now.
Ok. Enough of that. We’ve got a trip to finish.
If you’re still with me, it was morning in Florence. Early morning. It was time to catch the train.
Trudy and I got up well before the dawn, packed our bags and walked to the train station pulling them behind us, grateful for the sidewalks however narrow, because if we had been pulling those suitcases along the cobblestone streets, the whole city would have been up to see us off.
As it was, there were surprisingly many people arrayed around and in the station. Not surprising for a society that has an efficient train system, I suppose. Gotta be in Milan by morning? Catch the A train. (A good way to start the day, no matter how you look at it!)
And we had to be in Milan by morning. So there we were, outside the station in the dark.
Now, let me say a few words about McDonald’s.
Did you know that their colors in Europe are green and gold? Yes. It’s true. Their livery there reminds one of, say, Subway sandwiches. Secondly, did you know that you can’t get breakfast at the McDonald’s in Florence before 7:00am?
Like… what!?
This had been our fallback plan. If it was too early to find something real for breakfast, we figured it’d be a sure thing to stop in at the 24hour McDonald’s that was just across the street from the station. Wrong. Hamburgers and fries for breakfast? In the dark? No. No. And no.
The fair and industrious Trudy found a bakery a couple doors down, and we were ready to head north.
More on that later.
If I had a pencil in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me, I might scribble something. A big soft-leaded pencil, maybe, that could make dark black lines across the page.
Except that isn’t true.
I wouldn’t make dark black marks. And if I had a brush, I wouldn’t paint dark strokes. I might do something with black paper, cutting out geometric shapes (little triangles and trapezoids). But even then, when I got done, I just don’t think the thing would be dark. Sure, there’d be black. But there’d be lots of colors. And lots of shapes. And there would be movement across the page like maybe a breeze blowing. Or someone walking across the lawn. Or a path thru the woods.
But not dark.
And anyway, I don’t have a pencil right now. No paper on the table. No brush. No scissors to cut with. And my digital tablet is sitting under a clutter of miscellany that really needs to be organized.
So here’s the thing of it. There’s no easy way to say it. I have cancer. Again.
A swollen lymph node on my neck that’s kind of hard to miss. I wonder if the forth graders noticed. Cancer growing at the base of my tongue. The doctors have seen it in scans. And biopsies.
There’s a treatment plan coming together. I’ll be spending some quality time in Houston. Taking some time off work.
So maybe I’ll get a chance to put that pencil in my hand after all.
Our last day in Florence was full of art and architecture and of sculptures and gardens. We didn’t take in nearly enough — so much to see; so little time.
I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about that day. Still, I’d like to share some of it. So I’ll walk you thru a set of cartoons of where we went — enough to let you walk along with us.
It began with Perseus with Medusa’s head under the open-air arches of the Loggia.
And as if to balance the grotesqueness, just inside the Palazzo Verrechio was Verrocchio’s Putto with Dolphin, which I photographed at the entreaties of Trudy.
Florence beckoned from outside.
Inside, there were angry lions
and men in sculpted agony.
From the windows of the Uffizi Gallery along the river, Florence and distant Tuscany continued to beckon.
as did too much stunning art.
Of course there was Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, where we were not alone.
At the end of the art extravaganza, the Ufizzi Tower looked down at us as we rested outside on a patio.
From here, we crossed the Arno River along the Ponte Vecchio, where in old times the Medici made their way from Palazzo Vecchio to their summer palace. And we slowly made our own way to that very place, to Boboli Garden,
where we climbed the hill and rested our weary wheels and looked out on Tuscany as the sun set in the west.
When the announcement came that the garden was closing, we followed others who were gathered there and made our way back to the gates
and retraced our steps
back to our B&B where we packed our suitcases and collapsed into our beds in preparation for a dawn departure the next day.
It was early afternoon on our last day in Florence. We had postponed lunch, and now I could feel the hunger rising.
“I just need a sandwich,” I mumbled as we walked down the narrow Via de Neri.
At that moment, I noticed people on the other side of the street sitting on the curb eating… sandwiches. But the fair and industrious Trudy would not be distracted.
“It must be down further…” she said, studying her map and guidebook, periodically looking up to orient herself.
As we walked, the crowd of sandwich-eating-people grew. Now they were in the street and on the sidewalk beside us. All of them were eating sandwiches from the same place, All’antico Vinaio. And now I saw this place on the other side of the street.
“Let’s go there,” I said, with a (not so subtle) hint of desperation.
“We’re almost there,” Trudy said. Then she stopped. “Here it is!”
Club del Gusto was a small place with one or two tables on the sidewalk in front of a small window that said, Trippa e Lampredotto. We walked thru the door past a narrow kitchen where two guys were cooking while a single customer ordered a late lunch. We sat at a broad wooden table in the back, and just a few moments later the owner, Paolo, walked up and began speaking in English.
He apologized for the menu being exclusively in Italian and proceeded to explain each dish with loving detail. And he gave us a gift of lampredotto to try before we ordered.
They brought the lampredotto to our table on a small, wooden board. It was served hot on crispy bread, and seeing as Trudy took a pass, I ate it all myself. When Paolo came back, I pointed to the empty board and said, “It’s good!”
Paolo’s eyes widened.
“Ah,” he said, “well now we know!” And he laughed. Then he reached down with his left hand and slid the board to the far end of the table. Now we know, he said, as if I had told him something he didn’t know.
An old man was sitting nearby finishing his pasta lunch and had been watching us. As the board came to a stop, he laughed.
After we had finished our (delicious) lunch, Paolo came back to talk. The rush was over, and he had two capable guys running the kitchen.
I explained to him how I had barely made it past the gauntlet of sandwiches just up the street but how Trudy had known what she was looking for.
We could see the look of frustration in his eyes at the mention of the sandwich place. And he told us how TripAdvisor has thousands of reviews for the place and as a result, as people come walking down the street they stop to have a sandwich there before ever making it as far as his place.
Now, admittedly, if it’s a sandwich you’re looking for, then stopping up the street is the right thing to do. Even in retrospect, I admit that those paninnis looked really tasty.
Paolo continued, “I know these are hard economic times. I know that quantity is good, but…” And here he paused momentarily, “but, quality is important, also.”
And that, my friends, is what Trudy had been looking for in the first place. And that is what we got. And it is a lucky thing, because (well, let’s be honest) I can have a pretty good sandwich just down the street from here, but lampredotto and Paolo’s pasta, that’s another matter entirely!
I’ve talked about it perhaps too much — how every morning we were in search of a hearty breakfast and how we had good success most mornings. This last full day in Florence was no exception.
Let me show you what I mean…
Just look at the satisfaction on Trudy’s face. And just look at our plates. Perfect over-medium eggs. Toast with butter to die for. Bacon. A generous cup of coffee. All at a little table just our size sitting out on the sidewalk just a couple blocks from the where we were staying.
Yes, that was a mighty fine breakfast we had at Caffè Il Sole.
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