Travel Horrors : What Bad Things Happen to Good People on Vacation : Our First Halloween Collection of Scary Stories About Misadventures on the Road : I’ve Fallen for Venice (and I Can’t Get Up)

Italy, land of beauty and antiquity.

Like most travelers, we’d always longed to find a spot where there were no other tourists, somewhere to soak up the local culture and mingle with indigenous folk without the intrusive presence of other Americans.

Late in the afternoon on June 16, 1991, we found one.

I still shudder at the memory. There on the ground lay my 78- year-old mother, Claire Magady, her face contorted in pain and drained of color after tripping and falling while walking across Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) just two days before our scheduled return to the United States from Milan. No doddering oldie, my widowed Mom was youthful, healthy, active and fun. But she’d spend the next 14 days in a hospital, soaking up the local medical care, counting the days until she escaped.

Until we all escaped.

Besides Mom and me, the third member of our party was my daughter, Kirsten, 22, whose recent graduation from college we were celebrating with this holiday. Mom flew to Los Angeles from her home in Kansas City, and then the three of us jetted overseas together. We were having a grand time. After four days in Rome, we’d driven to Siena, then two days later to Florence, then four days after that to the city of canals that one tour book likened to a goddess “rising from the waves.”

A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to break a hip there.

Twenty minutes after Mom’s fall, Venice’s version of 911 arrived. As the orchestra at Piazza San Marco’s famed Florian cafe continued to drone “Memories,” two medical orderlies put my mother on a stretcher and carried her to a motorboat. Yes, a motorboat. There are no autos or other motorized land vehicles in Venice, a city of 117 islands whose picturesque, pencil-narrow streets and bridges are often thick with pedestrians. But it’s also a city whose thoroughfares consist of 150 canals that are traveled by those famous gondolas, whose costumed gondoliers delight foreigners with their straw hats and sailors’ jumpers.

Unlike traffic-clogged Los Angeles, a place where there are no cars? Yes, of course, how refreshing. How glorious. How romantic.

And how awful when there’s a medical emergency. Having no alternative but to take the long way around Venice, our motorboat zoomed out into the Laguna Veneta, banging against the waves as my mother shrieked in agony with every movement. I had no idea where we were going, but I hoped that we’d get there fast.

After about 15 minutes, we arrived at Ospedale Civile Venezia, a sprawling hospital complex on the other side of Venice. It is operated by the National Health Service. Once a religious school, the Ospedale Civile’s ornate Renaissance facade faces a spacious square and adjoins that Gothic Venetian pantheon, the Church of St. John and St. Paul.

Our boat slid down Rio dei Mendicanti (Beggar’s Canal) and deposited us at a side entrance where the sign read Pronto Soccorso (First Aid). Inside, a male doctor examined my mother before sending her off to be X-rayed. After that, she was rolled on a gurney down a long dark corridor and into a tiny elevator which rocked perilously as it took us to the second floor. There, Mom was examined again, this time by a genial female doctor who spoke a few words of English.

She held up an X-ray and said, “Hip.”

“Broken? She broke it?”

The doctor nodded. “We must must . . . uh . . . operate.”

Operate. The word hit like a sledgehammer. Here we were in a hospital that we knew nothing about, where no one seemed to understand much English, and these people were going to operate on my mother. My terrified mother.

“Can’t I go home?” she asked, weakly.

The doctor shook her head. “Danger. Too much danger.”

Mom was installed in a large ward with seven Italian women, some of whom were very friendly, two of whom snored very loudly.

Kirsten and I returned the next morning in time to meet a surgeon whose English was very rudimentary but sufficient at least to inform us that Mom was to be operated on the next morning by the department’s top guy, the professore .

The surgeon spread his fingers to demonstrate how the pins were to be put into her hip, and then he asked a nurse to draw blood from my mother in case she needed a . . . transfusion. A what? As in blood transfusion?

The “A” word--AIDS--instantly blazed in my mind like the marquee at Caesars Palace.

Mom looked at me. Kirsten looked at me. “What about AIDS,” I said to the surgeon.

Appearing to understand, he cut me off, saying, “No, no, no,” giving me one of those not-to-worry looks before rushing off. Sure, not to worry. Italy is no Third World country, and Venice is a sophisticated city. But still, if Mom should need a transfusion, whose blood would they be pumping through her veins?

Everything was moving so fast. Imagine the scariness, for example, of my mother trying to convey to an anesthesiologist, who speaks little English, the medications she regularly takes so that he can give her an anesthetic that won’t kill her. What if he hadn’t understood? The next morning, though, the surgery went fine. And . . . no transfusion.

A bearded radiologist--one of the nicest, most tender people we were to meet here--found me afterward and brought me to his lab where, without speaking English, he demonstrated with comparative X-rays precisely how the professore had repaired Mom’s hip. For the first time I felt exhilarated.

But the nightmare wasn’t over.

After surgery, Mom was inexplicably returned not to the ward but to a semi-private room on the fourth floor with a seaside view of gondolas with flower-decorated caskets passing in front of the island of San Michele.

Venice’s burial ground.

Mom has a great sense of humor. “If you don’t live through this,” I joked, “they can just slide you right down.”

We had the semi-private room to ourselves part of the time, but it was primitive by U.S. standards. It was not air-conditioned, and the only way to cool it was to open the window. But the window had no screen, mosquitoes were able to pour through and feast on my mother. And Mom’s bed could not be cranked up, even manually, thus making eating difficult for her even when she was propped up with pillows.

But these were minor complaints compared to the nursing care. We got the impression that these nurses in particular did not consider their jobs a noble calling.

Because they turned her so infrequently, for example, Mom developed a painful bed sore that plagued her throughout her stay. On one occasion, a thermometer that a nurse inserted under Mom’s arm slipped out when she dozed off, and no one bothered to retrieve it. Much later, she found it in her bed. On still another occasion, an IV was inserted into her vein so ineptly that it slipped out twice, causing her arm to badly swell.

Mom quickly learned the word for pain, dolore . And at one point when a nurse was forcing her to do something that caused her great pain, I heard her cry out from the bathroom, “My bambino . Get my bambino .” That was me, Signore Bambino .

But our Italian dictionary had no word for bed pan, and it took some time before the nurses figured out what Mom was trying to tell them. You could almost see a light flashing on above the head of one of the nurses when she figured it out.

She produced a pan. Popo ! she exclaimed.

Once we hurdled that language barrier, the next challenge was “constipated.” It was one thing letting a nurse know you wanted to popo , quite another that you can’t popo . Time for charades.

I held my butt and grimaced. “No popo. Blockage. No popo .”

The nurses quizzically cocked their heads like puzzled birds.

I repeated my act. Finally, one of the nurses appeared to understand. Her face lit up. She nodded vigorously. She had it.

Cacca.

“I didn’t know that was an Italian word,” Mom said.

“I think it’s the same as popo ,” I said.

The nurses ranged from compassionate--a burly male nurse would sweetly pat my mother on the face when leaving--to surly, insulting and unresponsive.

Topping the latter list was a short, stocky, unsmiling, abrupt, butt-scratching sadist whom I nicknamed Italia the Hun. I was sure she was left over from Mussolini’s black shirts.

She knew we spoke only English. Yet she delighted in jabbering to us in Italian, then getting angry when we couldn’t understand. Worst of all was the time she brought in a pill for Mom. When I attempted to ask what the pill was, she threw up her hands and stalked out, taking the pill with her.

On June 26, a Wednesday, I went to the office of the young surgeon we’d first met to ask when Mom could leave. We weren’t communicating, so I called the English-speaking concierge at the Hotel Flora, where we were staying, and put him on the phone with the surgeon. Then I had the phone again. “Your mother can probably leave at the end of the week, on Saturday,” the concierge said.

We’d been paroled!

Knowing her trip would not come under Medicare, Mom had wisely spent $52 for a separate insurance policy for travelers. But first we had to pay the hospital bill, our passage to freedom. Because the hospital would accept only cash, I had to make sure I would have enough lire to pay the bill.

Through a teller’s window at the hospital business office, a man with Mom’s records informed me in barely understandable English that her bill after 14 days would be 690,000 lire. I did some quick calculating. For surgery and all the extras plus 14 days hospitalization--11 in a semi-private room, just $560? I could hardly believe it.

“This is it?” I asked, using hands, arms, facial expression, everything I could think of to convey disbelief. The man nodded.

I had this awful, nightmarish vision of us attempting to leave, only to be stopped at the door--probably by Italia the Hun--with a demand for $20,000.

But I had arrangements to make. Although she was recovering, Mom was still 78 years old and fresh from surgery. I had to arrange for a Saturday morning flight to Milan for our connecting flight home.

The next step was arranging to reach the Venice airport. “Ambulance boat,” the surgeon said.

“Really? You’ll take my daughter and me, too, and our luggage?”

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

I wanted to hug this guy. Everything was going to work out. Except on Thursday he informed me that the ambulance boat could take us, but not our luggage. That meant I would have hire a taxi boat to transport me with the luggage, while Kirsten and Mom went separately. The Normandy landing in World War II must have been easier to coordinate.

I made the arrangements. At 5 a.m. Saturday a taxi boat would pick Kirsten and me up at the dock behind our hotel and take us to the hospital. Someone would be at a side entrance to open the door. Kirsten would go upstairs to get Mom and they would board the ambulance boat and head for the airport, arriving in time for our 7:30 a.m. flight. Meanwhile, I will have preceded them there in the taxi boat with the luggage.

A perfect plan . . . if it worked.

I arrived at the administration office Friday morning to pay the bill, waiting impatiently as an elderly man took forever punching out figures on a calculator with one finger. Tenth-Century scribes prepared documents faster. Finally, he escorted me down a hall to the cashier, who gave me a final tab.

My God!

The bill inexplicably had risen more than 600%. Instead of $590, it was about $4,000. That was $2,500 more than I had with me. By then it was after noon in Venice, too late to have the money wired from Los Angeles, where banks had long been closed.

Trying not to panic, I made the 20-minute walk to the Hotel Flora in 10 minutes, and presented my case to Alex Romanelli, this gracious hotel’s owner, whose warmth and generosity I will never forget.

Although I was a virtual stranger, Signore Romanelli escorted me to his bank and asked them to cash my personal check for $3,000. When they refused, he cashed the check himself. “I trust you,” he said.

So the bill was paid, the next morning somehow everything went smoothly, and, like characters in a suspense movie, we escaped Ospedale Civile Venizia in two speedboats.

Postscript: It was hell while we were there, but the professore did good work. Now 80, Mom walks as good as ever.