Column: festival

My GP and I, we know each other through and through after 10 years. Our increasingly frequent encounters (with advancing old age comes with flaws) are beginning to resemble comic skits. We are completely attuned to each other. Snip & Snap in the treatment room. This is how every visit to my family doctorBesides the inevitable nagging about my PHPD complaints (Pain Here, Pain There), luckily there is always something to laugh about.

However, for me as a non-Italian, the fun starts earlier, even before I enter Doctor Dezza's sanctuary: in the waiting room. Especially in the winter season, this desolate space is usually quite crowded with very tightly wrapped elderly people who stare gloomily and silently as if the Last Judgment is imminent. And it is, because Dezza's diagnoses are unrelenting.

However, the mood in the porch changes by magic when someone sees an acquaintance enter. The cheerful 'ciao ciao ciao' and 'come stai?' are then not of the air to only calm down after a few minutes. Then the whisper starts and I have to prick up my ears not to miss the climax. Before long, the acquaintances begin to exchange their minor complaints and inconveniences, and those litanies follow a fixed pattern, deeply carved by generations of nagging Italians.

As soon as I understand colpo d'aria I think I have heard from the muffled whispers, I brace myself. Here he comes, here he comes, I think. Yes, yes… yes! 'Mi fa male il cervicale,' one of the interlocutors confesses to my great pleasure, as if it were a rare incurable condition. Epidemic is the cervical sure, because all Italians suffer from it. Not me, because I'm not Italian and foreigners don't know what a cervical is. And a part of the body you don't know you have can't hurt, as Dezza once explained to me in great detail.

Completely cheered up by the fixed waiting room scene, I finally enter Dezza's room. As always the medical health insurance company staring at the screen of his laptop. He greets my 'buonasera' (I usually visit the afternoon consultation hour) with an affable smile. 'Stephanus,' he then says and types my name in advance, to bring out my extensive complaint file. He has stopped talking about my second name, Aloysius, which is so mysterious to him, after I explained to him that it simply means Luigi. “Mi dica,” he continues. Two astute twinkle eyes stare at me from behind his refined frames.

I explain that I have been suffering from a painful knee for weeks, but before I can elaborate on this, I am already lying on the treatment table with my pants down. Dezza kneads both my knees alternately. The right one is indeed a bit thicker. Dezza wants to know if I bumped him or did something stupid: the moment of truth! I already know what he's going to say if I confess to him how the pain started. He will lecture me in an ironic tone.

I hesitate for a moment, but I'll tell the truth anyway. 'Pilates. I think I overstretched him a bit during an exercise.' Dezza raises his eyes to heaven, lets his arms fall to his sides and returns to his desk, defeated. He lets his shoulders hang on purpose. Even as I struggle with my trouser legs, he begins: 'I really don't understand why everyone does such stupid things. Over the age of fifty, swimming is the only safe sport. The rest only leads to misery. Fitness, running, gymnastics .. pilates: all dangerous.'

After this tirade, he closes his mouth in a broad laugh. "But Pilates did help with my back pain," I interject. That should be a sufficient argument because Dezza can dream about my back problems after a decade. But no: 'And instead of a sore back you now have a big knee!' He laughs and indicates the size of a knee so large that even an elephant would have taken it to the doctor. I burst out laughing. "But without those idiots who get all those sports injuries, you'd be out of work!" I say. Now Dezza smiles again. 'No no no. I have enough work. Even without all these hogwash, stupidities.'

Enough for today. I get a prescription for painkillers and step back into the waiting room. There's still little to laugh about there, though they must have heard Dezza and me. At the pharmacy I stand in line. At some point the door opens and another customer enters. I recognize him from the waiting room. But what do I feel? March! An colpo d'aria! Oh no, right? Now the cervical are not far away either. Could the pharmacist have a remedy for it? Something homeopathic? A drink without active ingredients against a non-existent ailment: it must be effective.

Want to read more fun stories about life in Italy? You can find it in the three parts 'Italiaanse Status' by Stef Smulders, available at bol.com.