Tradotto dall’autore – Copyright: ©Paolo Giovannetti, 2024 (inedito)
Una giornata particolare per il protagonista che si sveglia con una fitta al petto. Preoccupato si reca al pronto soccorso dove gli fanno tutti gli accertamenti del caso. Ma poi il destino volta pagina …
Monday morning – seven o’clock – he was in bed and already awake as usual, but that morning was a special morning. A sudden pain was coming at the left side of his chest, the heart’s side, a twinge two minutes long. He rested motionless almost breathless trying to drive away bad thoughts. Then he got out of bed looking for his wife to tell her about his painful experience, but she was already out, gone to work. So he sat in the kitchen and took his habitual light breakfast: coffee-milk and a slice of bread with strawberry jam. He was thoughtful and a bit worried. He wasn’t the person to be frightened at all but that morning he thought that he might have had a warning. Maybe a sort of a heart attack? He also thought he was a little over-sixty, a risky age they say, and the last blood test showed an high value of cholesterol. So he decided to phone to his doctor if only for an advice. The doctor, a wise and scrupulous woman took seriously his symptoms and invited him to go as soon as possible to the first-aid of the nearest hospital, just for a check.
Jacob, this was his name, didn’t feel a real pain now but simply a sensation of a light weight on his chest, nevertheless he decided to follow the doctor’s advice and took his scooter to ride to the town’s hospital.
At the first-aid’s triage a male nurse, a fat man with a green coat, after listening about his symptoms, registered him and sent him to the Red Zone where he was laid in a stretcher. Shortly a blond-haired nurse went by him: «Mr. Jacob, how are you now?» He replied that he wasn’t feeling too bad at the time. «Anyway we have to follow our protocol in these cases so now I’ll connect you to the automatic pressure monitor and we’ll check your blood every three hours, so be patient.»
In that place there were more than ten locations for hospitalized persons, each separated by a tent, so Jacob, that was resting almost motionless in a rather disconfortable stretcher, could hear the speeches of everyone, those of doctors and patients. The needle of the first blood test was already out when he heard a doctor saying: «the guy in number five has swallowed fifteen razor blades but we have found only ten, we must check again his stomach.» Jacob was number nine and he listened carefully if they were talking about him. Time passed and after three hours the nurse came back with another syringe for the second blood check. He asked: «How many more?» «Be patient, just another, Mr. Jacob, then doctors will be able to understand your case and make a diagnosis.» He tried to take a nap but the bottom of the stretcher was very hard and stressful for his back and he often had to turn side to side. He thought they should provide real beds in the Red Zone but he remained silent. Meantime a new patient entered, was a Belgian young woman, Jacob heard the Head Physician say if she could speak English but she answered in French. So the doctor started asking her some questions in French, he was talking slowly. Jacob could understand the language and heard her saying that she suffered from severe pain in her belly, then two nurses came and put a drip on her left wrist closing her location’s tent: number eleven. After some time two patients left their places: number seven and eight were now free. Jacob began to be worried, he remembered his appointment with the plumber at home at four p.m. and now was one o’clock, but a male nurse came by him. He was a bearded, tall man that told him he was to bring him for a lung x-ray, so he made him sit in a wheelchair and pushed it towards the radiography department. Half an hour passed and Jacob came back to his location, feeling that his back was a bit relieved by the change of position but now he was again in the same uncomfortable stretcher.
During his absence, number seven had been occupied by a young boy that he said to have experienced dizziness and of seeing double. He told the doctor he suffered of epileptic seizures and that he was taking regularly his medicine. Shortly a neurologist was called to visit him. Jacob thought he should have been visited by a cardiologist instead, so he asked to the doctors to call him , but at that moment they were talking loudly and almost happy about the remaining five blades found in the guy’s stomach.
After an hour, at the end, Jacob was visited by a young cardiologist that looked at his electrocardiogram and made him an ultrasound at his hearth. Finally he said to him that he had nothing to worry about, his twinge had been probably a muscle pain, then the Head Physician called him and told he could come back home: he was discharged from the Red Zone.
Jacob looked at his watch: thirty to four, he could arrive home on time for the appointment. He headed fast to the hospital parking and started his scooter. After half a mile he went around a roundabout not seeing a truck approaching his side. Too late, an useless hard braking. A white helmet lay at the road side next to an ambulance with blinking lights.
In the Red Zone the doctors were talking remembering a patient named Jacob, one of them wispered: “may God protect”.
Le Mie Storie 