A New Addition to the Family

Here is my sister holding the newest addition to the family, an itty-bitty kitten. I came up with his name. He's brown, you see, and the word brown in Italian is marrone (mah-roh-neh). I also thought of how in New York, the transplanted Sicilians there would pronounce Madonna "Marron" when frustrated, so I suggested we call it Marron. In English, I guess, we'd translate its name as "Brownie."

Cute, huh? But it has a set of lungs on it!

My Brother-in-Law's Secret Formula

Like most of us who get older, once we realize we like something, we stick with it. My brother-in-law figured out a while ago that mixing certain flavors of soda (or pop, whatever you prefer to call it) in just the right proportions makes for the perfect flavor for him.

So here he is mixing just the right ratios of ginger and orange soda and who knows what else? I tried it once. Let's just say that I don't think the results would be a big seller on the open market! But each to his own, right?

Castle Grounds

This is the first time I went inside this building on the grounds of the Sarazano Castle near my sister's house.

In the first photo, you can see the base of an altar, recently found and now being excavated.

More photos? Click here.

Stopping for Coffee

On the way to the hospital today, Sally and I stopped at one of our favorite coffee shops for cappuccino. You may remember this from my travels here last year - this is the place where the world-famous Diana makes the best coffee ever and adds art work, as you see here. (Sorry the coffee is a little out focus!)

Diana consented to have her photo taken with me. Wasn't that nice of her?

To see the other entries on Diana's artwork, click below:

Caffe Macchiato with Class

More Coffee Art from Artist Diana

Mom...Maybe a Little Better

It's hard to say, but today mom may have showed some signs of improvement. I spent a long time talking with her, my face close to hers. She never looked away from me and when I moved a little, she would follow for a bit. She also reached out her hand to mine and grabbed it three times today. She tried to talk three or four times but could not get the words out.

I don't know if she knows who I am (I think not) but she knows I'm a friendly face who comes to visit her every day and talk to her. She is able to smile ever so slightly when I play the fool with her. That's rewarding for me.

Sally (my dear sister) and I are mom's companions. We talk to her every day and try to cheer her up, try to jog her memories, try to make her feel loved. In this hospital, the first couple of days she had a young lady as a roommate for a couple of days, then she was alone for a day, and then she has had a very nice 90-year-old lady who was there for 3 days and was released today. The 90-year-old said she had never seen a mother so loved by her children. We responded that we were just showing her what she had shown us all our lives - the love of a mother who took care of her two children by herself after losing her husband after only 3 years of marriage.

Sally is fantastic. Despite having her share of pain and her very busy schedule, she seems indefatigable with mom - loads of energy there.

Today she had an MRI. We hope to know the results very soon.

Thank you again for all your support.

A Visit from Pamela and Her Two Boys

This is Pamela, a long-time family friend of my sister's and so also one of my friends for the last several years. In the time I've known her, she married Robby, who was stuck at home tonight working, and has had two boys, Thomas and Lucas. They are all wonderful people and I'm proud to know them!

More photos? Click here!

Davide, Mark, Monica and Michela

Here I am with Monica, Mark, Michela and Davide and Carlotta the Dog in their workplace here in Reggio Emilia, Italy. They are all supernice people and Davide and Mark are good friends of the family.

Monica (the blonde) and Michela (the brunette) are twin sisters - yes, really! I think this is the first time I have been kissed by twin ladies!

More photos? Click here!

A Visit from Mark and Giorgia

Our good friends Mark and Giorgia (pronounced Georgia) came to visit Sunday evening to my sister's house here in Italy. This is Giorgia, Mark, and my sister in the first photo.

In the second photo, I'm the lucky recipient of a kiss (on the cheek, alas) from Giorgia!

More photos? Click here.

Vera's 50th Birthday Party

This is Vera, a good friend of my sister Sally. She is an excellent pediatrician who lives and works in London. She visits her home town here in Italy often and was here to let us all celebrate her 50th birthday party. She had a huge turnout and a local band. We all got blue T-shirts with VERA 50 on the back so we all looked like members of her team. She wore a yellow t-shirt as our coach.

A fun time was had by all!

More photos? Click here.

Mom is the Same Today

Today mom is the same, not talking, looking at us when we talk but not able to respond or move much. I have extended my stay by eight days until August 2nd and hope to see some results in the meanwhile.

Tomorrow we should know the results of the MRI. Here's hoping...

You all keep me sane with your emails and comments here. Thank you so much.

Mom is Not Improving

Sigh...today was not a good day for hoping for mom's recovery. The head doctor at the new hospital said he's not convinced that mom has the Herpes virus because the test for the virus results in many false positives and it is so rare for the elderly to actually have it.

The cortisone had helped, it seems to me, in that they stopped it yesterday and she was back to not being able to communicate or move again. She only tried to say things a few times today to us and each time it was hard for her to get any words out.

Part of the reason for that, I think, is the side effect of the cortisone. Her face is very swollen and perhaps her tongue as well and it's hard for mom to talk.

I'm seriously thinking of prolonging my stay here. The doctors are doing another MRI today and will have complete results on Wednesday. I was supposed to take trains up to Zürich Thursday and then fly out Friday, but I may stay longer to see if the diagnosis changes with the MRI results and if that means a treatment with visible results in a few days.

Here's hoping...

Mom is Improving

Improvement is always a relative term, of course. She has been at the new hospital for two days. We had a long talk with the head doctor and he confirmed what they were going to do. The first order of business has been to give mom some cortisone to help dry up some of the excess liquid that surrounds her brain and presses down on it. They started the treatment yesterday. Today she was like a different person. She is still not back to herself but I was delighted to see her moving her whole body in bed rather than just her head when she would move any part of her body at all. She also would turn her head to look directly at me and grabbed hold of my hand a couple of times. She is still not herself mentally but she is talking nonstop again, over and over about how she has to work hard to help the children. In this case, she's not talking about my sister and me, whom she still doesn't recognize, but of the orphan children that she worked with when she was a young lady, before meeting my father and moving to the States. She worked long hours to make money to help the orphans in the orphanage. The name of the orphanage was St. Joseph's (San Giuseppe) and she mentioned the name, so we figured out where her memory was. She used lots of words today, though, that I hadn't heard her use since I've been here, a larger vocabulary than simply repeating the same phrase over and over, which is what she was doing before.

It's day to day. I hope to see even more improvement tomorrow, perhaps even a return of more recent memories, but I'm happy to see such improvement in one day. These things can turn on a dime, I know, and tomorrow she may be back to a waking coma state, but perhaps this is a harbinger of things to come, good things. Thanks again for all your support.

They Now Know What's Causing Mom's Illness!

Finally, a test has come up positive. Mom has Human Herpes Virus Type 6. It usually attacks children under the age of 3 and is mild, affecting the skin only, going away on its own after a while. However, when it attacks adults, it can be much more serious, often infecting the brain, which is what has happened to her.

Mom is being moved as we speak to the bigger hospital in Reggio Emilia, where they have a topnotch communicable disease division and they'll be able to take better care of her.

Mom didn't have a fever or any of the symptoms she has now when she entered the hospital. All this happened after about a week. We don't know if the virus had been dormant in her and woke up after she was in the hospital or she got the virus in the hospital. The research we have done this afternoon after we found out tells us that this virus an lay dormant for months in the body, so it's likely she already had it before she went into the hospital. Either way, I'm glad that at least we have a probable cause!

We hope to know more soon and will keep you posted here.

Signs

Signs, signs, signs. I like signs.

Around the Washington, D.C. beltway, near the town of Kensington, is the Mormon temple. When you come West on the outer loop, the temple seems to rise out of the ground in front of you. To many, it looks like the palace of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz.

Once in a while, on the fence that separates the beltway from the temple grounds, someone will put up a hand-written sign that can be seen as you drive past- SURRENDER DOROTHY. The first time I saw that, I almost split my gut I laughed so hard!

Not far from my sister's place in Italy is a home on a nice piece of land. For years, the homeowner had a horse on his land. When the horse got old, it would often lie down on the ground to rest. Well...motorists driving by would see the horse lying on the ground and stop to tell the homeowner that his horse was dead. After this happened a few times, the homeowner put up his own handwritten sign, "MY HORSE IS NOT DEAD!"

Of course, the horse did eventually die, but as far as I know the homeowner simply took the sign down after they took the horse away rather than putting a big red X over the word NOT.

These things make me laugh!

Update on Mom

This is my mom a couple of years ago with Chiara, my cousin. For the last few days, my mom has shown some slight improvement. Sunday was much like Saturday - she was very talkative but didn't say much that made sense.

Monday she slept quite a bit. Yesterday and today she has been awake but has spoken much less, and when she does it's tough to understand because she is not speaking very clearly. We have been showing her photos from her life and ours, have been talking with her about a lot of things to try to trigger her memories but at this point she still only seems to remember her name and her place of birth.

The doctors still can't figure out what's causing all this - it's very frustrating. I'm ready to wring some necks but I don't think that will do much good - in fact, wringing a doctor's neck may just get me barred from the hospital. Of course, the doctors are doing their best but I can't believe that there aren't other doctors who may not be able to tell what's wrong with my poor mom.

Thank you for all of your emails and your good wishes. They are much appreciated!

More Photos - A Castle!

These are from today. More photos can be found by clicking here.

More Photos from Casina

Here are more photos taken from my sister's car while driving back and forth from the hospital. You should especially click the first one to enlarge it so you can see the rainbow! More photos can be seen by clicking here.

Getting Older

OK, this is just a random pic from the Web, it's not me! But I *am* 48 years old now...wow! I've now lived longer than most people in history!

As I get older, I'm noticing a trend. When I go to Bertucci's pizza, I almost always order the Marengo pizza. After having tried many different pizzas there at first over a period of several months, I tried the Marengo pizza, adding caramelized onions. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!

If I were to go back to Bertucci's often, I'm sure I would try many different dishes there. However, I only go once every few months and so I always have the same thing now, perhaps with a salad on the side. Why? I know I will love it, that's why. I found something I like and I stick with it.

That's the quandary of getting older. When I was young, I was ready to try everything, thinking myself quite immortal. Now that I realize my days are numbered, instinctively I want to use every moment to the utmost and that means sometimes not trying something different and new on the off chance I'll be disappointed. Rather, I'll stick with something I know I'll like to make the most of that moment.

This is not always a good thing. It's old-man syndrome. It's "when I was young, I could buy a Mars bar for a nickel." It's "what is it with these young people and their strange music?" However, if the old man is happy, what of it? If he's not, then maybe it requires a change in attitude.

A classic example is music. Everyone thinks that their generation's music is the best. Those of a generation younger than they listen to "strange" music, not like the music in the good old days. Suddenly we find ourselves listening to the oldies station, which of course only plays the best songs from every year of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and maybe even the 80s! However, this I do try to resist. I actually listen to the Top 40 pop station a lot and I love a lot of the new music. My current craze is Duffy and her song Mercy. OK, so it sounds as if it could have been made in the 60s, but still! I also love Natasha Bedingfield, Panic in the Disco, State of Shock and others. Those who would pine for the good old days of the songs of the 60s would do well to listen to them carefully and realize how many of their lyrics were silly, with all their "yeah-yeah-yeahs". Funny but true.

One place that getting older is not always fun is watching movies and realizing I had already seen the same story in an earlier movie. The kids think it's fresh and new. I know better! Shucks.

Funny and Cute

In Italy for a sad reason...

First, this is not my mom. This is the other lady in my mom's hospital room with me and my sister behind her. More on this in a moment.

I came to Italy very suddenly Wednesday, arriving Thursday after flying from Boston, where I was working, to DC, and then onto Zürich, Switzerland, where I hopped on three trains to get to Reggio Emilia, Italy, where my sister's friend picked me up and took me directly to the hospital where my mother has been for two weeks as of today. She came because she had a bad stomach ache that wasn't going away and just when things seemed to be going better, she suddenly fell into a semi-comatose state. The doctors said they believed she had had a stroke.

As soon as my sister told me on Tuesday, I cashed in 100,000 of my 140,000 frequent flier miles on United Airlines to book my ticket and flew out the next day. I wanted to fly to Italy directly, but the airline won't allow frequent fliers to use their miles to fly to Italy because it's too popular a tourist destination, at least not from June 1st until August 31st. So I found the closest city I could to which I could fly, and that was Zurich. I would have spent the cash to fly more directly, but cash is short right now. After two days of traveling, I arrived at my mom's bedside.

What I saw of her frightened me. I am not prone to easy tears but I was not able to stop crying. She was totally unresponsive, alive but in a deep sleep from which she would not wake. I returned and spent the whole day there yesterday and finally in the afternoon she woke up some and tried to talk but was not able to make much sense; her words not even recognizable.

My mom actually woke up today and talked a lot, clearly. The only problem was that she kept repeating the same sentence over and over, one that didn't make much sense. She appeared to be reliving the same moment from many years ago over and over. Sometimes she would answer our questions. We asked her what her name was and she said she didn't know. After we told her her name she then repeated it back later fine. My sister and I asked her who we were and she said she didn't know. That much didn't change. Her body is rather swollen, including her feet, from all the IV liquids she has been getting, and my sister asked her if her feet hurt and she clearly answered that, no, they did not hurt! Believe me, after the last two days of seeing her do nothing but sleep and occasionally murmur something that I couldn't make out, today was a joy. I doubt she'll ever be back to normal but I do hope to see a lot of improvement in the coming weeks.

I'm staying for at least two weeks. The doctors still don't know what is wrong with her. They have done many tests and think it's a virus, maybe one like Mad Cow, though clearly it's not Mad Cow.

My mom is only 73. She shares a large hospital room with two ladies, one who is 94 and the other, the one in the picture above, who is 92. The 94-year-old does not look good, but this lady, whose name is Onesta, is perfectly coherent and a lovely person with whom to converse. Onesta means Honest in Italian - what a nice name, no? She keeps an eye on mom during the night when we can't be there, though she herself is a patient. Unfortunately, she had to miss her sister's birthday the other day - her sister who just turned 100!

Onesta doesn't know much about the States and so she has asked me some interesting questions, based primarily on old westerns she has seen, I think. Here are two of the more interesting ones:

1. Do people in America eat snakes? I saw it in a movie. What do they eat in America?
2. Are there really people with dark skins in America? Do they live in huts?

The second question pained me so I explained carefully how the situation really is. She seemed very accepting of my answers!

I will post what I can from time to time, and I will also post some photos I took getting down here and being a passenger in my sister's car as we drive back and forth to the hospital twice a day.

Thank you to all my blog fans (both of you!) for your continued support!

Scenes in Italy Driving to the Hospital

Do click the photos to enlarge them and see them better.

Zurich...

Flying into Zürich


The last Starbucks I'll see for a couple of weeks - in Zürich Airport


In the airport train station to take the first of three trains


The train station sign showing we are Zürich Airport


What you see after leaving Zürich through the rain window (you really should click the photo to enlarge it!)

Italian Festival in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday was the annual Italian Festival in Washington, D.C. Every year they focus on a different region of Italy and this year it was Lazio's turn. It's a small festival, but nice. In area where it's rare to hear Italian heard, it's nice to hear so many people speaking Italian around me. The gelato was good and we got to see some friends we hadn't seen in a while.

Click here for more photos and videos.