Italian Hospitals

In 2016, I did a creative writing class for education where I studied in Bologna, Italy for 3 weeks. Just before my trip, my neurologist had increased my migraine medicine to 1000mg.

I remember feeling weird after the flight. It started with harsher migraines, nausea, and feeling overheated, but I blamed this on the summer weather. After a week and a half of nausea, vomiting, passing out, dizziness, etc – my professor finally decided that it would be smart for me to be seen by a doctor.

There was only one English-speaking doctor at a pharmacy in the city. My classmates went to class as normal and I stayed home one day. My professor gave me instructions on how to get to the pharmacy on my own. I set off and I honestly don’t remember much from my journey besides having a hard time breathing, not being able to see because my eyes kept going black, and some man handing me a card and trying to speak to me in Italian. I made it to the pharmacy and asked if the man spoke English. After confirming he could help me, I ran him through everything and he determined that I needed to go to the hospital.

I told my professor and she contacted an Italian professor at the university to see if she could take me. Lucia picked me up and took me to the hospital in Bologna. No one spoke English besides her.

The hospital was crowded and we had to wait a bit. When we finally got in, all of the doctors and nurses were yelling in Italian. They asked me over and over again if I was pregnant and I kept having to tell Lucia to tell them no, it’s not possible. After the 8th time of them asking this, she finally made it clear that unless I was the second Virgin Mary, I wasn’t pregnant. They finally listened and went through my vitals and meds and did a scan of my brain, determining that I needed to stop taking the 1000mg medicine. They tried explaining that on my flight because of the pressure, something in my head had “popped” and caused the medicine to bring out symptoms that only happen to 5% of the people who take it. I was sent back to the university and updated my neurologist from afar.

The first week and a half of my trip had been ruined by my sickness. After stopping the medicine, I slowly got back to feeling normal. I was able to go out with my classmates, eat normal meals, drink alcohol, and function for the most part. The rest of the trip was absolutely amazing.

When I returned from my trip to Italy, the migraines stopped for some time. It was like a “miracle fix”. A medicine that was supposed to help me made everything worse. And then when taken off of it, things immediately were better. Of course this was only temporary.