Today was a little hectic. We had to get up early and head off to a hospital on one side of town so our son could have some blood samples taken. The doctors want to know why his level of anti-corpuscles is falling slightly and this means they want to carry out series of tests at one hospital followed by another test at another. A consequence of this wish was that yours truly had to fly across Milan to the San Raffaele hospital complex with a small phial of my son’s blood.
I only just managed to get to the San Raffaele in time – the section which I needed to take the sample to closes at 11 o clock in the morning. Still, mission accomplished. What I don’t really understand is why the hospitals could not have had the sample transferred internally – but then this is Italy, and one has to expect these little things.
Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
The lowish level of anti-corpuscles floating around in my son’s body does not come as a great shock to me – after all, he has been on antibiotics for around three years and although I’m not sure whether this would have had an effect, I would not be overly surprised to find out that it had. Italian doctors, however, maintain that there is no correlation between extended use of antibiotics and reduced levels of anti-corpuscles.
A family friend, who just happens to be a retired doctor, was a little surprised to hear that my son had been kept on antibiotics for so long, and in his opinion, it is probable that the antibiotics are no longer performing any useful purpose. I don’t really know – I’m not a doctor, and in Italy antibiotics seems seem to be used almost as widely as aspirin. Italians demand the things after only a few days of what might be bronchitis or what is more likely to have been not much more than a bad cold.
I think it would be fair to say that the Italian medical profession has a different attitude towards the use of antibiotics, especially when compared to the accepted use of the things in the UK, for example.
