Hospitalization - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 186

***
Lunch comes just after 12:30. Every day, a nursing assistant comes into our room with a
little hand-held device and punches in our menu selection. We are offered a choice of four
different primi piatti , usually soups, pasta and rice dishes. Then there are four choices of
maincourses,mostlymeat dishes,occasionally cheeses. Thenfourchoices forasideveget-
able,andfourchoicesfordessert.Apartfromthedessertwhichiseitherapplesauceorpear
sauce, the other menu items are real choices. Items repeat regularly on the menu lists, but
every day or two, there's something special that's not typically on the menu. You learn to
listen attentively for those items; they are typically delicious. But even the standard items
are quite good. I pinch myself occasionally and try to believe that I am enjoying hospital
food in Tuscany. But the artichoke risotto, the grilled trout, the baked chicken, the pureed
potatoes and many other dishes are truly superb. What a distance from those shimmering
red jellos with bits of canned fruit cocktail and those salisbury steaks of unidentifiable ori-
gin and the instant mash potato flakes that my parents endured in American hospitals in the
final years of their lives.
The fully automated ordering system almost works. Five days out of six, everything arrives
smoothly and flawlessly. On the sixth day you stare at your plate wondering how you could
have possibly ordered this. Then you realize that you never did. For dinner, there's a bowl
of semolina, a mozzarella cheese, some pureed potatoes, and an orange. You mention it to
the staff and they don't really have any explanation. Something apparently went wrong, but
tomorrow should be fine. And, in fact, it always is.
It's not a big deal. My only fear is that the company that wrote the ordering software for the
food service, is probably now hard at work on new products to automate ordering and dis-
tribution of patient medications. The doctor will just punch the info into a hand-held device
and the pills will appear neatly packaged in a little cup for each patient. Five days out of
six the drugs and dosages will be correct. On the sixth day, God help us.
***
This morning my roommate, Salvatore, who was a security guard for twenty-five years in
the area around Bari, is in a reflective mood. He speaks to all of us at once, two of us who
have just undergone first heart surgeries, and one who is line for the same.
“You know something? If we were born 50 years earlier, in the time of our grandparents,
we would all be dead now. All of us. With these things that we have. In the old days the
first time something got blocked up or didn't work right, that was it. Now with this techno-