Words by Pat Eggleton

Buongiorno, cari lettori.

Today I hope you are going to help me solve one of the greatest medical mysteries of all time and it has nothing to do with diagnostics.

When I first visited Sicily in 1992 I concluded that a tourist could have been forgiven for imagining that the islanders had something against toilet seats as I rarely found one in the bathrooms of bars or other public places. This situation has improved a lot since then with the exception of one location in Modica – the hospital.

The missing toilet seats

No matter what department you find yourself in, if you need to avail yourself of the facilities, you will not find a toilet with a seat. No one could tell me why a year ago and no one has been able to tell me why since. I have several friends who work in the building, including two doctors and none of them has the faintest idea. It’s just another of those Sicilian enigmas over which you must raise your eyes heavenward, sigh deeply and utter “È così” -“It is so”. [Be sure you get the sigh right and put the tonic stress on the È.]

Less privacy than one would have in a British hospital

I found myself saying “È così” several times a day during my hospital stay and the first thing I resigned myself to was the lack of privacy. In Britain you immediately lose your dignity upon being admitted to hospital as you are called by your first name whether you want it or not and are weighed, prodded, examined and discussed by a seemingly endless stream of people.

In Modica you retain the dignity of your title but lose much of your privacy: there are no curtains to go round your bed, so although visitors are asked to leave the room, you are examined in full view of the other patients. All medical information is conveyed to you in their hearing, too, but once you surrender your shyness you can have a good chat with your bed-neighbours about your own and everybody else’s conditions. The elderly lady in the bed opposite mine knew when I would be discharged before I did and it was she who informed me and what it was to look after myself when I got home.

There was also less privacy than one would have in a British hospital because relatives deemed it necessary to stay most of the day and overnight in order to administer to care needs, even when their loved ones were not seriously ill. In a British hospital only a nurse would be allowed to perform the tasks that patients’ relatives carry out in some Italian hospitals, partly because of the legal position. In this large, modern hospital, however, there was no staff help available for patients needing to relieve themselves unless they were bedridden or needed a wheelchair to get to the bathroom. I do not wish to imply that the nursing care was poor, for it certainly was not; there simply wasn’t enough of it to go round.

This brings me nicely back to the mystery of the missing toilet seats.
I soon learnt that it was an “È così” affair as my fellow-patients all thought it was completely normal and I couldn’t work out why the women were not more bothered about it. Some of you may remember that my illness was causing me to lose my balance all the time and I found going to the bathroom under these circumstances a terrifying – though interesting – experience. Bathrooms in houses here are state-of-the-art and the pride and joy of many a Sicilian housewife, so it’s not as if toilet seats are unknown. Or perhaps I am merely over-observant, for when I asked one of my doctor friends about it, he said,
“Do you know, I’ve never noticed that?”

Perhaps it is a matter for Salvo Montalbano.

I would like to say that I received excellent medical care and very little of the above is intended as criticism.

Part 2 of the Patti Chiari hospital tale next week.