platelet , noun | Physiology : a small colourless disc-shaped cell fragment without a nucleus, found in large numbers in blood and involved in clotting. (Oxford Dictionary)

Because of a nasty genetic disease affecting her blood, my sister produces too many platelets and the platelets cause her blood to thicken too much, this in the long run obviously leads to thrombosis, thus higher chance of stroke, ischemia, arteriosclerosis etcetera. She is 35 and they say the worse is not supposed to happen anytime soon, especially if she responds well to the containment drugs. Although right now her body doesn't seem to tolerate very well the mini aspirin, which is the standard treatment in these cases.

I went at the polyclinic today to make a HLA typing test in the not desirable case my sister should go for a bone marrow transplant in the next future. HLA stays for Human Leukocitye Antigenes, aka the major indicator of genetic compatibility between individuals.
My sister is being cured in Rome, and since the HLA test is very expensive the hospital here in Milan had to wait for some papers from Rome to arrive to authorize the test, and although it's not urgent, getting to the hospital I feel better that the papers arrived before I left for the U.S.

Later I am in the room where they take your blood for analysis. The doctor attends my arm phial after phial outlining for me the purpose and utility of the HLA typing test. She says that in case of bone marrow transplant the test must give 90% of compatibility, which is pretty hard to get. "There's only so little probability for siblings to be that compatible, actually only 25% chance to get there, and almost zero chance for any two random individuals", she says.
And the thing is risky too, I mumble.
"It is risky for the recipient", she says, "whose blood cells have to be 'destroyed' before the operation".
She makes a quick gesture outward with her hands turned down, flickering her fingers to picture the event of destruction. She doesn't go into the details of such a destruction, or the risks involved with it. She's so adapted to underplay the little annoyances of being a donor to persuade people to donate that she seems to be forgetting for a second there that she's talking about my sister's blood cells to possibly be "destroyed".
But I am afraid to ask more. She has sweet oblique eyes, dark hair and large cheek bones like certain italians have, a motherly suffering air about her that makes her immediately sympathetic. She doesn't want me to think at the details now, it's too early, and she's right I guess.
There is also a risk for the donor, right? I say then, feeling a bit coward and provocateur as I say it, and she replies, quick: absolutely not, no! Persuasive.
Behind us another doctor is going about the papers, curly blond hair and a larger body, also very gentle wider eyes. I feel weird and self-conscious as I sit there saying the names of my parents out loud for the family tree form she's filling in. I wonder for a second when it was the last time I pronounced those names.
Finally they hand me all the leaflets about being a donor, and about the bone marrow transplant, give me my documents back and off I go, rolling down the sleeve.

Strangely enough, be it for logistical considerations, or possibly for reasons of persuasion, to get in and out of the room where they take your blood for analysis one has to pass across the hall where the regular blood donors lay down and give blood. So as I walk by, at least a dozen are laying down calmly looking up at the ceiling or sideways eying the doctors, nurses, patients and special occasional potential donors like me passing by for the analysis. A very pretty girl, all dressed in black, is laying down on one of the stretchers listening to her earpieces. For a second there I have the disturbing feeling she's not even donating, she's just laying there listening to music.

Outside is still another warm day. I go across the area of the polyclinic to via commenda to finally get me something to eat. A little later I am sitting in a bar eating focaccia and reading the leaflets about bone marrow transplant.
To my disappointment nowhere on the leaflet (which is not a leaflet at all, actually, but just some xeroed pages stapled together) is said anything about the risks for the recipient. The possibility of rejection is mentioned where it explains the HLA compatibility numbers, and that's it. Nothing is said of the "destruction" of the cells the lady was referring to.
There are few laconic lines about the risks that the donor runs, though. A "very little but not null" chance of a "breaking of the spleen" is mentioned,"possibility of cerebrum-vascular accidents" and "myocardial ischemia", following the "mobilization" and alteration of the blood that the donor must undergo in order to produce more stem cells before the transplant. Wow, just great.

Out of the bar. Is the sky turning gray? Is it a sunny day? Fuck who knows. It's warm. I walk down the street wondering all the things it is stupid to wonder, like what if we she really will need the transplant? And what if we are not compatible?
Me and my sister never got along very much. Nobody really got along with anybody in our so called family. We never mentioned or proved our reciprocal feelings for each other in any way during the years and so, one wonders if the feelings are really there. Well, I wonder all the time and I never got a clear answer.
And if I ever have to do something so important for my sister... at least I want to do it right, to come out right. To be useful.

I curse science and doctors. I curse medicine. I walk by the Berchet high school, the second hour bell just ringing, a girl's running in, the heavy knapsack slamming her back back. Maybe her second hour is science.
Fuck, science. There are the moments of truth when one sees clearly. I have one right there at the end of via commenda. I sort of always knew that science existed to overcome fear, and suddenly I see it so clearly. The reasons, the hope, the results, the hopeless too. So mixed up.

As this story goes, the Italian polyclinic "Umberto I" in Rome, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, after having outsourced in these shortage years to a bunch of private contractors all its maintenance, today doesn't even know the exact number of its employees anymore. That's why the mythic journalist Fabrizio Gatti posing as a cleaning man managed to easily infiltrate the Hospital.
Every Italian will immediately grasp the reason why to infiltrate a public Hospital in this fashion, especially by a journalist who in the past has infiltrated and documented places like detention camps for illegal aliens and Mafia's slavery fields. The reason is the unbelievable condition of neglect in which Italian hospitals are generally left. Dirtiness, untidiness, broken stuff left around, abandoned toxic material, private files left open, generally run down infrastructures.
Every patient and medic knows that this is the normal background of Italian hospitals, especially in big cities.

Although not worn out at the levels of the Polyclinic Umberto I in Rome, the Polyclinic of Milan is not much better. Old and rotten in most parts, scarce of staff and certainly easy to break in, given that day and night anybody use it as a crossing way from one part of the city to the other, it could make a nice subject for another infiltration documentary.

Fabrizio Gatti has done a good work, as always: documented with loads of videos this time. Everything can be accessed here.
I am not going to translate the entire article, but here's a taste:

The storage facility for cultures of bacteria and viruses of the Department for Infectious and Tropical Diseases has no lock: without surveillance, with test tubes potentially infectious in the open, it is always accessible to anyone. For three days nobody cleans away the excrements that the Night of St. Stefan a stray dog left in the corridor used to move patients from a unit to another. Nurses and stretcher-bearers often smoke even when they move the infirm around with wheelchairs or stretchers. Every time the patients, even the most critically ill ones, are moved from Intensive Care or from the Emergency Room or from the operating rooms, naked under the sheets, intubated or with oxygen, they follow the same path of the garbage. They end between black bags and yellow cardboard boxes amassed in the basement, or lined behind the trash carts. And when the operators wash down the remains of garbage with jets of water, the wheels of the stretchers get soaked with sewage, and then pull the dirtiness along to the wards.

If I have to criticize something of this article, it is only its ending: "Tonight as always the waiting room of the Emergency Room is crowded. They are forced to wait for the work pace of the public health. And to have faith. They are not called Silvio Berlusconi and none of them can afford to be recovered in the United States."
Now, although as an Italian politician Berlusconi is directly responsible for this shame altogether with a bunch of other oligarchs, the polemic against him has not much sense in these terms. He is certainly not the only one who goes to the United States to have a heart-replacement operation. There's enough people in Italy rich enough to be recovered in the United States if they have to, only they probably will recur to it as a last resort, just like he did. We always tend to overlook how much rich people there is here, and how much rich is a western European country in general.
Also, to say "recovered in the United States" like if that means tout-court having a better health care seems optimistic to say the least. Although hospitals are undoubtedly better kept there, as far as I know infections caused by permanence at the hospitals are fairly common, and good infiltration documentaries are or can be certainly done there too.

So corriere.it says that Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn in the green zone of Baghdad. Well I don't really care for his personal destiny, besides I am persuaded that this was his doppelganger, with his beard-hazed face and those crooked teeth and the wide opened eyes.
Anyway if they want to send to death criminals they should at least show it to the people in the open. Why being merciless without shame, and yet being ashamed of showing what this actually means? (fear to die, cries, rhetoric of the authority, dangling jerked body, the snap of the neck breaking, hangman's hood, etc.)

Corriere.it should say how I can always be shocked by reading the usual things about the falling country instead: like those who die waiting for some ER to open for them. This item reminds me of an eleven months old boy I know (already mentioned on this blog a while ago), who fell from the stairs and smashed his head against the (luckily wooden) floor five meters below-- just two weeks ago. Few minutes after the accident he was hoisted on an ambulance which then waited 45 fucking-minutes in front of the house calling every hospital in the city for a neurosurgery with some vacant space slash time for him (luckily the little boy is recuperating now.)

And corriere.it should say how much I am disgusted to read about Somalia again, of course.
The hypocrisy and lies bubbling all over the phrases of the journalists.
The "cheering crowds". The others who already miss the "Islamic courts" and throw stones to the peaceful military convoys.
A Somali supposed-president escorted by Ethiopian soldiers! It would be like calling the Israeli army to protect Egypt. Only the U.S. could think of such a perversion. To Support the "lords of war" that everybody fears and detest (tribal leaders only respected by their closest circles), and to call in the old enemy to help: millions of people who have been starving and fighting and escaping for fifteen years are offered this as the only way out.
I wonder, is there a real choice, for the starving and traumatized and forever wounded, between the endless war (American way) and the ordered arrogance of the Islamic rule?
But the thing is, the Islamic rule proved to be able to bring peace and law --if only because not based on corruption like any other fighting part-- to a people who forgot even the meaning of those words. Corriere.it doesn't even try to understand why.

During a terrorist drill in Naples, the third after Rome and Milan, two ambulances running towards an emergency simulated at the central station of Naples smashed one into the other, luckily without serious consequences. Only three five paramedics were wounded.
In picture: people and dummies during the simulation. Thanks to Repubblica.it.
In September, during the previous simulated terrorist attack in Rome, a lot of things went wrong too. I think that this is comforting. My people do not really believe in organization.

**update: As Corriere.it reports, the simulation consisted in one bus exploding, followed by a second explosion near the maritime port. Meanwhile another backpack containing explosive was being discovered at the central station. Finally, a device exploded in a coach of a crowded Vesuvian train. During this last episode, a woman involved in the rescue operation was recovered for a panic attack due to the confusion and smoke following the simulated explosion.
The prefect of Naples, in charge of the operation, claimed a perfect success, maintaining that the accident where the two ambulances were involved and five people sent to the hospital is not significant.
He seems to forgets that for any Italian hospital, particularly if in Naples, five more injured means a lot of deal. Like, hours of wait.
Yet none of this simulations seems ever to be considering the timing of the emergency inside public hospitals.
Probably because the simulation in such cases would take too many hours. Or days.

'Apartheid' at Italian hospital. An Hospital in the Veneto region separates expectant mothers according to their ethnic origins.
I wonder what are they scared of; If I know people from Veneto a little, as I hope I do since I lived there for years, women, the italian expectants and their mothers, asked for the separation indirectly by complaining for the noisy and multitudinously immigrant families.
Those gigantic families surrounding the immigrant expectants' beds would constantly humble down our scarce prolific attitude by submerging us with floods of children and relatives.
I know that we don't like to see the many different ways by which we are going to disappear in a matter of decades as a ethnic and cultural gist.
'Cause italians as we knew them are not fit for this very efficient laboring world, and I, with them, sometimes admire them a little for this.
Poor racist bastards.

"Mysterious respiration problems, fever and other alarming symptoms arised after a simple bath in the sea. A bad sunday for tens of bathers in Genova, checked into hospital after feeling sick on the beach." (from il corriere)
Welcome to the sunny country. They suggest it's an alga. Could be. What kind of alga can be so harmful anyway?
Well, I don't care. I would never swim in the sea in front of Genova. You must be crazy or desperate to do that. Which, btw, most of our italian workers-on-holiday are.
You came to this blog for some advice on your next vacation in Italy?
Don't come in August, don't bathe near cities or even villages, don't mingle with desperate Italians on vacation. They're crazy.

* * update: the people on the beach got actually intoxicated by an alga. It's a tropical alga that lives now in the Mediterranean thanks to the higher temperatures. It was blossoming. So don't come to Italy at all. Here burning alga flowers floating can send you to hospital.