Corsica Day 9

Monday, it was back to the hospital, this time in Ajaccio. Amy took me while Tim kept the four girls at the apartment. In Ajaccio, the hospital visit went relatively smoothy. My foot is still very ugly. They took a few more x-rays; discovered a “petit” break in one of my foot bones (basically, where the ligament tore away) that will heal on it’s own; decided against a real cast because of its weight; and prescribed an “air cast” (boot). We got answers to all of our specific questions (Amy is a great care provider, in that she wrote the questions down ahead of time for me and made sure they got answered), but it’s still not super clear what the extent of the injury is (and therefore what the recovery from it looks like). It is clear that I've been told to see an orthopedist when we return home. Less English was spoken at this hospital than in Porto Vecchio (which was surprising) but more Italian was spoken. We used Amy’s Italian when the person on the other side of the conversation was fluent in Italian. Which was once. Otherwise, the other person would speak in French, Amy and I would cobble together what we thought they were saying, Amy would repeat it back in Italian to verify, and the speaker would excitedly corroborate that we understood. Who knows if we did?

We hobbled from the hospital to the car (they took my splint and simply wrote a prescription for the boot) so we could go to the pharmacy. It was just a few blocks away, but even a few blocks are so frustratingly long right now. The pharmacist helpfully fit the air cast, then we had some lunch. We had the most French lunch yet… at a place called the London Cafe.

We headed back to the apartment (by now, it was mid afternoon), where Tim had taken the girls on a scavenger hunt and bug finding trip around the grounds of the apartment. Each girl had a bucket of “treasure” and they were pleased to show them to us. The little girls were still both asleep (at 4pm!) so he must have worked them hard.

Amy and I took over kid-duty, and Tim went back to the Calanques to hike a bit and photograph them in a better light. Then we met up at a roadside restaurant Amy and Tim had passed on their drive the previous day. It was delicious, and just the perfect kind of place. Everyone on the staff was jovial, which makes the language barriers not so awkward, and the food was fresh and delicious (except for the over-cooked steak served to our big kids).