Why not to trust your tutore

Do you ever get the feeling you've been taken for a ride? How do you feel afterwards? Angry? Frustrated? Humilliated? Bewilldered? Outraged? Disappointed? E and I got taken on the ride of our lives this week and much as I think it's incredibly dull to read other people's moaning 'why me' stories I'm going to tell you about it anyway and if you don't like whingeing you can stop reading now!

Let me start from the beginning. On leaving hospital after my iron-removal work I was told that the next stage of the therapy would involve wearing some kind of plastic leg support, a tutore. The doctor, who I have known since February, informed me that tutores were hard to find. 'But don't worry!' he told me 'I know a place that stocks them. Here is their phone number and the name of the product you need'.

Armed with our information we phoned a couple of days later. The shop had them in stock, but it was some distance away so we planned to go on the only morning E could get free from work. This also happened to be the day before I was due in hospital to have the thing put on.

Off we set, and two hours of murderous traffic later arrived at a somewhat uncomprimising looking, poky sanitaria. Already feeling slightly out of kilter by this discovery seeing as there is a sanitaria in every neighbourhood in Rome we went in and were told that the tutore they had was for the right, not left leg. And it cost 114 Euro. 'I can get you the left leg by tomorrow morning, or you could ask elsewhere if you're in a rush' the girl told us. Some not-so-probing questions later confirmed our suspicions that yes, this was an ordinary run-of-the-mill sanitaria and not, as we had been led to believe, a tutore churning-out super-shop.

We left the shop, sat in the car and looked at eachother in disbelief. We were bewildered, and kept going round in circles trying to find an obvious answer to why our doctor would send us here for no apparent reason. This was the doctor who spoke to me in Englsih when I arrived hurt and confused in hospital. He liked chatting to E about pizza toppings. It didn't make sense.

After a while E's mouth set in a grim line. As we set off to go and look for the tutore in one of the hundreds of sanitarias in Rome the anger began. There ensued lots of steering-wheel bashing and some very colourful language. I was caught between begging to be let out of the car as he stormed angrily down resedential streets and trying not to laugh at the fantastic Italian curses raining out of his mouth (how about porca madonna- pig madonna, anyone?).

As we raced back towards town desperately trying to find the thing before the next days' appointment I made myself as small as possible in the passenger seat and while E started yelling abuse and honking his horn in response to some minor road infringement I began to feel that very British form of anger- outrage. I was outraged that a doctor in a public hospital could make such a 'recommendation'. Outraged that he had the nerve. Outraged by the betrayal of trust. So I sat and nursed my outrage while pig madonnas were cursed all around me and we passed a very tense hour trip back to the city.

Finally, when we later came to talk about it with our friends we were humilliated when they pointed out to us what we already knew- that he had taken us for a ride because we are foreigners and therefore easy prey for this particularly Italian brand of furbizia, or cunning. My doctor knew that at the time I couldn't walk, that E worked, and that we had no one else to help us out, yet he still sent us miles out of town to find what we could have found on our doorstep. We felt stupid.

And now? I'm mainly disappointed that this could happen in the public health system and will be more wary in the future. It may seem like I'm making an unncecessary hoo-ha about this, but it really was a spectacular waste of E's time and my money, both of which we have in short supply (the nurse asked me in hospital why I had splashed out and bought the branded tutore...yep, you guessed it, the brand was there specified on my handy doctor's note). This one's definitely getting labelled under 'Italian Puzzles'.