The movers are here packing up boxes and I’m looking very officious and busy as I type this. (Better than continuing to get in the way.)

We are sad to leave our friends here, our patient babysitter, our hard-won transition from subjects to recipients of local gossip. We are, however, leaving a town where most of the pigeons have deformed left feet from inexpert banding. Creeeeeeeepy.*

Poor Max has been having a new heart problem, severe enough that it requires starting a thrice-daily medicine and frequent ECGs. He’s putting up with it admirably, pretending that his mobile heart monitor is a phone and calling everyone he knows. His little heart gets up to 240 bpm for 30 minutes at a time, high enough for his pediatrician to start crying in her office when she saw me understand.

We are glad to get back to the great pediatric cardiologist in Hamburg, and grateful for the expedient care we’ve received here. If I were my week’s schedule, I would be looking a little bruised from the thrice-weekly trips to the children’s hospital in Milan. Luckily, I’m not a schedule, I am a person with friends and family who are happy to cook and ferry and Google for us in a time of need.

It does feel a bit, though, like the power supply at my career’s cold storage facility might have had a failure, and I am at risk for what the pharmaceutical world calls a ‘temperature excursion’. I know I’m stressed this week even though I ain’t got no job, but please, career, don’t die on me. Also, don’t come back to life as an Italian Pediatric Cardiology Translator because although we’re muddling through, communicating life-changing facts and decisions in my fourth language does not feel like my greatest strength. (Picture me holding up my hands this far apart and saying, “This bad? Or this bad?”)

Next up: arriving in Hamburg, unpacking, doing the round of Max’s German doctors, evaluators and therapists, and reconnecting with friends for a few days before heading to Colorado for a much-anticipated 6-week collapse at the Rosenbaum farm.

I cannot wait.

*for me. Fuuuuucking nightmarish for the pigeons.