A tour to Italy took an unexpected turn for a well-known couple of Makhado (Louis Trichardt) when they ended up having to spend five weeks in an Italian hospital, surrounded by compassionate people who couldn’t speak a word of English.

“It is very frightening to be in a foreign country when illness strikes. The drama with the medical and travel insurance was traumatic, but in retrospect, one can see the hand of God all along the way,” said Ms Melody Mocke, whose husband, Mr Cyril Mocke (68), was hospitalised for a perforation of the colon.

Cyril’s health was fine when they left South Africa on 11 May. He had had a colonoscopy done beforehand, persuaded by his daughter, Kerryn, who is a medical doctor. The first week of Cyril and Melody’s tour was blissful and they spent a few days in magnificent historical Rome and then went on to Napels and Vienna.

On the morning of 20 May, Cyril wasn’t feeling well and he stayed on the tour bus while Melody and the other tourists explored Verona and crossed the border into Switzerland. Back in Veresi, in the beautiful Italian Lake District, the tour guide called a doctor and Cyril was taken to hospital by ambulance at about 19:00, with Melody in the front.

“And they drive like crazy!” says Melody.

At the hospital, Cyril was whisked away and there Melody sat, not knowing what was happening and unable to communicate. At last, a doctor who could speak English came and told her that her husband was seriously ill and had to be operated on.

Melody sat on a wooden bench for eight hours. Finally, at around 03:00, she was allowed to see her husband. He was full of tubes, surrounded by machines, very weak, but alive.

Tears ran when two of their four children, Kerryn and Brett, came to Italy for a couple of days to support their parents.

Despite a second operation and the accompanying pain, there were some hilarious moments during his five-week stay in hospital. Once he tried to tell the nurse, with a great deal of sign language, that she must either give him an injection now or knock him over the head, she replied: “Oooh, you want to shower, hey!”

Cyril shared a ward with a wonderful Italian patient. “He took me under his wing, wiped the perspiration of my brow and shaved my beard for me,” says Cyril. The Italian gentleman was diagnosed with stomach cancer and was dismissed from hospital to undergo treatment. He came back to visit Cyril and took a photograph of the Mockes. The next day, he surprised them with a present - a beautiful pencil sketch of each of them!

In the meantime, their son Christian took care of affairs back home and their daughter from Johannesburg, Sherryl, took it upon herself to sort out the medical and travel insurance. Though they were covered for R5 million, the company maintained that Cyril had had a pre-condition. With a lot of help from Kerryn, who conferred with the Italian specialists, they could prove that the perforation was in a perfectly healthy part of the bowel and was not a pre-condition. Sherryl was persistent and threatened with legal action, and eventually the insurance company relented.

“Once they came to the party, the company was fantastic. In the end, they paid for the hotel, a taxi ride in a Jaguar, a flight with Swiss Air in business class and all the medical costs,” said Melody. When the Mockes worked out the medical costs in Italy with their government medical care, it came to only R110 000 for two operations, five weeks in hospital, including all the anaesthetists, doctors, specialists, scans, tests and x-rays.

Back in South Africa, Cyril was hospitalised in Johannesburg for a few days, spent recovery time with Sherryl and arrived in Louis Trichardt on 19 July.

“What a joy to eat pap and boerewors. I don’t want to see pasta or pizza for a long time,” jokes Cyril. The Mockes thank all those who supported them with their prayers, “without which we never would have survived.”