Personal Journey |

For me and my husband, it was a belated honeymoon trip to Florence, Venice, Rome and Greece. For my husband's 78-year-old mother, whom everyone calls Nonna, it was her first trip home to Celico, Italy, in 20 years.

Luckily for all of us, we took our travel agent's advice and bought travel insurance along with the plane and train tickets, hotel packages, and passage on a cruise ship.

Nonna was happy and in good health when we reached Calabria, where we were greeted by her family, food and vino. For three days, my husband and I visited Nonna's cousins, the deceased, the butchers and the farmers. Then, my husband and I kissed Nonna goodbye and headed off to do some exploring on our own for a few weeks.

Those plans screeched to a halt when our cell phone rang on the train from Venice to Rome. It was Nonna's sister: "Nonna fell and broke her femur. She is in the hospital, and we are all here with her. She's OK."

Who would have thought that she would fall and break her hip during her first week visiting her family? We had expected them to sit around the hillside patio, drink cappuccino, and tell stories from the past.

The doctors placed a pin in Nonna's hip. She couldn't walk, and 10 days after the surgery, she was moved to a rehabilitation center. At least she had plenty of family members to visit her and keep her spirits up.

But my husband and I had to return home. We got daily updates from our relatives, but it was difficult for us to contact the doctors. That's where our travel insurance started paying off. AIG Travel Guard relayed information from Nonna's doctors to us. Thank goodness she was doing well.

Then there were the medical bills.

"They are going to find a loophole in the policy," I said to my husband. "How can we spend $160 on an insurance policy and expect them to cover thousands of dollars in hospital bills?"

My travel agent and a Travel Guard representative reassured me that this was the purpose of the travel insurance policy.

After a month of rehabilitation, Nonna was able to answer the phone and tell us how she was whizzing around in a wheelchair and getting daily visits from family and friends. A few weeks later, she traded her wheelchair for a cane and was ready to come home.

Again, Travel Guard took care of all the details: the paperwork, arranging for a personal nurse from Holland to fly with Nonna, and paying a balance of about $14,000 at the rehab center so she could be released. Although the flights were heavily booked just before Labor Day, Travel Guard secured first-class tickets for the flights from Calabria to Rome and Rome to Philadelphia.

When the nurse delivered Nonna to our home by ambulance, we celebrated by serving both of them an Italian feast.

Now, Nonna is walking around carefully without her cane, and Travel Guard has paid more than $20,000 for her care. The company is still working with me as we wait for the surgical bills.

It was a long summer for all of us, but one lesson we learned is that you never know what can happen when you travel outside the United States. Nonna's health insurance does not cover anything outside the country, but our travel insurance sure has.

 

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Karen Monaghan-Arnone lives

in Dresher, Montgomery County.