I retract everything I said yesterday. When I understood that only one of the medications cost 90,000 shekel well over $25,000, i was suddenly embarrassed about the stink I’d made here.
Anyway I have a backache that won’t go away so I’m going to the orthopedist for some of the good stuff he gives for pain, so I am too dependent on the health clinic to complain about it…
Ezi’s father Bandi had a friend named Naf, who was a bachelor in the wild city of Tel Aviv, with women all over town. One morning he came over looking all scruffy and worn out, and Bandi looked at him and winked, suggesting the wild nights he must be having. “No, no!” He shouted, “It’s not the f—ing – It’s the running!” I keep this story at the front of my mind to keep my sense of humor when I follow Ezi trying to get the authorizations to get treatment for his lymphoma. All right, it’s been difficult diagnosing – almost a year and a quarter before it could be said with authority that his lymphoma is probably indolent and could be helped by a treatment of Zevalin and Maphtera. But once the protocol was clear we thought it would be simple – just do it. Okay, they wanted to get some stem cells first. So the authorizations took a while and the nurse wasn’t around, and all that. But now that the hematologist waved the papers at us and told us to get them set up with the insurance because the next shipment of radioactive material from France would be on the 23 and he had to have the biological material a week before, we thought it would be easy.
But No.
Our GP had to authorize the M and Z, and she is overworked, so it took her a few days to see the request, and a few more days to respond, and when Ezi picked it up today and took it to the health clinic offices they noted that she had only asked for Z and not for M. So we have to start all over with asking the GP who isn’t there today for the M paper, take it over to the clinic. Then, hopefully, there will still be time to get it approved through the hc board, take that approval back to the doctor, who will then issue the hc approval for hospitalization, take all that to the hospital and begin ordering the medicine and arranging the dates for treatment.
Having assumed it would work out, I canceled the book launch on the 28th because Ezi wouldn’t be well enough yet from the treatment, but now I see he will not be in treatment yet, even if we really use every connection we can find to get this in place.
Last night we protested the entire denigration of women in the customary way. We went to the “Beit Ha’am,” a building that was lent to the protesters (2nd and 3rd floor above the Infinity Franchise – a nice piece of irony) on Rothchild 69 (a bit more irony there). We read poems to each other and applauded a lot every time some one said something that suggested protest or revolution. I loved some of the poems, and the poets, like Rony Somek and Schulamit Hava HaLevi, but there were a lot of beginners who need encouragement, and some who need to be discouraged.
I think I’ve got the management of my shuk shopping down to a fun enterprise. I start out from the direction of Allenby and move toward the sea. Today, I bought some shirts for Ezi from Shai, and a necklace from some other guy I didn’t feel like talking to. There were a lot of other ‘items’ I was looking for that I didn’t buy – tights, scarves, night shirts – didn’t really like what I saw. Then to drop the stuff off in the car and on the I managed to have a little conversation with Yoram Kaniuk who was sitting in the restaurant across the street from Pappa’s, but that wasn’t part of the plan. Then a great lunch with Sharon, and then – the vegetable shopping. This takes place further west toward the sea, and since my criteria includes nice salespeople, there are a number of places I skip over. I don’t like to buy spices in the open market, even though they look tempting, because they’re OPEN. And it took me a while to find a cheese person I like. I haven’t even begun exploring the oriental markets – Thai, Philipine, Chinese, etc. But with the lunch break in the middle, I now feel I can start really learning about what’s going on there.
And for those of you who can’t get enough of hospitals, here’s an update. Once we get all the insurance approvals, the zevalin can be ordered from France. It takes 2 weeks to get here, and has to be used immediately, and there are two technicians who can do it, so it has to be carefully planned. The strange thing is that although we do most of the leg work, it is the doctor who does at least half of the secretarial work. He has no secretary, and apparently hates writing on the computer, so he writes these complex letters about recurrent follicular lymphoma with a fountain pen in elaborate calligraphy. His phone never stops ringing during this time and he has to answer at least half of the calls. As I sat there I figured that a part-time secretary would not only have saved him 50% of his time, but would have allowed him to see twice as many patients.
And that might have prevented the backache I have now from waiting in the hall for half an hour.
Because of the “Mehadrin” buses where women sit in the back, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether women are suppressed in Israel. So here are a few words. The responsibility for self-control in Judaism rests on the individual. Joseph didn’t give in to Potiphar’s wife, and when Samson gave in to Delilah it was his weakness not her temptation. When the foreign drunken conquering heroes give in to ladies, it’s just another aspect of their foolishness. So the whole business of the siren call of a women’s voice is just another aspect of the necessity of keeping the extreme religious away from a world that is much more attractive than theirs.
As for the freedom of women in Israel, I’m earning as much as my male colleagues are and I can walk anywhere in Tel Aviv – day or night – without fear (except the old central bus station where the illegal refugees are forced into crime by the situation).
It has been an impossible task, trying to back up the computer of a hoarder. So we let it alone for the weekend. We explored Ramat Aviv in the morning (narcissus all over Ramat Aviv Gimmel) and the cinemateque of Hertzlia in the afternoon (just like the old art cinemas), There we saw a documentary of Eric Mendelson that proved quite fascinating. It was surprising how little the three of us knew about him – Rachel of the Erez Yisrael history, Ezi with his background of architecture, and me with my fascination with German immigrants to Israel. We didn’t even know that Mendelson was a friend of Einstein and built his observatory in Potsdam. We didn’t know that he left everything he had in Berlin and escaped to England where he built the De la Warr pavilion in Brixhall. We did know we were indebted to him for coming to Israel and setting the pattern of building in much of Israel – the Chaim Weizman house and labs in the Weitman Institute in Rehovot, Hadassah Hospital and the whole Jerusalem Stone concept in Jerusalem, the style of building in Tel Aviv.
We went to the movie by default, having found ourselves unable to travel to Jerusalem for an opening, but we were not sorry.
So much news – so little irony. If only I had time to laugh at all the stupidity around us. Take for instance the statement of our Minister of Interior that we lost the second Lebanon War because we didn’t have enough faith (we weren’t praying enough). So let’s draft all the yeshiva bochers and we’ll win the next war. Of course, this time we should find out if we have ammunition in our stores before we declare war. It seems like we’re on the Costa Concordia with a captain sailing too close to the shore so he can wave…
Ezi arrived in Ichilov at 7:30 for his bone marrow harvesting. His blood count was tested and then he was hooked up to the centrifugal machine whic is something like dialysis for blood. Bone marrow and plasma were extracted and his blood was replaced. Now we were waiting to see if they got enough and we can go home. It’s pretty amazing how simple it is becoming to save lives!
And now we’re home and all is well. Omer has a new toy – the Gaya stand in the hospital shopping center has all these irresistable
educational games, and when we passed by he said, “What is that?” and pointed to a wooden train. Then “What is this?” and pointed to something else. Because he didn’t ask for anything, but just inquired about it, I melted. “What do you have for a child of a year and half?” the salesman said, “What can he do? Can he do this puzzle?” “Oh yes, ” said his mother. “And this?”
“not quite.” “Well then,” he pulled out one of those fit-the-triangle things and I pulled out my credit card. After offering to hire Omer to sit and play with the toys to show people how much fun they are, he said to me, “We have a saying in Arabic, ‘the mother loves, but the grandmother loves more’.” Now if anything can open a grandmother’s purse wider, that could. But we were in a hurry to get back to Ezi, so one triangle game was enough for today.
I don’t know what kind of survey determined that Tel Aviv is the most gay friendly city in the world. Gay Travel. It is friendly, but as with every thing else in TA, there are problems, such as a little ‘incident’ in a gay club for teenagers a while back where someone walked in and shot randomly into the room, killing and injuring children. We’re a country of extremes, and although we call our homosexuals, “gayim” which means proud ones in Hebrew as well as being the plural of “gay” there are communities that consider homosexuality a deadly sin. Lesbianism is actually okay. who cares what women do as long as they make kids?
It is probably sleeplessness that makes me rant like this. Ezi wakes up from the pain and then I get up, but he is soon snoring again while I have visions of tigers and lions for the rest of the night. They say anyway we don’t get enough sleep around here – at least the Jews don’t. The Muslims, according to surveys, sleep one hour more per night then the Jews.
See Haaretz today for a review of my book. It’s small but profound, just like the book. And I had a cool and profound interview on Galei Zahal today with Zipi Gon Gross that should be broadcasted on Friday afternoon
