27 January 2013

I slept quite well last night, David hardly at all. Both of us continue to have pretty bad coughs, although his is quite a bit worse than mine.

This morning I did the weekly grocery shopping. David came along for the ride, but he stayed in the car.

At 1:00, we had an appointment with Bat-El, David's social worker in the municipal welfare department. She said there is finally a doctor in Be'er Sheva who does (or will soon be doing) examinations of applicants for a teudat iver (certificate of blindness). Since the position has been vacant for months, he or she may have a long backlog. Let's hope that David will receive his letter inviting him for the examination soon, but we'd probably better NOT hold our breaths! Bat-El was also surprised to find out that the mobility instructor has NOT contacted us yet, and she promised to look into that. She was not able to come up with any other help for David, claiming that it's difficult in a small city so far from the rest of the country. Personally, I don't think it would actually be much better anywhere else, either. There IS a blind club here, but she didn't think any of them were English speakers (that's probably also true just about everywhere!). In any case, it was a VERY discouraging meeting for David. So MUCH depends on having the teudat iver. For example, he would like to get a Brailler, a machine that writes Braille. The full price is 5,000 shekels (!), but with a teudat iver, he can get one from the Center for the Blind for only 500 shekels. So, 5,000 now, or 500 who knows HOW many months down the road? Forty-five hundred shekels is equivalent to 1.5 month's rent!

We ate lunch after the meeting at Greg. It was nice to go there, but David was so agitated that he ate very little.

This evening, we had an appointment with the doctor to get medicines to help David sleep and to help with the cough. Afterwards, I went over to the pharmacy while David stayed in the car. There were a LOT of people ahead of me at MaccabiPharm, so I had to wait quite a while. When it was finally my turn, I found out that they were out of the cough syrup! So, they filled the other prescription and checked that I could get the cough syrup at another pharmacy. We then headed over there. Luckily, there was NO wait at that pharmacy!