Tuesday, 15 October 2013

I woke up early this morning but felt too tired to get up and so slept nearly another hour. I didn't get out for a walk at all as a result.

I was scheduled to teach 7 units of Berlitz today: 11:00-12:30, 3:00-4:30, and 4:30-6:45. However, things didn't quite go as planned.

During my first class, David decided to take a shower. Our shower is also a bathtub, but we have a plastic chair that we put in there for him so that he can sit while he bathes himself. However, he is often quite unstable getting in and, especially, out. During my break, I was in the bathroom peeing when he got out and suddenly fell, with his head coming down right beside me! I really only caught exactly what happened out of the corner of my eye, since I wasn't looking that direction or even expecting him to be getting out at that moment.

Of course he complained of pain, mostly in his ribs. But what worried me was that he threw up shortly after falling. Because of that, we decided we had better call for an ambulance, and that's what I did. The paramedics checked him, got him up onto his feet (I certainly could NOT have done that all by myself!), and got him to his chair. We got him dressed, and then they transported him to the ER with me following right behind in my car.

After much checking at the ER to rule out more serious problems, they determined that one of his ribs had a small crack in it. It's not a serious problem, of course, but it's causing him plenty of pain, which won't be going away very soon, I'm afraid.

I had had to contact Berlitz, of course, so that they'd let the student I was teaching know that I wouldn't be back. Later, I had to call them from the ER to cancel my remaining lessons for the day (there went 5 units of pay!).

By the time we got out of the ER, it was about 3:30, and we hadn't had lunch yet, so we headed over to Il Pentolino for our traditional dishes there. We chose it mostly because we can almost always park right in front of the restaurant (which we did today, too), and so it's the place that involves the least amount of walking for David.

On the way home, I had to stop by the doctor's office with the prescription they had given me in the ER so that he could write a Maccabi prescription that I could actually get filled.

After bringing David home and resting a little, I headed out to the pharmacy. Of course, a lot of other people were also there by then, so I had to wait quite a long time, only to find out that the medicine (Tramadex) is not available ANYWHERE in the whole city. So, I headed BACK to the doctor's office to try to get a prescription for another medicine. But he just flat out said that there is no other pain medicine that we can safely give David because of all the meds he's on and because of the danger of ruining his kidneys (which are already marginal). So the strongest thing we'll be able to give him is Optalgin, a pain killer that's available over the counter here but is banned in the U.S. The main advantage of it is that it doesn't damage his kidneys as most others, such as ibuprofen, do.

So, it was a busy day. We're glad that David had no worse injuries than a cracked rib, but neither of us is looking forward to the weeks of pain ahead, obviously.

I have to add a postscript about hospitals and ERs here in Israel. The short story is that they are some of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse places imaginable. Anyone who thinks that Israel is even remotely like an apartheid state has NEVER spent even 10 minutes in an Israeli hospital or ER. For example, the main person examining David today was an African-American woman (yes, really American!) who is a medical student here in Israel. The physician supervising her and also doing some of the examining was almost certainly an Israeli Arab guy (fluent in Hebrew and English, although his native language is probably Arabic). Another physician working there was almost certainly Jewish, but I heard him say חג שמח (Happy Holiday in Hebrew) to a patient who, presumably, was a Muslim (since we are in a 3-day Muslim holiday). The guy who took David to x-ray and back was Russian, at least judging from his appearance. And that's just a tiny sample of a typical Israeli ER.