Rambam Hospita Emergency Ward, Haifa
Everyday I'm thinking, Thank G-d it's not yesterday.
Robby was not getting any better and we realised if we left him in his hotel room in Tel Aviv alone over Shabbat he might just freeze to death, though the thought of moving scared him to bits. He was not well enough to make the drive and he could not pack up and check out but mostly he could not bare to be in our hot house with a million teenagers and air conditioning units that, much like us, worked some times, randomly and not at maximum efficiency.
Still we had no choice but to save him and so we drove to Tel-Aviv, packed him up and brought him home against his better judgment. The house was clean, and we had run the air conditioning all day to cool it down. There was hot chicken soup on the stove. By Sunday morning he still had a fever so I took him to the doctor who sent him for an x-ray. "Ze iy efshar"- it's not possible, said the woman at reception, he has no details, no Israeli ID number, it can't be done. Just like that she was willing to let this tourist slip away from sheer neglect. "Really" I said, bewildered that a fellow human could be so clear about the possible demise of another. The doctor sent us here, surely that's a sign that this chest needs to be X-rayed. No, she said, it's not possible, and she looked back at her monitor, untouched. At this point Robby perked up with an offer of cash. She too came alive. It will cost 200 shekels she told me annoyed that we were still there and presuming that his life was not actually worth that much, and that we wouldn't go for it.
A few minutes later the disc was begrudgingly handed over with the words - massive pneumonia spat out at us like we were criminals. The crime of course was hers, but no Israeli will admit to such negligent behavior, fear of litigation has not yet reached this primitive country.
The doctor immediately put him on a double course of anti-biotics and since it was already late in the day, sent us to Rambam hospital first thing the next morning.
Walking in through emergency is always confronting, old men in wheelchairs propped up with foam props, half naked, exposing the inevitability of old age to the already vulnerable, faces exhausted from waiting too many hours filled with anxiety and helplessly surrendered to a system that offers no sympathy to the weak and frail. Security guards brazenly showing off their Arabic to beautifully groomed nurses harshly reflecting the fast deflating life-force of the ill at hand who meekly wait in line to give their details to women who are poorly paid to take them, in the slowest and most painstaking way possible.
The woman behind the glass looks up blankly after twenty minutes filling in forms "Oh", she says, "I suppose you want the receipt in English for your health Insurance?" and she starts again, with a carbon copy invoice book and a ball point pen. How quaint, I think, a hospital that invoices the old fashioned way coupled with a medical system that promises to cross ID all patients across the country. What are they planning on doing, photocopying every body's records and sending them down a long tube to a silent underground centre that funnels information to every doctor's surgery in the state through a secret hole in the floorboards via Mosad retired mice?
But like all Jews, we have a plan. We have protectzia, we know the best of the best, we know people who have donated so much money to so many worthy institutions in this country, that we already have our own little underground network busy securing the best treatment by the best doctors in the country. Still beurocracy must take its due process and as Robby sits shivering in a corner, we shuffle from one corridor to the next and await his fate as rabbi's hustle in the background shouting our cause to professors who themselves have no power in a system stuck in the post socialist quagmire that is the Israeli Health Care System.
Finally he is submitted, but there are no beds in the Emergency Ward, so we take him downstairs to the hospital mall, where a zillion patients (and their families) furiously shop and eat fast food in their pajamas attached to their drips. It's a veritable commercial hub down underground at Rambam and I myself manage to pick up three singlets from a bargain table outside the Fox shop for ten shekels each. A Russian Israeli has set himself up with a little table from where he reads the palms of the already vulnerably ill, giving them hope perhaps for a better life next time round.
We return to the Emergency Ward after Robby and Gray finish their kosher McDonalds. He is given a bed and we wait, trying to distract him from the Russian man who's just been wheeled in shivering and moaning in shock, his cowboy boots telling of life on the street, his son standing suspiciously far away from him, offering no comfort to the man whom he probably just pushed down the stairs himself. Across the way an elderly Arab woman sits tending to her dying mother whose lungs have filled with fluid, and who no longer has the will, strength or consciousness to try and cough up the mucous in which she will inevitable drown. She weeps into a tissue and I try consoling her in my broken Hebrew.
And so the day passes, and as patients disappear into the big unknown upstairs we leave Robby and return to our own chaos back home. And then things heat up again in the Emergency Ward as a new wave of disabled bodies start arriving, most notably a man in an Orange jump suit, handcuffed to his bed and accompanied by two police officers. The room is full but for a small space between Robby and the sink into which they squeeze Robby's new roommate.
That's it, Robby gets up. "After being there for eight hours being promised a bed all day, I said enough is enough, You gotta get me a room". Oh, OK, said the pretty nurse, there's one upstairs waiting for you, and so it was that Robby left the stench and the fear of life in transition and made his way to the first floor. He would miss the small bathroom who's unsubstantial sink served only to splash water from its high arched tap onto the floor leaving it wet and dirty all day, and who's hole in the ceiling made one wonder if some pervert hadn't planted a video camera from which he would later post the daily bowel movements of the infirm on U-tube for his amusement. He would miss the gargling sound of vomit from the women next to him, regurgitating three times over before being puked out for all to hear, sending everyone gagging and running off to the little wet floored toilet down the hall. Later he said, "that sound and that smell will stay with me forever."
"I'm in a hotel" he said reporting from the first floor of the hospital "and everyone is really nice up here, even though you can hear what the person on the other side of the phone is shouting to the guy across from me in Russian". I listen hard, but all I can hear is the hideous sound of a wild boar coughing up incessantly in the background, no polite conversational pauses between labored breaths.
The next day we go visit - he looks better, he can breathe. He looks at us and says, "Everyday I'm thinking, Thanks G-d it's not yesterday".
Robby was not getting any better and we realised if we left him in his hotel room in Tel Aviv alone over Shabbat he might just freeze to death, though the thought of moving scared him to bits. He was not well enough to make the drive and he could not pack up and check out but mostly he could not bare to be in our hot house with a million teenagers and air conditioning units that, much like us, worked some times, randomly and not at maximum efficiency.
Still we had no choice but to save him and so we drove to Tel-Aviv, packed him up and brought him home against his better judgment. The house was clean, and we had run the air conditioning all day to cool it down. There was hot chicken soup on the stove. By Sunday morning he still had a fever so I took him to the doctor who sent him for an x-ray. "Ze iy efshar"- it's not possible, said the woman at reception, he has no details, no Israeli ID number, it can't be done. Just like that she was willing to let this tourist slip away from sheer neglect. "Really" I said, bewildered that a fellow human could be so clear about the possible demise of another. The doctor sent us here, surely that's a sign that this chest needs to be X-rayed. No, she said, it's not possible, and she looked back at her monitor, untouched. At this point Robby perked up with an offer of cash. She too came alive. It will cost 200 shekels she told me annoyed that we were still there and presuming that his life was not actually worth that much, and that we wouldn't go for it.
A few minutes later the disc was begrudgingly handed over with the words - massive pneumonia spat out at us like we were criminals. The crime of course was hers, but no Israeli will admit to such negligent behavior, fear of litigation has not yet reached this primitive country.
The doctor immediately put him on a double course of anti-biotics and since it was already late in the day, sent us to Rambam hospital first thing the next morning.
Walking in through emergency is always confronting, old men in wheelchairs propped up with foam props, half naked, exposing the inevitability of old age to the already vulnerable, faces exhausted from waiting too many hours filled with anxiety and helplessly surrendered to a system that offers no sympathy to the weak and frail. Security guards brazenly showing off their Arabic to beautifully groomed nurses harshly reflecting the fast deflating life-force of the ill at hand who meekly wait in line to give their details to women who are poorly paid to take them, in the slowest and most painstaking way possible.
The woman behind the glass looks up blankly after twenty minutes filling in forms "Oh", she says, "I suppose you want the receipt in English for your health Insurance?" and she starts again, with a carbon copy invoice book and a ball point pen. How quaint, I think, a hospital that invoices the old fashioned way coupled with a medical system that promises to cross ID all patients across the country. What are they planning on doing, photocopying every body's records and sending them down a long tube to a silent underground centre that funnels information to every doctor's surgery in the state through a secret hole in the floorboards via Mosad retired mice?
But like all Jews, we have a plan. We have protectzia, we know the best of the best, we know people who have donated so much money to so many worthy institutions in this country, that we already have our own little underground network busy securing the best treatment by the best doctors in the country. Still beurocracy must take its due process and as Robby sits shivering in a corner, we shuffle from one corridor to the next and await his fate as rabbi's hustle in the background shouting our cause to professors who themselves have no power in a system stuck in the post socialist quagmire that is the Israeli Health Care System.
Finally he is submitted, but there are no beds in the Emergency Ward, so we take him downstairs to the hospital mall, where a zillion patients (and their families) furiously shop and eat fast food in their pajamas attached to their drips. It's a veritable commercial hub down underground at Rambam and I myself manage to pick up three singlets from a bargain table outside the Fox shop for ten shekels each. A Russian Israeli has set himself up with a little table from where he reads the palms of the already vulnerably ill, giving them hope perhaps for a better life next time round.
We return to the Emergency Ward after Robby and Gray finish their kosher McDonalds. He is given a bed and we wait, trying to distract him from the Russian man who's just been wheeled in shivering and moaning in shock, his cowboy boots telling of life on the street, his son standing suspiciously far away from him, offering no comfort to the man whom he probably just pushed down the stairs himself. Across the way an elderly Arab woman sits tending to her dying mother whose lungs have filled with fluid, and who no longer has the will, strength or consciousness to try and cough up the mucous in which she will inevitable drown. She weeps into a tissue and I try consoling her in my broken Hebrew.
And so the day passes, and as patients disappear into the big unknown upstairs we leave Robby and return to our own chaos back home. And then things heat up again in the Emergency Ward as a new wave of disabled bodies start arriving, most notably a man in an Orange jump suit, handcuffed to his bed and accompanied by two police officers. The room is full but for a small space between Robby and the sink into which they squeeze Robby's new roommate.
That's it, Robby gets up. "After being there for eight hours being promised a bed all day, I said enough is enough, You gotta get me a room". Oh, OK, said the pretty nurse, there's one upstairs waiting for you, and so it was that Robby left the stench and the fear of life in transition and made his way to the first floor. He would miss the small bathroom who's unsubstantial sink served only to splash water from its high arched tap onto the floor leaving it wet and dirty all day, and who's hole in the ceiling made one wonder if some pervert hadn't planted a video camera from which he would later post the daily bowel movements of the infirm on U-tube for his amusement. He would miss the gargling sound of vomit from the women next to him, regurgitating three times over before being puked out for all to hear, sending everyone gagging and running off to the little wet floored toilet down the hall. Later he said, "that sound and that smell will stay with me forever."
"I'm in a hotel" he said reporting from the first floor of the hospital "and everyone is really nice up here, even though you can hear what the person on the other side of the phone is shouting to the guy across from me in Russian". I listen hard, but all I can hear is the hideous sound of a wild boar coughing up incessantly in the background, no polite conversational pauses between labored breaths.
The next day we go visit - he looks better, he can breathe. He looks at us and says, "Everyday I'm thinking, Thanks G-d it's not yesterday".
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