Fortunately I have Almost no Experience in Emergency Rooms

If you're not bleeding to death, you have to stand in line at the reception window and check into the Emergency Room at Sha'arei Tsedeq Hospital. The entrance is bright, high-ceilinged, and well-maintained. A wall on the left lists the major donors and displays a large photograph of Dr. David Applebaum, who was killed in a terrorist suicide bombing in 2003.
At first it wasn't clear where we had to go, but to our right we saw a short line in front of plate glass partitions, and two women sat behind the glass, asked people questions, and filled out forms. We joined the short line, which advanced  fast enough, and we moved on to the waiting room, step two.
That room was somewhat crowded and a bit dark. Quite a few of the people in the room were Arabs, attending the relatives they had brought to the emergency room. We sat and waited there for a long time, until we were called for triage, step three.
While we were waiting for triage, we saw a few patients wheeled in from ambulances, and some of the people waiting for admission were in terrible shape, suffering and frightened. Luckily, we were able to be calm and wait stoically. My wife was not in pain.
In the triage room, a nurse went through all the usual questions, took a blood sample, put a needle in my wife's arm, and sent us on to the emergency room itself, a huge space with curtained examination rooms down the sides.
We were told to wait in front of room number eight. By then I lost track of time, drifting in and out of a doze. We had arrived at the hospital at 11:30 or so, and it wasn't till after 2 in the morning when a doctor finally examined my wife.
The major psychological difficulty, after the fear and pain, is uncertainty: how long will you have to wait? what will be the outcome? what's the procedure? The people who work in the emergency room know just what to do and where to go. The patients are lost.
Hospitals impress and depress me. The emergency room was clean - a young Arab man constantly and efficiently swept and mopped, moving from place to place and restoring order and spraying against germs - and there was no shortage of equipment. A huge amount of money has been invested in equipping and maintaining that emergency room, and you have to feel grateful to the philanthropists who gave so generously - though part of me thinks that hospitals should be equipped only by the state and not be dependent on donations.
But hospitals also  depress me because just looking at the directory reminds me of how many systems in my body might break down and need attention: bronchoscopy, medical genetics, neurological diagnosis, allergy and imunology, and so on. In case one needs reminding, hospitals
I admire medical professionals and know that I could never be one. I can't imagine sticking needles into people, cutting them open with scalpels, dealing with burns and wounds, treating cancer and degenerative diseases that leave no hope for the patient. How is it that some people know they can do that kind of thing, and others know they can't at all?

The End of a Good Day

Last night, at about eleven, I was thinking of writing a blog about what a great day I had had.
As usual, I practiced flute for an hour or more in the morning. Beginning my day that way is a form of meditation for me. I spend about half an hour with warm-up exercises - long tones, vibrato, scales, overtones - and then I play music. Recently I've been working on Telemann's canonic sonatas for two flutes. They're not terrifically difficult, but they're interesting. I read through a couple of them every morning, going over the hard parts, and enjoying the music.
Then I spent three hours in Aviv Malcom's pottery studio. I was a bit frustrated, because at first I wasn't managing to do what I intended to do, but I still enjoyed it, and in the end I did manage to produce a couple of the wide, shallow bowls I was trying to make.
Even when I fail to do what I set out to do, pottery is rewarding. It's another form of meditation, though I only do it once a week. It keeps me away from words, from pointless thoughts, and negative emotions. I focus on the physical task, the feel of the clay, the motion of the wheel. I also enjoy the company of the others at the lesson, usually women young enough to be my daughters or granddaughters.
Starting the week with a few hours using my hands to make something solid and real is a great anchor in reality.
In the afternoon I managed to finish revising a long and interesting chapter in a translation I've been working on, a biographical study of the great scholar of Kabbalism, Gershom Scholem. The author, an Israeli scholar named Noam Zadoff, who teaches at the University of Indiana, is learned and intelligent, and the issues he raises about Scholem's ambivalent attitudes toward European culture are of interest to me.
Scholem was definitely a gigantic intellect, someone who managed to move a highly specialized field of scholarship into the realm of general interest. He was also a very complex individual, as Zadoff shows perceptively. I hope his book is widely read when we finally finish with it.
Then in the evening I played saxophone trios with two of my friends, and I found myself playing to my own satisfaction. In the past year, I've been playing better, because I've been playing with better musicians, and I'm taking myself more seriously as a musician.
Then I came home, and my wife and I watched an episode of Shtissel, a fine Israeli TV series about the Haredi community in Jerusalem. So, at about eleven, after all those satisfying activities, before going to sleep - I was kind of wound up and not ready for bed - I was planning to review my day and express gratitude that I have been blessed to be able to engage in them.
Just then, my wife came into my study and told me that she had to go to the emergency room because of an alarming condition that had arisen.
So, I got dressed again, and we set out for Sha'arei Tsedeq Hospital.
Both of us were nervous and frightened.
Of course there was virtually no traffic at 11:30 at night, and there were plenty of places in the hospital parking lot.
We spent the next 3 hours mainly waiting. Since my wife's condition wasn't a life-threatening emergency, just something that needed prompt attention, we had to wait a long time before she was admitted.
I don't recommend spending time in an emergency room as recreation. You see a lot of very sick and frightened people. Every now and then an ambulance arrives and a gurney is rushed in with someone groaning on it.
The staff was calm and orderly, although many of the patients were demanding.
Exhaustion and boredom set it, and I fell asleep for a while while we were waiting. I had brought a book to read, but of course I was too tired and nervous to openit.
We expected that my wife would be admitted to the hospital, which would mean that she would spend the night on a bed in the already crowded corridors of the emergency room, and we wouldn't know about her condition until sometime the following day. Fortunately, at about 2:30 am, the doctor who examined her, a very tired man, determined that, in fact, there was no need for hospitalization, the symptom that had concerned us was less severe than we thought, and we could go home.
My major fear, as we drove back through the deserted streets, was that I'd fall asleep at the wheel and crash the car - but I forced myself to remain alert, and we got home safely.
We collapsed into bed at 3 in the morning.
Not such a perfect day after all.