Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Rain rain – how wonderful for us all! As I lie here with my aching back listening to the pitter patter I dream of all the wonderful vegetables I’ll be eating next month.

The Israel Association of Writers in English today completed all the corrections to the government application for funding. It has been a long and difficult process – costing hundreds of dollars and no small amount of time, and I am so proud of having been able – with a great deal of help – to complete the forms, that the actual awarding of the funding (if it actually happens it will be the first time English writers won anything in Israel) almost doesn’t matter.

Yes it does. The organization will go under without the funding and I still have hopes to getting some recognition some day for all those writers who have no connection with Hebrew lit but live here.

So as the Sea of Galilee fills up, I too am enjoying a sense of fulfillment.

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.

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.

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.

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.