I always wondered when my ‘luck’ would run out. Here I was, a month shy of my seventy-eighth birthday, and I had never been in a hospital. I don’t mean to visit someone, nor do I mean for the kind of diagnostic testing (where they stick a tube up or down somewhere in your anatomy) that is now routinely done in a doctor’s office. I mean when you’re sick, really sick – as in they’ve come to haul you away in an ambulance. In my case, I did manage to get there on my own two feet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shabbat afternoon, and I was feeling, shall we say, not so ay-yay ipsy-pipsy. Being an optimist, I attributed the pains in my abdomen to the confluence of several days of semi-riotous living: the whisky tasting Thursday night at Mordechai’s apartment, the usual amount of wine and whisky over Shabbat, and one of my staggeringly good cholents for lunch. Had the pain gone away, my diagnosis might have proven correct, but, sad to say, I was in as much agony on Sunday as I was before. By the evening, my medical advisor suggested, no insisted, that we go to Terem (which is like an Urgent Care Center in The States). The fact that I did not object or make excuses is ample evidence of the pain I was in. Continue reading →