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Shmuel Moshe Yonah (Shawn Michael Taub)
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| More on the Coeliac front |
[30 Jun 2009|10:50am] |
Yes, I know, not final diagnosis. Not happy still. Still wandering around muttering, "Fucking Coeliac disease? Of all the stupid fucking things, Coeliac?!" Made my appointment with the gastroenterologist, who happens to be situated in the same building as our kids' pediatrician and where Yehuda and Shear used to live, so he's really close buy. Seems nice, even though he has a strong French accent. Shouldn't badmouth the French, since my head nurse is French. But it's so easy, and I don't really mean it.
Anyhoo, by some small miracle after several days of cursing God for this unconfirmed diagnosis, we stumbled upon The Israeli Celiac Association, which lead us to GlutenFree.co.il. The former has a list of restaurants that are gluten free, which includes an awesome Indian food restaurant and a pizza place we've been meaning to try. The latter is a storehouse of awesome, even if it is in Petach Tikva. The important part is that it seems to deliver to Jerusalem. Very impressive is that they have an English version of the website that's actually translated properly, as best as I can tell, which makes my life easier, too. And my father-in-law, who discovered the site about five minutes before we did, already ordered New Grist Beer, which he can use in a recipe to make a gluten-free chocolate cake.
The best part is its chocolate page.
The worst part is finding out that I can get oat matza - three pieces for 35 NIS.
So basically, things are looking up. So are our food bills. Say, I've been unable to confirm it, but I've heard rumours that I can get my kupat cholim to help sponsor those. Confirm/deny? I'm with Meuchedet.
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| Briefly, since I need to study |
[27 Jun 2009|11:51pm] |
1. I may have Coeliac disease. In brief, when wheat gluten gets to the small intestine, the body starts attacking the lining of the small intestine, causing problems in absorption of nutrients. This in after months of exhaustion, excessive sweating, and hot flashes prompted me to finally go to my doctor, who sends me for a blood test that shows my iron is low, and a month later sends me again to check my iron levels plus other markers for diseases that may cause low iron in someone that's not menstruating. Overjoyed, the marker for Coeliac was through the freakin' roof, so he's sending me to a gastroenterologist for confirmation. I have been spending the last few days muttering "fucking Coeliac" and checking labels to see what has gluten. Notables: Shreddies, Kellog's Corn Flakes, Elite Milk Chocolate(!?), Egozi candy bars, and bagels. I also will never be able to have mother's schnitzel nor banana chocolate chip muffins, and to add insult to injury, my wife's challah and other baking. At least Kraft Low-fat Peanut Butter doesn't have gluten.
2. From the "Charedim are destroying my religion" files: at the Jerusalem Pride Parade, a protester threw an egg at parade goers. Granted, this is infinitely better than the stabbing that occurred a few years back, but it's still violence.
3. From the "Charedim are destroying my religion" files: four cops injured, 40+ arrested, one major injury during a violent protest on Shabbat to protect the sanctity of Shabbat.
4. From the "Charedim are destroying my religion" files: More shit-flinging regarding conversion in Israel. Charedi rabbis make up new rules that have nothing to do with the original point of conversion; National Religious rabbis try to protect it.
5. From the "Charedim are destroying my religion" files: I did a morning shift today. I lost count of how many times I was told to get a Shabbat goy to do my job.
6. From the "Charedim are destroying my religion" files: At one point, the doctor on duty frantically raced to get a fax through to the ER to get an ultrasound done on a child that has a chest drainage that wasn't draining, and now he had a fever. When the family was approached to be taken down to the ultrasound, they refused, asking to have it delayed until after Shabbat, even Sunday. At one point, there was four doctors, two nurses, and myself, standing in the room explaining to the parents (the father was hiding his eyes from the oh-so-unmodestly dressed staff) that they need to do the ultrasound now in order to help them figure out what's wrong, especially now that there's a fever that could be a sign of infection. But no, since it wasn't an issue of life and death, no ultrasound. I wanted to scream at them, "Your child has a tube draining fluid that could fill up his lungs and kill him. The tube isn't draining. Now he has a fever, which probably means an infection. Is Shabbat so fucking important to you that you don't give a shit about your child's health? Are you even fucking human anymore? Are you aware that you're his parents, you're supposed to protect him and do what's best for him?"
7. Other than that, and the one Charedi family that wanted to move rooms so that they wouldn't have to share a room with an Arab family, pediatrics isn't so bad.
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| A little hebrew help, please |
[23 Jun 2009|08:40am] |
What are the names of the fingers and toes? I got that the thumb is called "agudal", and that the generic name for toes is "bohen", what else?
Yes, it's a random question, but it is actually related to what I'm studying currently.
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| I hate studying for exams. |
[22 Jun 2009|06:23pm] |
Does anyone have an extra laptop with Office lying around that they can lend me? Ideally, I'd be using it until the end of exam period sometime in September, but at this point, I'll take anything I can get. Don't need anything fancy, just something that I can use to study while I'm bedridden taking care of babies.
Alternatively, does anyone want to volunteer to help Yaffa with the girls while I lock myself in the office and bash my head against the keyboard study?
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| Parenting, Pediatrics, that new nursing show, exams |
[22 Jun 2009|08:01am] |
1. Yesterday I cut Eliana's left thumb while trying to trim her fingernails. She cried for a minute, bled for over five, and I am still traumatized. Yes, typical first-time parent, I called her pediatrician to ask if she needs a tetanus shot. I'm still shaking, even though it's 24 hours later.
2. Started yesterday in my new position as a student nurse in Hadassah Ein Karem's Pediatrics ward. A number of things have been revealed to me in rapid succession: a) I know nothing about pediatric medicine, b) I know nothing about talking to kids, c) I desperately need to learn Arabic. a) was a factor of remembering that kids have drastically different standards for measuring vital signs. I was reminded how I freaked out when they first measured Bracha's blood pressure at the NICU - it was something like 60/40 - so the nurse there needed to remind me that we're talking about a tiny human, not a full-grown one. b) is simply one of those things that always plagued me; I've never really been good with kids. It's taken Mechal, Ron and Sho's daughter, nearly three years to not run and hide behind mommy's legs when she sees me. c) is merely a function of the Israeli medical system, wherein there's 10 different languages spoken by patients and their families at any given time, and the staff can cover maybe 3 of those languages. Inevitably, you will end up being completely unable to communicate with a patient and their family because you simply don't have a common language. This is most common with Arab patients, where if you're lucky they speak English, and if you're really lucky they speak Hebrew, though normally never both, and all too often neither. Granted, you will always run into an Anglo, Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Portuguese, or Ethiopian patient who doesn't speak anything but their native tongue, but it's most common with the Arabs. While all wards do their best to have at least one Russian and Arabic speaker per shift, it doesn't always work out that they can be there to translate. Since it's an established, evidence-based fact that it's normally the Arabs that fall through the cracks in the medical system, I'm more worried about them.
3. Nurse Jackie is really offensive to me on so many levels. Starting with that stupid fucking nursing hat that was displayed in the opening credits of the pilot and peppered throughout with a complete lack of ethics, stirred with abuse of patients, their families, nursing students, and even narcotics, I'm really bothered by this show. And yet, since I'm somewhat of a masochist, I'll keep watching it to see if it's got a point to make other than that the title character is a fucked-up bitch of an ER nurse. Granted, she's got her human side, and when they show that part of her it's a grand tour de force of what nursing really is, but most of the show is her shitting on everyone around her. One thing that I do want to point out that is probably the main thing keeping me watching this show was a line in last week's episode. Nurse Jackie tells her nursing student: "You know what this job is, honey? This job is wading through a shitstorm of people who come into this place on the very worst day of their lives. And just so you know, doctors are here to diagnose. Not heal. We heal. All Saints [the name of the hospital] is in the business of flipping beds. That's it. End of story. The fact that you have even the slightest inclination to help people puts you miles ahead of 100% of the population." If this show can succeed in portraying ER nurses, and nurses in general, in this light, then maybe it can do some good.
ETA: Also really fucking annoying is that both of the two male nurses shown so far are gay.
4. I have my first exam next week. I hate studying.
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| Coffee Wars: Canadian vs. Israeli |
[21 Jun 2009|08:45pm] |
Yet again, I was confronted by the barista that told me that my coffee was too strong.
Three shots of espresso to about two shots of hot milk is not too strong. It's the first time in Israel that I have been genuinely happy with a coffee.
Instead, I opted for the "Israelis don't drink coffee, they drink coffee-flavoured milk. I just don't understand, when I made aliya they told me that this is coffee, and I figured that Israelis just didn't know what coffee was."
So she countered, "And when you make your instant coffee, you put in two spoons?"
"At least."
She told me that it wasn't healthy. Had I been better with the rapid witty retort in Hebrew, I would have told her, "No, not healthy would be me falling asleep on my shift."
I am really enjoying this coffee. I think I've finally figured out the bastardized form of coffee that Israelis call "hafuch".
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| Slow news day |
[21 Jun 2009|10:09am] |
Shock! Horror! The interior ministry was rude to someone!
In other news, happy fathers' day. Bracha gave me a huge gob of spit-up on my sleeve in honour of the day. Eliana is a blob, and as such has so far given me a few hours of quiet after sleeping a full night. Yaffa, well, we can't discuss that on a family-rated journal, now, can we?
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| Random bits and pieces |
[17 Jun 2009|01:40pm] |
1. Subsequent to Bracha's last physiotherapy session, we bought a few toys. Among them was an electric piano that plays a whole bunch of obnoxiously loud tunes, farm animal sounds, etc. More importantly, it has a good keyboard with flat keys, no less. Yaffa and I proceeded to quickly fight over it.
Me: Yaffa, stop playing with the kids' piano.
Yaffa: You're only saying that because you want to play for it.
2. Last night, I helped Yehuda and Shir move the last few things to their new apartment. A discussion over pizza:
Josh: Yaffa's a saint to put up with you.
Yehuda: I know Yaffa, and she's anything but a saint.
*something about handcuffs*
Yehuda's sister Batsheva: I don't need to know about your fuzzy pink handcuffs.
Me: They're black and fuzzy.
Batsheva: Way more than I needed to know.
Me: We haven't had a chance to re-attach them to the bed since we moved. I think I know where they are still.
3. Stupid ארס kid at bus stop today that didn't look old enough for his balls to have descended: Do you have a cigarette?
Me, holding Bracha in the wrap: Are you fucking kidding me? How old are you?
Him: I'll be 18 in a week.
Me: Bullshit.
Him: You wanna see my ID card? Here's my ID card.
Me: I don't fucking care about your ID card. If you want to die from smoking, that's your problem.
The only thing I hate more than smoking is kids who smoke.
4. Stupid bloodwork nurse: Are you babysitting?
Me: No, I'm the father.
Nurse: But you're babysitting while your wife is at work?
Me: No, I'm the father, and my wife is at home with her twin.
What I really wanted to say was, "I'm taking care of my kid, you fucking bimbo bitch. What's so fucking weird about a father taking care of his kid? Would you ask a mother if she's just babysitting?" Unfortunately, or possibly fortunately, I haven't mastered the art of the rapid-fire angry retort in Hebrew.
5. Yaffa's Aunt Barbara is landing today! Yay goodies from America!
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| Wikisurfing |
[12 Jun 2009|04:52pm] |
We had a can of okra in tomato sauce that will somehow be incorporated into a kubbeh recipe that Yaffa is making. My curiosity led me to check Wikipedia, which informs me that okra, known as Lady's Fingers outside of the States and gumbo in parts of the States and the English-speaking Carribean, is in the same family of plants that produce cotton, cacao, hibiscus flowers, and durian. Durian, for the uninformed, is a fruit that is banned in many public places in southeast Asia because of its awful smell.
That is all.
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| An overdue post about Obama's speech |
[11 Jun 2009|05:27am] |
First, this is what I originally posted on Facebook:
Seriously, America, you manage to get rid of one idiot from the presidency just to elect an even bigger moron? Fuck off, Obama. Goddamn idiot can't see the difference from violent terrorism that targets everyone in the world and a bunch of people trying to live their lives peacefully on land that was legally annexed because the Arabs attacked us. I'm so sorry we won in '67. Would it have been better if we lost?
Now an attempt to try and write what I really feel.
( That is, if you care. )
I could go on for a hell of a lot longer on this, but this post has been slowly rotting in an abandoned browser tab for over a week. I just want to get a little bit of my brainwerks out.
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| Probably the most bizarre find I've come across in a while |
[31 May 2009|08:13am] |
This after being linked from another YouTube video via the Featured Videos feature. Especially important is the part around 2:48.
Yaffa stopped me from watching this despite my protestations of "Train wreck, honey!"
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| Notable mention: CinemaBowl III: The Creme de la Crudde |
[20 May 2009|01:17am] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) slipjig has up his new CinemaBowl, and this time, it's the battle of the crappiest movies you've ever seen. So far, the first poll has gone bye (I can't believe that Starship Troopers tied The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)). The second poll is up. Keep watching his journal for some bloody zombie-mashing movie badness fun.
And no, Manos hasn't showed up. Yet. (I bloody well expect Manos to show up, slipjig.)
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[14 May 2009|03:43am] |
Whomever coined the phrase "to sleep like a baby" obviously never had kids.
Woo hoo 3am feedings.
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[13 May 2009|07:58am] |
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Mazal Tov to Ofer and Devora Strauss on the birth of a boy!
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| Time to kill |
[07 May 2009|01:15pm] |
Since I have some time to kill until I get to see my supervisor at the hospital, I had some time to upload a few photos of the girls.
In the meantime, I'm going to try and find something productive to do with my time.
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| A very cold day in hell; or A very slow day at the Interior Ministry |
[05 May 2009|12:14pm] |
Yesterday we went with the girls to get their American passports and certificates of birth abroad. We had some extra time, so in our natural masochistic fashion we also went to the Ministry of the Interior to register for the girls' passports.
They just came right now by registered mail.
For serious, 24 hours and we got Israeli passports for the girls.
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