Blimie Tries To Kill Me

I was only alone over a Shabbos* once during my stay at Columbia Presbyterian. My kids took turns staying with me. Remember the weekend when there was a driving rain all day on Saturday accompanied by high winds and trees and power lines were down all over the city? Well, that weekend happened to be Blimie and Amir's turn. Poor Amir got absolutely drenched walking to shul and back. When you're in the hospital for a prolonged period of time, you're pretty much unaware of the conditions outside in the real world. After all, inclement weather doesn't really affect you at all in your little, insular world. That weekend, however, even I realized that things were really nasty outside. I happened to glance out the window just as a plastic shopping bag went sailing by. I believe I was on the sixth floor at the time. The bag did this graceful little dance passing my room and then soared upward until it was out of view. Then a few seconds later it appeared again and then once again began climbing ever higher into the bleak and dreary sky. Had I been alone it might have been a pleasant distraction, but at the time I was trying to concentrate on which one of Blimie's yummy delicacies I was going to sample first. For someone like me who had been subsisting on hospital food, the choices were all tantalizing. She gave me a sandwich to die for: eggs, liver and coleslaw all on a kaiser roll. I'm not sure if it was really as good as I remember it or it just seemed that way because of all the gruel I'd been eating. All this took place Friday night. Shabbos afternoon Blimie asked me if I wanted another sandwich. I have to stop here and interject an interesting little tidbit about myself: if you put spoiled food in front of me, unless it's got something growing on it, chances are I'll eat it. I'll give you two examples. First, when I was in elementary school, they sold breakfast for twenty-one cents. Hey, did you know that there's no "cent" symbol on a compture keyboard? Neither did I. So it was seven cents each for eggs, a roll and hot cocoa. I was drinking my cocoa one morning and it tasted wierd. Actually it was worse than wierd; it was downright awful. But I had paid seven cents for it and there was no way I wasn't gonna finish it. Right after I had drained the last drop, the annoncement was made: "please don't drink the cocoa, it was mixed with the dirty dishwater by mistake". I took a lot of bathroom breaks that day. Now, fast forward to about a year ago. I was eating Babby's applesauce at the Fisch house, even though it tasted a little funny. Then Chayie took a spoonful and promptly spit it out. "Are you out of your mind," she asked (rhetorically, I would imagine), "this is soooooooo moldy!" I told her that I thought it tasted a little funny. Blimie S. is convinced that that's how my lung problems got started, although personally I don't see the correlation. Okay, so now that you know that I'm not particularly discerning about what I ingest, let's go back to that Shabbos afternoon. Blimie gave me the new sandwich and I polished it off voraciously. While I was licking my fingers, Blimie tasted some of the coleslaw. "Dad!" she said, "this coleslaw is soooooooo spoiled!!" "But it wasn't last night", I retorted. I guess it doesn't take very long for coleslaw to spoil. This time my cast-iron stomach was not pleased. I take all kinds of medication and therefore take Omeprizole (generic Prilosec), too, to protect my stomach from all the nasty meds. But I don't think the Omeprizole was prepared for the spoiled coleslaw. I was no longer in the ICU at this point and, because of my MRSA, I had a private room. That turned out to be quite serendipitous, because I don't think anyone would have wanted to share that bathroom with me. And vise versa. The problem was that I had to get to the bathroom, and as usual I was tethered to an oxygen tank. So I had to disconnect the O2, run (okay, walk briskly) to the bathroom, take care of business and get back to the bed and the oxygen without passing out. Somehow I managed to do it, but I probably would have been better off not to have eaten the coleslaw in the first place.

* Since Orthodox Jews don't drive or use mass transit on the Sabbath, if you go somewhere Friday afternoon that's not walking distance from your house, you have to get back before sundown, otherwise you have to stay until sundown of the following (Saturday) day.