Miscellaneous

Long Day...

By jeremyblachman

I'm in New York... kept half-wanting to post about this and half not wanting to, but my mom had surgery today so I flew home for that -- I wrote a couple of years ago about her breast cancer and last year she had a benign ovarian tumor that had to be removed.  And today she had to have a mass on her kidney removed, probably a very small cancer that hasn't spread, and most likely completely unrelated to the breast cancer or the ovarian mass.  She'd never had any medical issues prior to the breast cancer, and now it's been these three things, pretty much back to back to back, seemingly unrelated, and fortunately all either not a big deal or caught early enough that she should be fine -- this kidney thing was caught as an incidental finding on a sonogram she had, and the doctor says it's unlikely to have spread anywhere and now that it's out it shouldn't be a concern ever again.  So that's good.  But a long day spent sitting in hospital waiting rooms.

There were two women in one of the waiting rooms, speaking Spanish to each other -- my high school Spanish was terrible then and is obviously even more terrible now, more than ten years later (illustration of how terrible it was: to place out of the Princeton language requirement, you needed a 740 on the SAT II.  I took it just to try -- I got a 470.).  But I heard "tuna y matzo" and my ears perked up and I started listening.  As far as I could tell, one of them worked in some capacity for a Jewish family and was making fun of them and of Passover -- she said they didn't let her eat any bread and kept trying to make her eat balls of fish -- gefilte fish, I assume she was talking about -- and that these balls of fish were made by doing some verb to the heads of fish (cabeza de pescado).  She said cabeza de pescado a few times.  Anyway, that was the amusing portion of the day.  The other part of the fun was that my grandma lost her hearing aid last week and hasn't gotten a new one yet, and so I kept having to repeat everything anyone said and stop her from asking questions that had already been answered seven times.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on May 07, 2008 (boomark / email).