As you could guess, Christmas traditions here are different from those we grew up with in the US. It’s almost time for dinner, and we plan the traditional Slovak Christmas Eve meal of cabbage soup followed by the main course of fried fish and potato salad. We opted out of buying a live carp and keeping it in our bath tub for a few days - our fried fish will be frozen fillets. Perhaps some year when we feel a bit more daring….
After dinner we open presents – a tradition that Kristian and Ethan are welcoming with open arms (they aren’t nearly so keen on the cabbage soup, fried fish, or even the potato salad). Tomorrow we will celebrate our old traditions with the team: turkey and ham and all the fixin’s at our house at 2:00. It’s nice to have two countries to draw traditions from.
And we have a special treat in the works, as you can see from the pictures: it started snowing this afternoon, with no signs of letting up. Paula, Ethan, Kim Watne, and I went for a later afternoon walk across town to enjoy it. (By the way, Kim and Carol Watne are good friends from our days in Las Cruces, and they joined MTW’s team in Romania the week before we came here. They rode a train up to spend Christmas with us.)
Merry Christmas, everyone!
It’s a quarter to four in the afternoon and the sun is setting on Slovakia, which reminds me that my thanks are overdue. For those of you who are interested and who prayed for me when I injured my back, I have an update: I have been back-pain-drug-free for four days now. I can walk upright like a regular human being (in fact, I estimate that I walked between eight and ten kilometers yesterday). The only time I notice back pain is when I wake in the morning and I’m stiffer than usual for an old man.
So, thanks for your prayers – and the highest thanks of all to our great and merciful Physician.
I’ve told you more than once, and even insisted on it, that you should read Gilead. It was Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning second novel, so I wanted to read her first. I had some time on my hands while I lay in the hospital bed for eight days last month, so I picked it up. It’s called Housekeeping, and it’s not nearly the story that Gilead is, but it is full of beautiful writing.
Here is one sentence of hers that made me fall down in admiration (and double over with laughter – as much as anyone with a severe back injury and lying in a hospital can be said to double over). The narrator is describing a neighbor named Beatrice:
She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.
It’s time to announce the winner of our contest to invent a history for the naming of the gramafon, the celebrated (and appreciated) portable potty from the neurological ward of the Fakultná nemocnica Trnava. We had several creative entries (and I suspect others had some excellent ideas but were too shy to write), but the judge (me) finally chose this as the winner:
This isn’t really the chair’s name, it is a euphemism for using the chair. Back in World War 1, a creative orderly invented this device for a badly wounded colonel to use. Unfortunately the colonel would shriek in pain when getting in and out of it, due to the extent of his injuries. Not wanting to appear weak before his injured enlisted men who were also in the ward, he would ask his orderly to fetch his gramophone and play something loud on it (the new pop hit “1812 Overture” was a particular favorite) when he needed to avail himself of the orderly’s device. “Štefan, bring the gramophone, please”, he would say, and his orderly would know that the colonel needed to go.
Alas, the colonel’s name is lost to history, but his euphemism remains to this day.
Incidentally, this is the real reason your roommate turned up the radio and then left – the tradition of the gramophone lives on.
Hats off and a big Golden Gramafon to Randy Scott!
When was the last time you heard “We Are the World” on the radio? I heard it twice in three days during my first weekend in the hospital, and still I have no idea what Willie Nelson meant when he sang
As God has shown us by turning stone to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand
When did God turn stone to bread? Perhaps someone could help me with this? But my point is not to critique Michael Jackson’s song-writing; I simply want to give the flavor of the music that was pounded into my skull from 7:30 each morning till after 10:00 each night. I heard “Forever Young,” the song played at the dance in Napoleon Dynamite (“Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?”). I heard “Summer Wine” (“Oohh-oh summer wine”), “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies (I prefer Weird Al’s spoof of this song), and the at first intriguing but finally bizarre “One of Us”: (more…)
You should take notes or print a copy of this post just in case you ever come to Slovakia and have to be admitted to the hospital. I was fortunately forewarned, so I came prepared. There are some things that you need to bring with you, because they will not be supplied by the hospital under ordinary circumstances:
- Pyjamas (no gowns here – which is kinda nice)
- Towels
- Eating utensils
- Toilet paper (if you forget everything else, don’t forget this one!)
(more…)
Paula and the boys brought some balloons and tape to transform the otherwise-bland room into something a bit more, uh, festive. So here’s the birthday boy in bed with his banana and balloons:
No comments this time – just pictures of the doors to my ward (my home for eight days).
Like anyone who has gets hospitalized, I was intensely curious about what was causing my pain. On my first full day, Friday 23 November, my “ambulance friends” came to fetch me and haul me to another part of the medical complex for an x-ray. They picked me up like an over-sized sack of potatoes, tossed me on a stretcher, and stuffed me in the back of their van.
The x-ray didn’t show any damaged bones, but neither did it tell the doctor anything about the likely culprit: a disc. So I need an MRI. In their sometimes amusing English, the doctors told me that I could not have an MRI on Friday because “they had too many brains.” I gathered that they had a full schedule of MRI’s to perform on people’s brains. So they hoped (and I hoped too) that they could schedule me for Monday. (more…)
There were many nurses around, but only the head nurse spoke a few words of English – and I mean literally a few. And, of course, the head nurse was not always tending to little ol’ me. So I was a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by foreign lips and strange tongues. Communication was always interesting and sometimes frustrating. I knew that these women were trying to tell me something important, or that they were asking me to make a decision about something crucial (this was, after all, a hospital), yet I sometimes couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were trying so desperately to say. (more…)