An American tourist learns to be pushy
Two young men walked into my hospital room dressed in street clothes and carrying flowers–the first visitors all day not wearing scrubs. I sat up in my bed to meet them, but my bubble burst when my roommate shouted a greeting in Hebrew.
They were there for him, not me.
I got used to this endless parade of visitors after only two days in the hospital: children in uniform visited their parents, brothers reunited after months apart, and cousins–first, second, even once removed–took time to visit their sick family members in the hospital. Meanwhile, I had no one to expect: All of my relatives—cousins included—remained across the Atlantic Ocean. So I waited in vain, sitting up when anyone entered the room and slouching back when the visitors said hello to the other, Israeli patients.
My family was not the only thing I was missing during my year at a yeshiva in Israel; the vision in my right eye was also partially gone due to a stuck contact lens. I developed an infection and a scratched cornea, which later became a torn cornea and a heavy prescription of eyedrops–four an hour for 24 hours. When that didn’t work, I went to the hospital–which is where the real trial began.
With my broken Hebrew, my left eye and my wallet, I struggled to find wherever I needed to go. This led me on a odyssey through the building–from the information desk to the emergency room’s waiting room to the eye ward and around to the reception hall. Whenever I asked for directions, I got rude responses that I could only half understand. Signs and arrows became my only guide, but their writing was as incomprehensible to me as the braille printed underneath. A couple of hours later, having filled out the necessary paperwork and donned my inpatient’s garb, I locked myself up in my prison cell of a hospital room.
What I learned during the following 48 hours was that getting medical attention in Israel was just like getting votes in an election: it was all about getting people to like you. The more visitors a patient had, the more attention she received, as family members would pretend to be the doctors’ and nurses’ best friends.
My roommate Ariel, a tall, strong, and confident guy with a bandage on his eye, was a case in point. He looked like he just finished his service in the Israeli army; I couldn’t have looked more like an American tourist. Ariel had a constant stream of visitors, and soon the nurses treated him more like a son than a patient. The doctors checked up on him every couple of hours to make sure that he received his medication and that his condition was improving. While he sat on his bed, receiving proper care, I sat neglected. The nurses came to me with a tray of food and left, sometimes asking how I was feeling and nothing more. The doctors rarely checked my eye, and I knew I was not getting the medical attention I needed.
Were this to have happened in America, my mom would have lividly requested that I get more attention while a cousin schmoozed with the doctors. But I was alone, and I felt an urge to sit back in my bed and avoid awkward conversations, frustrated responses and nasty jabs. My tourist instinct told me that I didn’t want those doctors to think I was a rude, aggressive American.
As time went on, though, I realized that unless I did something, I would be stuck there for weeks. So I decided to take action. At first it wasn’t easy to push open the door to the doctor’s office and tell him in my choppy Hebrew that my eye wasn’t healing, but after a few times I got the hang of bothering the staff. Each time I stepped into the doctor’s office, I spoke more eloquently, assertively and passionately, and before long I received adequate care.
Prior to my hospitalization, when I would sit next to an Israeli on the bus, I would turn on my iPod and look away. I always felt uncomfortable around them: I was taking up their space and using their resources, so the best I could do was mind my own business.
My experience at the hospital taught me otherwise: minding my own business and staying out of the way was the worst thing I could have done. As I regained my vision, I also saw that to get anything in Israel—even proper medical care—I had to let go of my tourist instinct. As long as I kept being pushy, I knew I could survive.
Brian Lasman is a graduate of Maimonides High School in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is currently studying in Bet Shemesh, Israel at Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah.
