Some might think my first tip or "secret" is common knowledge, but it turns out I had to learn it the hard way: Listen to the person who loves and cares for you. It sounds obvious, right? Simple. Well, apparently not for me.
My back hurt. Like, really hurt. A sharp, undeniable pain right in the center of my back, and I had zero interest in checking it out. I was convinced that I was the only one who truly understood the situation: it was 100% "climbing pain." Never mind the fact that I hadn't touched a climbing wall in at least six months—that was a minor, irrelevant detail.
It took Sharon six months of pleading, begging, and eventually a simple, blunt ultimatum: "Go see a doctor, or I'm calling your parents and our family physician." Only then, in my "infinite wisdom," did I decide to finally get my right shoulder blade and back checked out.
So, after my wife basically threatened me with murder, I scheduled an appointment with an orthopedist. I ended up with a guy who looked like a neighborhood shaman straight out of Woodstock. He explained that at my age, "falling apart" is perfectly normal and that everyone’s back hurts. He was convinced that the right breathing rhythm would stop my body parts from disintegrating. But, since I looked truly miserable, he gave me some pills and told me to come back in a month if the pain persisted.
Luckily, my wife’s instincts are sharper than any surgical scalpel. She told me those pills would be as useful as "cupping therapy for the dead" (an old Hebrew way of saying 'useless'), but added: "Fine, take them, but schedule another appointment in the meantime." So I did.
You can guess what happened next: the pills didn't do a thing.
Sharon said, "Imaging. Preferably a CT, but he won't give you one, so start with an X-ray." Exactly one month later, I went back to him. With zero enthusiasm, he gave me a referral for an X-ray—"Unnecessary radiation," in his words.
I drove to the Clalit clinic on Bialik Street in Ramat Gan. After the X-ray, I waited for the disc. To be honest, I’ve spent my whole life waiting for discs after medical tests that I never actually needed. But this time, it was taking longer than usual.
I almost left—I mean, who actually uses those discs anyway?—but they called my cell just as I was walking out of the building, telling me to come back and pick it up.
Pro tip: If the waiting time for your imaging disc is taking forever, there's probably a "slight" problem. :)
To everyone's surprise (well, mostly mine), the X-ray revealed a tumor the size of a baseball in my chest. It was enough to send a bunch of doctors, led by my family physician, into a panic, calling me to say it was URGENT.
And all I could think about was that I’d never actually played baseball in my life, and I wondered if I would’ve been any good at it. That was the first time I truly understood the power of denial. To this day, I still occasionally wonder about my skills in a sport that doesn't even really exist in Israel, yet decided to make a guest appearance in my ribcage.
Within two weeks, I was already on the operating table. But that’s for the next post—along with an interesting story about a midnight stroll through the hallways of Hadassah Hospital.
