Wednesday, November 28, 2007

News and a Call for Prayer


Some of you who've read my blog before are already aware, but for many of you this may be your first time hearing. My father has some serious heart problems. In short he needs a heart transplant, and has now been on the waiting list for one for almost a year and a half. (Since just before Rosh HaShana the year before this last one.) I don't want to take the time to give a full medical history, but in short, he was born with a congenital heart defect, received possibly the first successful childhood surgery at age 4, and was fine until approximately 2 years ago when he had the first of a series of CHF bouts (Congestive Heart Failure). This left his heart swollen to twice normal size, reopening the old whole between the upper chambers of his heart, and leaving 3 of his 4 valves failing. The time since then has been a rough period marked by slow degeneration and anxious waiting (the hardest part) for the unknown time when a heart in his rare blood type will become available. Now for the sudden call to action...

For the last several months he's been constantly attached to an external heart monitor/defibrillator set to shock his heart back into normal rhythm if it would ever Chas V'Shalom (translated non literally - G-d Forbid) slip. This is no longer good enough, and with no replacement heart in sight he's set to move to the next option. This Friday mourning at 7:30am he is scheduled to undergo a somewhat serious operation to have an internal regulator installed. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure the exact details. I just know it's supposed to replace the external set-up he had, and kick it up a notch.) I ask that you please keep him in mind in your various prayers for Refuah (healing). Any Torah that can be learned, Tehilem (Psalms) said, etc, in the merit of his refuah would also be appreciated. His name is:

Baruch Matan HaLevi ben Miriam Sarah

Thanks in advance for all your kind deeds, thoughts, and teffilot (prayers). BE"H (B'Ezrat Hashem - with G-d's help) we should all merit speedily to see the day when no one will need to beg Hashem (G-d) for refuah any longer.

Kol Tuv (Be Well),

Purim Hero

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

The Bight

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches,

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,

the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard.

it seems to me, like pickaxes,

rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

and going off with humorous elbowings,

Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

on impalpable drafts

and open their tails like scissors on the curves

or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

with the obliging air of retrievers,

bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

where, glinting like little plowshares,

the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm.

like torn-open, unanswered letters.

the bight is littered with old correspondences.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

----- by cheap runescape gold