Israel Today

Israel Today Seeing Clearly in the Holy Land

By Rafi Sackville

Ishould have listened to my wife. A year ago, I told her about my increasing difficulties seeing long distances. For months, I dismissed her pleas to make an appointment with the eye doctor in Nahariya.

It was June by the time I saw Doctor Zvi. He informed me I needed cataract surgery in both eyes. He initially told me he wouldn’t be able to operate until August unless there was a cancellation, which there was the following day. He called me to tell me. I was surprised to hear his voice, as I was in the naive belief his secretary would call instead.

Before I had a chance to gather my thoughts, I was lying on a bed in an operating theater in a medical center at the Check Post in Haifa.

After he’d finished the procedure, I asked him when I could do the right eye (it was worse than the left). He told me he’d speak to me the following day when I came for a checkup. I did just that, but he wasn’t certain and asked me to contact him.

The number he gave me took me on a circuitous route back to his recorded announcements. I tried another number, and it did the same thing. I tried calling from the private number he’d called me from, but that also went unanswered.

I started to worry. We were flying out to New York to visit our kids, and I wanted the appointment penciled in before we left. I tried emailing, but he didn’t answer. I tried calling the hospital he worked in but got the same result.

I then discovered his secretary was an ex-student of mine. I WhatsApped her. She immediately replied. It took her a couple of days to coordinate with him, but she eventually got back to me with the happy news that my second cataract procedure would take place a week after my return from New York, some two months after the first.

Upon entering the clinic at the Check Post in Haifa on the given date, I told the doctor that he was impossible to contact directly. When he reminded me he’d given me his email, I pointed out that were he to check his inbox, he’d find three emails from me.

I was wearing a cloak, lying on the table. Marked above my right eye was a black cross, I was covered by a heavy sheet, they were swabbing my eye with alcohol, when the doctor walked in. He took a look at my already operated eye and said, “You’ve got an infection. I’m not operating. I’ll give you drops.”

It took me a moment to register. When I did and asked him when we could reschedule, he replied nonchalantly, “End of November.” That took me longer to register.

“How do I arrange that?” I asked him.

He was in the middle of telling me that I had his email address when he caught himself and told me, “I’ll call you.” That had a sound of non-believability about it.

The point isn’t my eye. In fact, it has nothing to do with me. It’s the cavalier way business is regularly done in Israel that oftentimes has me questioning the efficacy of the system. In New York or Melbourne, the point person, the secretary, acts as a barrier between doctors and their patients. They direct traffic. They keep calendars clutter-free. They maintain order.

There are doctors in Israel who do have efficient gatekeepers, but there are those who enjoy being autonomous, and when they do, the inevitable clutter and discombobulation occurs. My eye doctor uses the occasional post-it notes to keep his appointment diary orderly, but once I left the medical center, I realized that I’d have to initiate the process of rescheduling myself, and I recalled the day he had called me months before when he commented, “Who are you? I don’t remember you because I have so many patients.”

The Israeli health experience can oftentimes feel like a game of unnecessary risk. Why is it that the roll-out of the Covid vaccine was run like a military operation and yet dealing with a specialist can often boil down to a hit or miss series of negotiations?

This all happened on a Tuesday. I wasn’t a happy camper through the following day. Then, on Thursday morning, my former student WhatsApped me saying there’d been a cancellation and “would next week be okay?”

Before I knew it, I was back on the same operating table.

“Ah, the drops have worked well,” said Doctor Zvi as he prepped for the operation. Then he went through his checklist; I was asked my name, then my personal identity number, then he asked me why I was there. I couldn’t resist.

“I’m here for a hair transplant. Make me blond.”

He replied almost instantly, “I’m sorry, but if I’m taking the hair off your chest, it’s all white.”

The following morning, I took off the bandages, and within a day I was amazed at how clear the world looked. I had a follow-up call that afternoon.

Doctor Zvi was in a jovial mood. He asked me what I thought after he proudly announced I now had 20/20 vision.

“I’ve got two things to say,” I told him. “The first is that I should learn to listen to my wife,” to which he readily agreed.

“The second is that she thinks I look quite handsome without glasses.”

Doctor Zvi lifted his head and looked at me with a glint in his eye. “She thinks you look quite handsome without glasses? Tell her she ought to see me as soon as possible. She might be having trouble with her vision.”

I laughed aloud. Walking outside, I caught the smell of the Mediterranean a short block away. I looked around at the tree-lined street. Nature had never looked so beautiful and so clear.

Rafi Sackville, formerly of Cedarhurst, teaches in Ort Maalot in Western Galil.