down to fundaleu

Falling off the wagon requires you to get up again. And when I got up and dusted myself off, I saw that things were different. Gone was the beautiful scenery of western New England, and gone was my wife’s rather large stomach. She gave birth to Elizabeth nine years ago, who ended up having her own complications, and we followed that with Emily and later Andrés. I looked around and saw the bit overwhelming city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, land of beef and Nazis, where we had been living for 6 years. Before that we were in Costa Rica. My children rattled the day away in Spanish. I mention that since we decided to get treatment here in Argentina, requiring me to visit hematologists and, although I have a pretty good command of Spanish, learn a whole new vocabulary and sound like a child the many times I didn’t know the word I wanted, or couldn’t grasp the word they wanted me to know. Ah….language learning.
Unlike the United States, oncology and hematology here are not interconnected fields, so my four hour wait for the oncologist at a nearby hospital proved to be somewhat in vain but fortuitous in that she did not recommend the hematologist at the hospital, nor could she recommend any in the area, but rather sent me to fundaleu (http://www.fundaleu.org/), a well respected leukemia hospital in the touristy heart of Buenos Aires. It was at fundaleu that I had my first flashback to my sojourn of nine years before. In the waiting room there were the same types of people, those with little hair, wasting away due to chemo, the worried expressions of family members, a TV set high above us all, and those, like me, who came and went, got to know the workers on a first name basis, and remembered to bring something to read. At the risk of being trite, it was said that Hitler at least made the trains run on time. Could we find a non-Nazi German around here, the area where I live is full of them, who could show some of those same efficiency skills and keep appointments running somewhat on schedule?