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Parting Short | I rubbed two drops into my gums as Benny did and settled in for a serene night of sleep. Whatever the expected effect, the oil had the opposite.
By DAVID BRINN FEBRUARY 22, 2025 08:04
A hospital bed.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
I arrived last Thursday night at a local Jerusalem hospital close to midnight.
A good friend had been admitted for tests, and I volunteered to stay overnight with him. I hate hospitals, so empathy always kicks in when someone I know ends up there.
Arriving directly from a jubilant Keves Shisha Asar reunion concert, I walked into the cavernous hospital with my backpack, after receiving a perfunctory nod from the security guard. From there, I could have gone anywhere without being questioned. Luckily, I wasn’t a hit man and Don Corleone wasn’t hospitalized.
I was still pumped, as we sat for a few minutes and talked. We kept our voices down so his sleeping and snoring roommate, separated from us by two paper-thin curtains, wouldn’t be disturbed.
Benny and I chatted for a bit and got ready for bed (mine being a makeshift cot at the foot of his bed). Among the veritable drug store of medication on his bed table was a bottle of medical cannabis oil for sleep, from which he shook some drops and rubbed them on his gums.
“Does that work? Maybe I should take some so I can go to sleep,” I said, thinking of a weekly tennis engagement coming up in less than eight hours.
I rubbed two drops into my gums like Benny did and settled in for a serene night of sleep. Whatever the expected effect, the oil had the opposite.
Within 20 minutes, my mind turned into a pinball machine, with balls crashing into lights that gloriously lit up in a barrage of ideas. Good ideas too, creative and even insightful! Melodies and rhythms of songs waiting to be written, memories of specific moments of my childhood, ideas for articles all murkily blended in my overactive brain along with the steady whir of hospital equipment.
Sleep was out of the question. I thought of getting up to bring my phone to the bathroom and record some of my thoughts, so I wouldn’t wake up Benny. That deliberation took about 45 minutes of more thoughts before I decided that if I was having such great ideas, I would remember them in the morning.
JUST WHEN I was beginning to fade into a zombie-like blankness, the room came alive with the sounds of visitors. Benny’s roommate was joined by what sounded like three or four people who were, most likely from their voices, his teenage children.
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Was the oil amplifying all sounds?
I couldn’t tell what they were saying, as it was a foreign mixture of Yiddish, with a few words of Hebrew or English occasionally thrown in. I wasn’t even trying to listen in, but they were using daytime voices, oblivious to their surroundings or the presence of others in the room.
In fact, I began to question that maybe the oil was having an intensifying effect of amplifying all sounds. I could hear every movement in the nurses’ station down the hall. And what about the language issue with the neighbors? Could I be imagining the whole thing? Benny seemed to be sleeping through it all, adding to the questioning of my own altered faculties.
I was too reticent (and a little paranoid) to get up, open their curtain and ask them to keep the noise down, so I went back to my melodies and memories, trying to block out the league of nations across the way.
I was actually drifting off to sleep, when a cell phone wake-up alarm from the other side of the curtain began blaring what could best be described as a hassidic fight song, complete with rousing male chorus and a cacophony of horns. It was like being in the front row of a haredi Coachella.
The amazing thing was… nobody turned it off! For nearly two minutes, the music got louder and louder, as I buried my head under my blanket and prayed that a bout of unconsciousness would overtake me.
When that didn’t happen, I gathered up my courage, and in a slow-motion series of lurching moves like I was entering enemy territory, swept away my curtain and the neighbor’s curtain, and saw three teenage boys who looked like they would be more at ease in Mea She’arim, sleeping in chairs next to the patient, presumably their father. Sleeping!
I shook the shoulder of the nearest kid and whisper-shouted “turn that off!”
He opened his eyes and woozily looked at me, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. Pointing to his father’s phone, I wordlessly gave him a hint, and indignantly went back to my side of the room, ripping my curtain closed in a futile facsimile of slamming the door.
Once he figured out how to turn off the alarm – or maybe it stopped on its own, who knows? – the music ceased.
Just as my heartbeat began to lower to normal and I desperately grasped for a few minutes of sleep, the nurses’ rounds began. There was more Yiddish-Hebrew miscommunication on the other side of the curtain that I infuriatingly couldn’t unhear.
Finally, the nurse left and quiet reared its head for a solitary moment. Sleep finally beckoned.
Then my morning alarm went off.
Time for tennis.
The writer is senior editor at The Jerusalem Post.
English (US) ·