Worthing Flash

Prayer for My Father After the death of a parent, some observant Jews follow the mourning tradition of avelut, which involves going to the synagogue every day for eleven months, to say the prayer for the dead. After my father died, I wanted to honor his death by committing myself to go to temple every day to say the kaddish. The kaddish is the prayer for the dead, but it never mentions the dead. It is just another thank you prayer to a very needy and uncaring god. I went to one Saturday service, but the rituals and language felt so alien to me that I never went back.  The time in that musty old, stucco Palm Springs temple left me feeling totally disconnected from my father and my heritage. And yet I had a strong urge to memorialize my father in some manner. On my way home I drove by a desert swap meet that my father had visited many years ago and talked about until the day he could no longer speak. I parked in the sandy lot and went looking for a particular vendor. My father ...

 Sometimes you know the language, but until you experience the procedure, the words don't begin to express what you are about to encounter.   A Catheter is a device you might know about.  You may have even seen a television commercial for self-lubricating catheters with happy, smiling actors.  Remember, they’re being paid to act happy, something you won’t be when you experience the catheter up close and personally. A catheter is a tube that goes up your urethra directly into the bladder to drain it.  While putting it in was awful.  Removing it was even worse.  Most catheters are kept in place by a tiny inflated balloon that expands in your urethra.  The first time I had a catheter, Nurse Sunshine used a different type of catheter, one that used a screw type mechanism to keep it in place.  When nurse Dana came in to remove it.  She tried to deflate the balloon – but there was no balloon.  She decided that the onl...