Avi's Lymphoma

This last week was a pretty standard week  (by standard I mean the kind of week we have gotten used to in the last year or so) – a couple of blood tests, a trip to Sloan but nothing very interesting or informative, except for yesterday's blood test which was petty bad. Avi had very low white blood counts and platelets, and pretty low hemoglobin. This actually was to be expected but as Monday's blood tests were much better we were hoping for smaller dips. So we spent a couple of hours in the transfusion center yesterday where Avi got some platelets. More transfusions are scheduled for Wednesday and before that another blood test Monday morning. Avi's back has not changed much and the pain dominates everything just now. He did get a back brace on Wednesday and that seems to help a tiny bit in the sense that laughing is less painful with the brace on. Walking and standing are also a bit better this way. On the other hand, the medical marijuana seems not to be the panacea Avi...

Here is a brief report on my state, and then we go back to more poems! I returned home on Friday, and of course this is always great, especially celebrating the end of this EPOCH chemo! Blood-wise, this promises to be the best recovery period after such a round. My numbers are quite a bit higher than after the previous rounds of this chemo. The simple explanation (which we buy) is that now, as most of the cancer is gone, generating blood is easier for my bone marrow. In particular, my white counts are now high enough    so I don’t need to worry as much about infections. Physically, my spine problems dominate the exhaustion from the treatment, and their combination is not fun at all. I will see my orthopedist again this week, although I don’t think he can do much (as rest is the main cure for such compression fractures). Still every little way of improving both the pain and the speed of healing will help (as during the weeks around transplant I hear weakness is far greater...

OK – that's a bit of a silly pun but it's good to put the orange stuff behind us. It clearly worked, and worked well but that did not come free. As eager as we are to move on to the next phase of Avi's treatment it's nice he will have some well deserved R&R before starting on the transplant trip at the end of this month. We are full of admiration to the oncological nurses and staff at the Princeton hospital, as well as to Avi's oncologist, Dr. Blom. During Avi's 4 stays here over the last couple of months they have all been very professional, attentive and kind as well as patient and happy to stop by for a chat and a smile. It's almost been a pleasure to come here again and again! It's a day of farewells – I dropped Eyal & Meir off at the train station a couple of hours ago and they will soon board their flight back to Israel – nice to have so many visitors!

Continuing my previous post on translations, I will provide more detail than anyone probably wants. But, as with this whole blogging experience I am growing into, it definitely serves a purpose for me now, and I believe I would be interested in reading it with some years’ perspective! There are so many (indeed, a growing number of) aspects to discuss regarding these poem translations, and I will do so in somewhat random order, but stress again that even thinking about these issues, besides about how to best translate a given poem, became extremely interesting to me. All choices and considerations below apply to these current, twilight translations. How do I choose a poem to translate? First, I need to love the lyrics. But that is not enough – it is necessary that it was set to music I like, and has a performance I love to listen to and then sing.    Indeed, essentially all poems I translated so far I have known and loved for years, have heard and sung them possibly hu...

So, finally I got to write more about this (continuing the post titled Twilight Time ), and will give a couple of poem translations at the end of this post. Let me start with some background on my long relationship with rhymes. As far back as I can remember myself, I always loved to hear, seek and produce rhymes. My father sang lullabies to us in Russian. My brother Meir (a year younger than me) and I listened to songs on the radio for hours every day for many many years, mainly in Hebrew, but also plenty in English, French, Italian, Spanish – whatever was playing.   I also started rhyming early – wrote some banal, patriotic (with hindsight) poems for the middle school newspaper, enjoying mainly the rhyming. Then, I started generating a long string of variations on existing songs, changing the words (but keeping the original language) to suit various occasions of family and friends (birthdays, weddings, etc.), first primarily in Hebrew, and more recently in English as well...