I prefer to wait for Moshiach at home instead of the ER, thanks

Spoiler: I didn’t die.

And now that we’ve cleared that up, it’s story time:

So, the most rebellious thing I’ve done in a while is leave the hospital against medical advice.

I’ll back up and explain.

Despite my talent for drama, I’m actually pretty hardcore when it comes to my health.

Yeah, I may whinge a little and occasionally wish my mother would come back from the dead to make me chicken soup and tell me I’m brave, but by and large I manage on my own.

Headache? Advil.

Cramps? Ditto.

Long covid? I write a poem or two about the crushing existential despair of existing in a body made of wet tissue paper and then basically continue with my life.

But last night, after a grueling and anything-but-peaceful bedtime routine with my little one, I finally sat down on the couch.

The kettle was on.
Tea was ready for pouring.
The apartment was quiet except for the soft nighttime sounds of the Old City drifting through the window.

And suddenly —

I gasped.

It felt like my chest and upper back were being squeezed in a giant invisible fist.

Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.
Not “my heart hurts because life is hard.”

I mean physically compressed like someone was trying to wring me out like a damp dishcloth.

My face tingled.
Sweat prickled across my forehead.

Now, I’m a neurotic Jewish woman of a certain age with an advanced medical degree from Google University, so naturally my brain immediately went:
Ah yes. Death.

I’ve never had a heart attack before.
But I’ve also never had whatever the hell this was.

The vice grip relaxed.

I sat there blinking.

“Hm,” I said to myself in the calm voice of a woman absolutely not spiraling.

Then it happened again.

And then again.

At this point I didn’t even bother consulting my therapist/rabbi/bff ChatGPT because while I may be neurotic, I’m not stupid, and I know that when your chest starts contracting like late-stage labor, it’s generally considered suboptimal.

The very last thing I wanted was the ER.

Emergency rooms are where dreams go to die and where there’s a very real possibility that moshiach will arrive before you get discharged.

So instead I texted the Jewish Quarter WhatsApp group:

“Does MADA have an EKG machine?”

(I’m low key like that.)

My thinking was simple:
If the EKG is normal, I’ll have my tea (ok whisky), attempt to stop being dramatic, and go to sleep.

I generally refrain from asking people to daven for me.
I mean, people are welcome to offer.
Or I can just sit here alone in the dark with my possible heart attack, don’t worry about me.

My friend Tova called immediately.

Tova rescues cats in the Old City which means she is one of the best people alive.

“I’m coming over,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m already on the way.”

That’s friendship.

She offered to stay with my son if I needed the hospital.

I was still on the fence, weighing the cost-benefit analysis between my couch and a hospital gurney, when another spasm hit me so hard I doubled over.

Ok.
Fine.
Perhaps we are doing this.

I called the paramedics.

By the time they arrived, I was drenched in sweat and shaking.

This is it, I thought.

Timna, Jessica:
delete my browser history.

Aimee:
destroy the photo of me from Cat Club circa 2003 and the one from the Raleigh’s bathroom in 2004.

Oh, and tell my kids and family I love them.

The paramedics arrived and so did, apparently, half the neighborhood.

Honestly we had more than a minyan.
I haven’t seen this many Jews and Arabs crammed into one small room since the Oslo Accords.

And suddenly my main concern shifted from mortality to humiliation.

Did I leave dishes in the sink?
Why didn’t I vacuum?
Why hadn’t I fluffed the pillows?

“What does the pain feel like?” one of the male paramedics asked while attaching leads to my body.

“Like contractions.”

“I’ve never had those.”

He wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm.
It squeezed painfully tight.

“Ok,” I gasped. “Like that. But around my chest.”

“I see.”

The EKG was normal.

As normal as it apparently is to have EMTs lifting your jammy-jammies in front of half the Old City while sticky electrodes are attached directly over your stretch marks.

The wise council of MADA convened in my living room.

Even with a normal EKG, they explained, I needed bloodwork.

A debate ensued.

I argued that I did not want to spend the next fourteen years waiting in an emergency room while my son slept peacefully in the next room.

“The ER is empty this time of night,” one paramedic assured me confidently. “You’ll be back long before moshiach.”

SPOILER: This man lied to me it would turn out.

The neighbors offered to watch my son.

I still balked.

“Would you rather be bored at the hospital,” another paramedic asked, sounding exactly like Woody Allen with a stethoscope, “or dead in your sleep?”

Unfortunately he made an excellent point.

Now, the streets of the Old City are fascinating thoroughfares:
wide enough for history, empire and the Almighty, not always wide enough for ambulances.

So they loaded me into a mini ambulance to get me to the main ambulance.

Honestly?
Back in the day this probably would’ve been a donkey, so I accepted the upgrade.

The paramedics were wonderful.
Capable, calm, immensely kind.

One of them kept talking to me during the ride because apparently I looked faint enough to concern him.

He asked about my children.
About living in the Old City.

“It’s my dream to live there,” he admitted.

“It’s a village,” I told him.

And it’s true.

You could see it in my tiny living room.

Different religions.
Different communities.
Different politics probably.

And yet everybody showed up.

To help.
To heal.
Or at the very least to see my sink full of dishes and feel significantly better about the state of their own sinks.

Truth is, these days all our homes contain multitudes:
laundry piles, unfolded towels, half-drunk coffee cups, unopened mail, anxiety, grief, survival.

Even the most well-oiled domestic machine is buckling a little under the strain of these deeply stupid and apocalyptic times.

Maybe that’s part of what this was.

Stress.

I mean, it would track.

It’s been quite a year.
Few years.
Lifetime.

Maybe eventually the body simply rises up and says:
EXCUSE ME ABSOLUTELY NOT.

We arrived at the hospital.

And immediately I realized the paramedic had deceived me.

Perhaps he had never actually been inside a Jerusalem ER after midnight during a collective national nervous breakdown.

Because the place was overflowing.

Every chair was taken.
People lined the hallways.
Children slept across parents’ laps.
A young woman was forming a new political party.
An old man muttered Psalms under his breath.
A teenager held a towel against a bleeding hand.
Somewhere a woman was yelling at someone in Russian.
Somewhere else a janitor named Pinchas was pushing a mop bucket down the corridor while singing the Eurovision song at full volume.

Moshiach was definitely ahead of me in line.

Tova stayed.

And honestly, if you’ve never had someone sit beside you in an emergency room at two in the morning while you wait to find out whether your heart is malfunctioning, you may not understand what a sacred thing that is.

A nurse came over and took blood to check for cardiac enzymes — markers that can indicate a heart attack.

“If this first result is normal,” she explained, “we’ll still need another test in a few hours.”

A few hours.

Reader, I absolutely did not have a few hours.

Not psychologically.
Not spiritually.
Not logistically.

The first test came back normal.

Spoiler: I wasn’t about to die imminently.

And suddenly the rebel in me awoke.

The ER was still packed.
People we practically bringing in suitcases and moving in.

I wanted my own bed.
I wanted my child.
I wanted my tiny apartment inside the walls of the Old City where at least if I died, I’d die near my own kettle.

Tova and I were exhausted.

I prefered to wait for Moshiach at home instead of the ER, thank you.

The doctor explained that leaving before the second blood test was not recommended.

I nodded respectfully while mentally preparing my escape.

Against medical advice sounds dramatic, but mostly it involves signing paperwork under fluorescent lighting while looking feral.

“You understand the risks?” the nurse asked.

“I do.”

“Chest pain can be serious.”

“Yes,” I said. “That part has been made extremely clear to me.”

She handed me the form with the weary expression of a woman who had seen this exact scene unfold roughly twelve thousand times before.

And then Tova helped me stand because my legs still felt shaky.

We walked back outside into the Jerusalem night to take a taxi home.

Cool air.
primordial stone.
That thin silver light the city gets just before dawn when it feels both forever and heartbreakingly fragile.
Home.

The pain was still there faintly.
A warning shot across the bow.

And maybe I should have stayed.

Maybe the moral of this story is that you should always listen to doctors and never leave the hospital early. But I made it through the night and feel more or less ok. A little
Embarassed, but ok.

But honestly I think the real lesson is this: none of us are meant to survive alone.

Not the capable paramedics.
Not the exhausted nurses.
Not the janitor singing Eurovision.
Not the cat rescuer who shows up in the middle of the night.
Not the neighbors offering to watch your child.
Not the terrified woman clutching her chest in jammy jammies while half of Jerusalem crowds into her living room.

This city exhausts me sometimes. But it embraces me, too…

And it also reminds me, over and over again, that even now — especially now — people still show up for one another.

Even in the dark.
Even in chaos.
Even with dishes in the sink.