Tomorrow, June 3rd, I am scheduled to undergo a critical surgery that will determine my future. The whole affair is rare and will be performed by a one-of-a-kind surgeon, and also with God’s help, at the NYU University Hospital in New York.

Using robotics, they will attempt to remove a tumor—possibly cancerous—from inside my spinal cord in the neck area. I hope they succeed without causing me irreversible damage. We will all strengthen the doctor’s hands and pray for the success of the surgery. The main thing is that my wife and children are by my side.

Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door (Bob Dylan)

I have an affair, an affair with cancer. The kind with ups and downs and everything in between. A permanent friend has joined my body, an aging cancer with some sort of body. It appears in a variety of shades, and when it is attacked, it quickly hides. It bursts out like a wild tumor in an empty stomach, or like the tumor that hid inside my spinal cord for years.

The doctors say the treatments help and save lives, but in hindsight, they damage the body’s level of alertness against attacks from other bastards. So when the gates are breached, little bastards appear and break out on an ear or a cheek, and I know it’s that same hiding one sending me a proxy. Something small and annoying that just screens the bastard so he can keep on singing. A surgeon’s scalpel uproots them one by one, each time with a little bit of “Yackov” from the side.

Parts of the body are already shut down with no spare parts available. Sensors too, into which seawater and Kishon river water have seeped, and now my autopilot, instead of Ness Ziona, takes me to Rishon. To me, it’s no longer clear who is responsible for the situation—that same bastard, or a loss of control at the outpost.

I am left with nothing but to lie on the table and abandon all of myself into his hands. Sometimes the doctor asks if he can poke, and I answer, “Do what you need to do now,” and it goes without saying. I don’t bat an eyelash and I don’t move a wing, and it seems to me that sometimes the doctor pokes just to make sure he isn’t already operating on a corpse lying before him.

Me, like a fly lying on its back, having its leg touched to check if it’s fit to fly right now.

I agree that I am lucky, but what of it? A goddess of luck has attached herself to me, so exhausted and old. Battered and wrinkled, she gave me everything she had and more. Now she is already begging for peace and rest, and I might need more, more and more. It reminds me of a line said by Rosa delle Rose in the movie based on the book by Tennessee Williams: “She didn’t shake hands with the devil! She has rheumatism.”

The goddess of luck and I trudge hand in hand along the track around the neighborhood. When I look at the grandstands, I see how current friends are slowly, slowly changing into friends of the past. There, far away and above, I vaguely see my parents who have been there for a long time, having passed away at different times, and now they are together. They stand out from the rest because they are the only ones waving their hands and making a sign to me: “Yankale, stop and go back!” while the rest are encouraging me to join the graduating class.

And as I reached the final stretch, I wonder—is this the last stretch? The end of the stretch still seems a bit far to me, and then, as if to mock the poor, the bastard sticks his head out, laughs, and with a pinching arm points toward its end.

The bastard thought to harm me and spares no means, but he didn’t know that I eat wolves for breakfast.

Only God knows, for he who laughs last laughs best, but my friend the cancer hasn’t yet revealed to me what else is hiding in his closet.

For the results of the third meeting? You will probably have to wait for a post that will come from here or from there, hoping that there is already Wi-Fi there too, for the sake of the families.