How Ya Feeling Old Fella?
Today I did what a lot of people my age do all too often. I stopped by my assigned medical mega-complex. It was mid-morning and mid-week, but still it was difficult to find a spot in their towering parking. Cars were waiting for spots that would be open if the cars in those spots were could back out, but they couldn’t because other cars were waiting for cars in other spots to back out.
I am not sick. although it makes me slightly queasy each time I come to this complex. Coming here reminds me that I am old, and that my life is slipping awa. I now have to spend more time, money and attention just to stay alive and upright. Being here also makes me aware of all the things that could go wrong, soon and suddenly. I didn’t think much about these things ten years ago, and certainly not twenty or thirty years ago, even after I became an orphan in my early fifties.
Now that I’m in my early seventies I have four doctors who pay close attention to me, even though I’m not sick. Yes, my body shows signs of wear and tear, but I’m not at all sure that all of this medical attention is helping me more than it’s stressing me out. I have an eye doctor because, as a kid, I had real problems with my eyes. Those were problems that doctors had just learned to fix and I was fortunate to be one of the early ones to get fixed. But the fix was only promised to last twenty years, and now its almost fifty years so they keep a close eye on it ( ha, ha).
Until about ten years ago I went to see a doctor about once or twice a decade. They would give me a Tetanus shot, poke around and send me home. That shot would last about ten years. But now I have to see a skin doctor because I get a couple of spots that never bothered me, but those doctors can tell which ones could possibly become bothersome someday. They freeze them, zap them or snip them off, and I leave with a big bandage.
I also have a urologist who sticks his well trained finger up my ass and tells me I have a big prostate. He asks me if I have trouble pissing. I also take a test that is said to be inaccurate, and with me that has proven to be the case. I have gotten high numbers, so they had to check meout in a very painful way, and thankfully, they found out I was Ok. There is more to that story but no one needs that much information.
I have my Primary Care Doctor (PCP) who I now see once a year. He needs to approve me so I can see the other doctors because I am in a Senior Care Plan, which is a new part of Medicare under Obamacare. They get points for controlling my symptoms and keeping me out of the hospital. If they can do that for me, and a lot of other folks, then they get paid more. Trump may get rid of that because he doesn’t seem to care about keeping people healthy unless they have the money to stay in his hotels. But for now, my doctors have a financial stake in keeping me alive.
That’s why I was here today. At my last visit with my PCP, he checked a lot of my stuff, like weight, blood pressure, ears and toes. He asked me if I feel safe at home (yes). He asked me if I fall down a lot (no). Then he went to the computer and punched in all my numbers. He told me I was healthy, which was reassuring, but the he said that I had two big risk factors. One was that my parents were both dead. They died of something, and I could die of that too. The fact that my father died at 87, and that he would be about 110 now didn’t seem to matter. The other risk factor is my age. People my age have a higher risk of, well, everything.
Then he told me again, as he has for the last three years, that they have a pill for that. He read from his computer, which must be connected to a Watson type machine, that in a study of 50,000 men, the ones who took this pill reduced their rate of having a heart attack or stroke by 2.5%, for me it would be only 1.9% since I was healthy. But why not take it?
My response of course was: “why take it?” What about side effects? Why put a strange chemical into my body? Who were these 50,000 men, and what did they end up dying from?
The doctor said that 5% of people get side effects. He said I would know with a week or two if I had any side effects, and if I did then I should stop taking the pill.
So fine. I took the pill. Now six weeks later I was here to have them check my blood to see if the pill, which gave me no apparent side-effects, was damaging my liver or kidneys. I couldn’t tell if it was making me stupid or anxious because I’m old and old people tend to get stupid and anxious at different rates. I sat there for about ten minutes in a very efficient waiting room, surrounded with other people of all ages, most of whom seemed more anxious than me. People looked green, others were on canes and walkers, many were overweight, some looked as if coming for help was already too late. The folks under sixty sat and looked at their phones. The older ones just sat.
After ten minutes I was called in, and three minutes later I was on my way back to the parking lot.
But this isn’t a story about my medical condition; it’s a story about trust.
As I sat in that waiting room I became aware that I had a lot of questions to which I could find answers, but I didn’t know if I believed the answers. Were the pills helping me or did the doctor get points for following the protocol? Was the drug company pushing this? Who paid for that study? How will I know if I’m doing 1.9% better? The pills cost me about four cents a piece, so whose making money? But four cents times a few hundred million becomes a few million.
Yet, I was there in that mega-medical-complex with hundreds of other people. Our medical care has unquestionably improved by a vast amount over the last twenty years. That’s why it’s so expensive. People in America have come to expect that if something’s wrong it can be fixed, but then they get upset at the expense. And they die anyway.
Is the expense worth it? Will I spend my extra 2% of my life unable to to remember my kids’ names and costing everyone thousands of dollars a month? Whose making money on this?
But if I can’t trust my doctor, and the Watson computer, who would I trust? Since I went on-line to search out what these pills will do to me I have been getting dozens of emails which offer me alternative remedies. Most, probably all, of them are wacko rip-offs, aimed at frighted old folks who don’t trust ObamaCare. I know enough not to believe much of anything I read on the Internet unless I can track the source back to The American Journal of Cardiology, and even then I would want to know who funded the study. I realize that soon I won’t be able to trust any information that comes out of the National Institute of Health because all of the people appointed by Trump believe in profit more than science. They won’t be looking out for me.
After I drove away from the mega-medical-complex I drove up to see Alice, one of the few patients I still see. She is slightly older than I am. She is a woman who has never trusted anyone in her life. She learned that early, being the only child of a raving religious fanatic mother and a mild mannered alcoholic father. Her father made a few attempts to defend her against the mother’s tirades about the devil, sin and men, but he copped out and dropped dead when Alice was eight. She never recovered from the years of her mother pounding fears into her. She sees dangers, threats, and conspiracies everywhere. She is only right about two-thirds of the time.
She lives alone, and always has, except for a brief marriage. She has no family, except for one cousin who lives far away. She has two friends, one of whom has just been diagnosed with cancer. She sees the world for what it is. None of the tragedies she sees on TV or reads about in the papers surprises her. She is not impressed with people, or with life. She leaves food for a few stray cats in alleyways.
In many ways this woman (some of her details have been changed), is better prepared for the turbulent times of change than I am. She knows that trust is difficult to establish. I am flattered that she trusts me. We live in a time when almost every fact is challenged (You say Russia did it , I say they didn’t. You say you have proof. Ha! proof, who cares?) It seems to me that more people now believe that the earth revolves around them than that it revolves around the sun, and if it doesn’t, it should.
We all can believe whatever we want. We can choose our own “facts” or make them up if we need them to fit what we want to believe. That seems to be a very popular trend. However, if you make a decision that is based on what you want instead of what is real, it will probably turn out badly: there really wasn’t a sex ring at that pizza parlor. Eating apricots may not be the best treatment for cancer. Not getting your child vaccinated endangers your child, and the community. Having credit left on your credit card is not the same as having money.
If we are going to make any real progress we have to find a way to make sure our words mean the same thing. We have to reach some agreements about what is real. If you tell me this drug, or this plan, or this job, or this man will be good for me, I want you to show me, in ways that I can understand, why this is so. I need more than a string of emogis. 😕
We need to be able to trust each other if we are going to have strong relationships, communities and nations.
Right now it’s not happening.
Thanks for reading. I’d appreciate any comments.
You can read more at:https://medium.com/choosing-our-future
