Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
An honest, frank look at how the health care system works from the viewpoint of one family, one man and his wife
I am going to open myself up on this blog, because I have realized we only have so many breaths available to us and if we waste them, they are gone. So too, we only have so many keystrokes available to us and if we waste them, they are gone. Unfortunately, my wife is very ill and with one small piece of plaque in the wrong place in her vascular system, she will be gone. Due to the detrimental effects of a major stroke and several Transient Ischemic Attacks, she has undergone drastic changes to her whole person very rapidly and due to these attacks on her vascular system, my wife, is not the same person today on February 8, 2011 she was on November 3, 2010.
The deterioration of her health and disappearance of who she was has happened very quickly. Nobody is ready for a loved one having bad health in their later years, but no one at all is ready for their wife, who on November 3, 2010 could walk all around the house with the aid of one crutch tucked under their left arm and do any of the work she wanted to do, to a person lost in vascular dementia, completely incapable of holding themselves erect on their own two feet, dependent on others to move her body which is incapable of moving itself. The aftermath of this series of strokes has left my wife a complete invalid in the matter of a short 3 months.
My wife has given birth to three wonderful children and I have one son. I have been Father to her grown children and she has been Mother to my son for 22 years. To say we are step parents is inaccurate. We have both tried to be involved in the lives of our children. We have succeeded in some instances and failed in others. There are no biological parents who have it any different. I love the children she gave birth to as if they were my biological children and she has loved my son more than his biological mother has ever thought about loving him. Together we have seen or been involved with the birth of 8 grandchildren. Two of them carry my blood line and 6 carry that of my wife.
We have had wonderful experiences while we have been together and traveled all over this country together. We have had awful, horrible times that I wouldn't wish on anyone, mostly involving ill health.
Now my wife is at a Hospice facility. Due to dementia and the aftermath of numerous strokes and transient ischemic attacks, she is only a shell of the vibrant woman she was for so many years. It has all happened so fast, but the truth is that all of us are going to die from something. Whether it is a lingering illness that takes away quality time from life while we await the inevitable, or a lightning fast accident that is over with in a matter of minutes, is only a matter of which number we get. G-d in His wisdom, does not let us see too far into the future. Oh, we can have insight and intuition, but that doesn't go very far with a disease that takes away the same mind that creates the insight and from which we derive the intuition.
What is left are the angels that live among us everyday that more often than not, receive no accolades for their efforts and very little in compensation. I am talking about the nurses and nurses aids and the social workers and the men and women who do the cleaning of the floors and emptying of the waste cans. These are the real people who make a difference in our health care system. I am not trying to take away anything from the doctors or pharmacists who make sure we have the drugs and therapy protocols that are necessary, especially in a lingering disease that takes its toll, not only in our health, but in our time, as well. But the true angels that live among us are barely noticed. They are the ones who have families of their own, yet they spend more time with the strangers, or in the case of long term care facilities, the not so strange ones, the people who call on their time each and everyday without ceasing, at least until they are dead, or go home because the therapy these angels administer has worked. These angels that walk among us don't look any different from any of the other people we see. Little do we know how one of them has had the fortitude to take their own finger and pull out impacted poop, in order to relieve the torment of one of the people for whom they care. Or, in the case of so many of us who have loved ones with dementia, these angels have to deal with being cussed out, spit on, slapped or hit, and still maintain their composure in order to make sure these poor sick people get the care they need.
My wife may not live much longer, or with the proper palliative care given by some of these angels who walk among us, she might linger for a while longer than any of us thought possible, just because these special people try so hard to give us all the time we can get with our loved ones. We can talk about "Death Panels", or the misuse of Medicaid, but I believe with all of my soul that our health care system is the best not because of bureaucrats, but because of these special angels that walk among us, the people on the front lines of health care who make their livings taking care of people they might never know personally, but who for the time they have them in their care, take up the focus of their lives. These front line angels put the health and well-being of the people in their care front and center and that is why our health care system will come out of this bureaucratic nightmare, no matter what the government does, and be better than any other in the world. These ministering angels put others ahead of themselves each and every day and if all of us could just try and live our lives a little like these special angels live theirs, this whole world would work and be a much better place to be in.
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Times They Are Achanging (Lyrics by Bob Dylan)
The times they are achanging! I grew up listening to Bob Dylan, Ritchie Havens, Peter, Paul and Mary, Styx, Kansas and a whole lot of musicians playing on their acoustic guitars in coffee houses. I also listened to John F. Kennedy, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I even tried drinking some "Billy" beer once.
In my young life, television was still in its' infancy. I mean we only had three channels to choose from, CBS, NBC and ABC. That was it. Our generation got its' point of view from a black and white television with news anchors that everyone listened to because there were no other choices, or a black and white newspaper whose political affiliations were well known by all. We watched the Kent State massacre on a black and white TV. We watched the Watts riots and all the lies from Nixon on a black and white TV. Actually, around 1972, my neighbor's family got a big, huge color television built into a console cabinet. My father did get a color TV, albeit, a smaller one, around 1975. It was really something to be able to watch those three channels in color.
Now, we have the option of hundreds of channels on satellite or on cable TV. The problems are different but the basic tenets of the problems we had in the 1960's and early 1970's are no different. The more we change, the more we stay the same! The patterns associated with the problems facing the country during my young years are the same patterns we see today. The faces have changed but the problems still remain. There are different names for party loyalists that people associate themselves with today-i.e. Progressives and Conservatives, instead of Democrats and Republicans, because a Progressive can be either Republican or Democrat, like John McCain, a Republican and the Blue Dog Democrats who vote on more of a moderate or centrist ticket, especially on items like defense and some Blue Dog Democrats have even come out against the Health Care Bill. America has touted the fact that we are a democratic nation, or a nation whose politics are based on a democracy, but we still only have two parties. It helps to know if the people are Progressives or Conservatives. But, in a true democracy, all the different types of people should be represented. Israel has come closest, I think, to what a true democracy should look like. They have around 18 different parties that represent everyone from conservative, orthodox religious people to the parties representing the Arab voters who live in Israel as citizens.
The problems we are facing now, not just as a nation, but worldwide, will transcend political affiliations. There are people in the world today, just as there were earlier in history, who actually want to kill and wipe out whole blocs of civilization just because they are of a different religion or faith. Whole swaths of the Middle East could soon be under the direction of a Caliphate, that is not as far-fetched as some people may think and Great Britain could actually fall under that direction with their failed experiment in multi-culturalism.
The times they are achanging and if we are going to survive as a country, we have to do, as a country what any household would do if faced with similar financial problems. We are going to have to tighten the financial belts, cut unnecessary spending, and find ways to bring in more money for the coffers (in order to pay down the debt, if that is even possible due to the staggering amount of debt). America is going to have to pick itself up, dust itself off and start doing what Americans have always done better than any other country in history-start making things that will benefit society as a whole. I remember that we used to call the students who wore pocket protectors and carried around $400.00 calculators, "Sweats", while the rest of us took History, English and Bible courses. Now those same "Sweats" who know how to get the square root of a number, are changing the way we communicate with each other; they are involved in some of the most far-reaching scientific experiments the world has ever seen, including the transportation of molecules from one location to another. How far off is it going to be before we actually use the phrase, "Beam me up!"
Mankind has always had the opportunity to annihilate themselves, or create a world in which we all try to make things a little better during our lifetimes. Not everyone will make a million dollars; nor will we all come up with the next "Facebook"; but, all of us can help our neighbors, or our family, or our friends when they need a helping hand to do something, even if it is a small something. That small action is what I mean by making this a better world. By choosing to do something all on your own that is a good thing, you can create waves in the pond of life and your small contribution may help someone you don't even know find a way to cure cancer, or make a car that doesn't need gasoline that can go further than 60-80 miles; or maybe just put a smile on the face of someone who was crying; that is the kind of world I want to live in! Not one in which one section of the population wants to wipe out and kill another section just because they may have different ideas about how to live their lives. There is a chance we may kill each other off for some stupid reason, or even by mis-communication, but if there is a chance for the individual to make a contribution, no matter how small it may seem that makes this world a place in which laughter is still heard in a hundred years, than we will be on the right track.
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