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.