By Fred Owens
A
quick survey of my pals around the country -- from email contacts,
phone calls and Facebook posts -- showed variations of Old, Weak, Tired
and Scared, not to mention Poor and Lonely.
I am making this sound much worse than it is, but here goes:
Al
K. in South Texas fell and broke his hip. He's stuck in the
Rehabilitation Center for now. His wife said he got a four-hour furlough
to come home on Christmas Day in a wheel chair. That was five days ago,
he might be better now.
Stuart in LaConner
seems to be recovering nicely from back surgery. He is out walking and
playing golf and he sounded cheerful on the phone.
Marc
Zappa has COPD. We have no new report here, but he struggles to walk
the dog and climb the stairs. I told him we need to discuss the Grateful
Dead in our next phone call. Zappa is a major Dead Head. He has every
tape ever imagined of any possible Dead Show.
Bruce
does nine hours every week at the kidney dialysis center in Santa
Barbara. He says if you have two kidneys and you are under the age of
forty, might he borrow one. Bruce continues to be in good spirits.
Jim, also in Santa Barbara, will find out if his prostate cancer has spread. He said it might be terminal.
Amy,
back in LaConner, has a tumor in the back of her eye. Her husband told
me it is too dangerous to perform a biopsy in that location so they
don't know what will happen. Hopefully nothing.
Mark
in the Hollywood Hills has multiple myeloma. I have to look that up and
learn what that is, otherwise his wife, who is a retired nurse, can
fill me in.
So I heard from all these people
and I wasn't even looking for bad news. You're supposed to not let it
get you down. You're supposed to not feel Old, Weak, Tired, Poor, Scared
or Lonely. But you do sometimes.
Enough of That. This
is part of a series temporarily called No Country for Old Men, a title
borrowed from Cormac McCarthy without his permission. The topic is
Medical Education. The method is to be lucid and matter-of-fact. These
things just happen. I got the idea years ago from Roger Geffen, a
retired Episcopalian priest who lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and
raised twenty species of bamboo that could grow in the harsh climate of
New England. Roger's left arm just hung there from a stroke. He pointed
to it with his good right hand and he said. "My left arm doesn't work
anymore." He spoke the truth. Truth is good. Truth is beauty. So in
reporting on this topic I will lay it out as plainly as possible. I will
write the truth as I am able.
Health Care Issues. Will
millions of aging Baby Boomers use up every available health care asset
in the country? That is a good question because the tidal wave is
coming soon. I am on the cusp of the Baby Boom, born in 1946, so I have
seen this crowd following me through life, and we are now facing the
infirmities of old age. One partial solution to this problem is for us
to make a lot of effort to take care of each other, and to depend less
on the younger folks to look after us.
There
aren't enough Filipino nurses to go around. The young Latino immigrants
who would take nursing aide positions are being blocked at the border.
Oh, we will get through this all right, and we'll do that by helping
each other. If you have one good arm like Roger Geffen you can use that
one good arm to wipe the fevered brow of a man with no good arms.
Gee, that's kind of serious stuff. I think we will go watch a movie tonight -- something funny and entertaining, like the Green Book
with Vigo -- how do you spell his name? and the other actor -- how do
you spell his name? Why don't they have Clark Gable and Henry Fonda
anymore? They were good actors and it was easy to spell their names.
Twenty Years. Frog
Hospital is celebrating 20 years of publication in 2019. Over 700
issues and some of them were pretty good. Our Credo has always been tell
the truth and don't waste people's time -- meaning keep it interesting.
We have done that. And we plan to keep going. Our motto is Onward!
Happy New Year,
Fred
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