Ruminating About Health Matters

I have been working on my class newsletter this last week or two...in my spare time. We have 83 class members online and 105 that are not. I have the local office supply store print the newsletter off each year and fold it for mailing then I stuff the envelopes, put stamps on them, sort them and get them mailed. I do this right after Christmas and have for fifteen years. Before I took it over, three other classmates in order had the job.

Last night I heard from the wife of a classmate whose husband has had a horrendous experience with the medical community. I wish I had the space to share their experience here but I don't. Every time I hear of one of these medical catastrophe experiences, I am grateful for my good health and hope when my time comes, I just die quietly in my sleep. My experiences with doctors and hospitals has not been good. In the past year two of my friends have lost their husbands from infections they picked up in the hospital. And there is my own experience in trying to get Bob's problem diagnosed over a six month period, only to finally discover his cancer after it had spread over his entire lymph system. The worst part of that experience was just trying to get it biopsied. The surgeon we went to declined to do the biopsy because of Bob's diabetes...he said. Then he told our family physician that we had declined to have it done....an out and out lie.

Right now, at least by next week, I am without a physician. My doctor is giving up her practice to work at the Cherokee Clinic thirty miles south of here. I really want a woman doctor but there aren't many around here. Luckily, at this time at least, I am pretty healthy....but at 76 that can't last forever.

I stayed with the doctor that delivered my last two children for forty years until he retired. Then I changed to the doctor I have had now for the past ten years. I only see her at her practice once or twice a year but that's because I have been healthy and my philosophy about doctors and hospitals is we are healthier if we stay away from them as much as possible.

And I never...repeat...never..want anyone to put me in a nursing home. I told my daughter that and she said, "sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, Mom." That's scarey! My Great Aunt Margie lived to be 104 and finally died in a nursing home. My family usually is long lived. And mostly they have lived in their own homes. My mother was the exception. She was a heavy smoker and died of COPD at 68 in a hospital. And, of course, my only sister is suffering from Altzheimers Disease and lives in a nursing home in a special unit for dementia patients.

But the situation is a concern. If I should really need a doctor, I have no idea where I would go.