It just happened that when we chose the lot for our house, it was close to a hospital still under construction, next door to Costco, the only store my wife and I need for the rest of my life. There, I can eat a hot dog with a cola, minced union, sauerkraut and mustard for about $1.50, which I consider the last best deal in America. Incidentally, I have to pass three cemeteries on my way to these two crucial institutions!
The next morning, coughing my lungs out, I drove to the doctor’s appointment. I told my wife only that I was very tired and wanted to get checked. Listening to my coughing, she said I probably need antibiotics, too. She believed I could have pneumonia, but I didn’t think so—I didn’t have a fever, nor did I have phlegm when I coughed. My last physical was 30 years ago. My only reassurance that I have been okay all that time is that I had donated blood twice a year, and this was allowed by the blood bank for an obvious reason: I was healthy. But there I was at the doctor’s office reception desk, filling out forms, showing my Medicare card, charging the copayment, and finally waiting for my name to be called.
Looking around and trying hard not to cough, I saw only older people, patiently waiting for their turn, obviously regular patients because the nurses who came to get them seemed know each one personally. I picked up a People magazine and going through it, I realized that I am old as well. I did not know one single young celebrity or anything about the latest Hollywood scandals. However, I did know the celebrities in the obituary section. I realized that my entertainment knowledge ended with the last shows of Johnny Carson and his guests. Indeed, I watch American Idol and often I can pick a winner from the early shows, and I always flip through the music channels showing young singers on a stage full of epileptic dancers and pyrotechnical explosions. I live in an old world and walking in supermarkets I notice only older folks around me. Once in a while a baby’s cry attracts my attention, only to cause me to walk away from that restless noise.
When my name was called, a young nurse loudly chewing gum led me through a long corridor with the unmistakable smell of alcohol, and stopped at a scale that shows I am 40 pounds overweight. So far, not so good…Then I entered a small consultation room with the well known five objects: a narrow adjustable bed, a little desk with two chairs, a sink and a waste basket closed by a shiny lid. On the walls were small medical instruments neatly lined up, and posters showing what the nervous system looks like and how the heart works. The nurse asked me to roll up my sleeve and took my blood pressure, while checking my pulse with a little gadget that wrapped around my finger. She took my blood pressure a second time and frowned. I asked what it was, and she said, 214 over 179! I protested that it had never been more than 120 over 80 each time I donated blood. The nurse took my blood pressure for a third time, and it was worse. I said it was probably my coughing that raised it so high. Then the doctor entered the room.
She was a young woman, wearing a white coat with the eternal stethoscope around her neck. With a professional skill I admired, she listened to my lungs very carefully while I was having one of my terrible coughing attacks. She took my pulse in the old-fashioned way, with three fingers on my wrist, and frowned. Before I knew it, I was in the dark room of x-rays for lungs. After many pictures, I returned to the little consultation room where two nurses asked me to take off my shirt and applied many stickers all over my chest and ankles, connecting me with the electrocardiogram machine. The reading proved to be very bad for me. The doctor indicated that my heart rhythm was “in shreds.” Seconds later, she told me I had a severe case of atrial fibrillation, commonly known as a-fib. That was why my blood pressure was so high and my pulse so irregular and weak. I realized my heart palpitations and hard-to-detect pulse, spells of dizziness and nightmarish sleep were because of this. The good news was that my lung x-rays were normal, and the cough was probably from my heart struggling to regulate itself.
In no time I learned that a-fib is due to chaotic electrical signals that open the atria valve at random, and little blood is pumped between ventricular chambers to supply the body with much needed oxygen and vital nutrition. It is due to the heart’s “computer” that is now out of control and sending wrong signals to the opening and closing of the valve. No wonder I had been feeling so tired and sleepy: my brain was not fed by enough blood and oxygen. On the bright side, I learned that millions of people have this condition which rarely is deadly. The problem was that stagnant blood was being forced to churn inside the heart and could result in blood clots that could go to the brain causing a stroke and partial paralysis or death. The doctor tried to ease my anxiety with a “we will put you back together in no time!”
A limping older nurse came with a wheelchair to take me from the doctor’s office to the hospital building on the other side of the parking lot. My plea that I could walk was ignored, and in moments I was on my way to an elegant-looking building, firmly convinced that people were wondering why a man who seemed to be so healthy except for a bad cough was being pushed in a wheelchair by an elderly nurse, who happened to be a volunteer worker. I recalled a joke: One guy wakes up in the ambulance and asks where he is being taken. “To the morgue” is the answer. “But I am not dead…” The reply is, “We are not there yet…” I smiled and close my eyes as I was whisked into a large elevator that stopped on the third floor.
I was taken to a small office where I asked to use a phone so I could call my wife. No surprise, she was stunned; she said she’d be right there, and about fifteen minutes later, she had found me. She sat on a chair next to me, her face worried and quite white. I’d been given a bunch of papers to fill out, all the insurance information. My wife filled in the papers for me. A woman came in and introduced herself as a social worker. My wife told her that I have Medicare, but not any supplemental insurance, and she said that wasn’t her area. A doctor arrived and started talking about a lot of tests he wanted to do. I told him that I had just Medicare and asked if that would cover everything? He thought for a minute, and then said yes, the tests he needed to do would all be covered.
He left, the social worker left, and my wife and I looked at each other. I knew what she was thinking. I had argued with her about having Medicare—I never had health insurance because I had never needed it. I figured I was strong and healthy and why pay for something I’d never use. She was adamant that I had to at least have Medicare parts A and B. Well, it was a good thing she won that argument! A moment later, she said, you’re signing up for a supplemental plan as soon as possible! I didn’t argue this time…as my awful cough hurt even the hair on my head.
A few minutes later, a nurse came, took the paperwork and handed it to someone else, and then said we’re going for a ride. My wife followed as I was wheeled down a corridor. The elevator door opened like a theatrical curtain and I was taken into a large room where two nurses were waiting for me. They examined my ankles. I was told to take my clothes off and put on a green hospital robe with the opening in the back. They left, and my wife helped me get undressed and into the hospital gown. I remembered that I had read some place about the guy who tailored that hospital garment by mistake and became a millionaire. One nurse returned with an IV stand, pushed up the sleeve of the hospital gown, and tie an elastic around my upper arm.
From there on, I began witnessing how a hospital operates, not always the way I expected. As I made a fist, the nurse searched for a large vain above my left elbow. She marked the spot with a pencil and put her plastic gloves on. I admired her expertise: the way she put the sterile needle and the hanging tube together, and rubbed my skin with alcohol. The wall phone rang and she picked it up. After a few words, she began to search for something inside her numerous pockets, until she finds a piece of paper and confirmed something. Then she began to search again for my hidden vein without changing her gloves. I asked her to change the gloves, which threw her off, but she did it. I also ask her to rub more alcohol on my skin before penetrating it with a thick needle and, clearly a bit annoyed with me, she did it.
Slowly, the large needle entered my skin and vein. With quick moves she hooked the IV tube to the needle and put a sticky patch over the needle above my hand and another above my wrist to keep the tube in place. She turned on the tube valve and with her gloved finger poked the tube to eliminate a bubble and make the serum flow into my vein. At that moment I knew without a doubt that I was officially sick, and I would never be the same. Two more nurses with different color gowns came with a portable machine and again I undressed to allow numerous patches to be applied to my chest and legs. Soon I was hooked to a machine with numerous red and white wires, and the machine began printing a long roll of paper.
Once that was done, another nurse looked at my ankles and then gave me a painful shot in my belly, and another began to draw blood from the other arm, filling at least four test tubes held together like bananas. I was unhooked and the machine taken away, while a sonar machine was rolled in by another nurse. Of course, this was after she, too, looked at my ankles. For the next twenty minutes, this nurse, wearing a different color gown, poked my left ribs with a kind of anti-perspiring roll, watching how the cold and slippery gadget collected images of my heart wrongly working. My wife asked the nurse how it looked, and the nurse, without losing any of her concentration, answered that only the doctor was able to answer. I took a look at the small screen and saw how my heart muscle worked to pump blood, and how the valves opened and closed without any predictability. I noticed, too, how my coughing affected the valve fluctuation. I thought I was probably coughing to re-activate the heartbeats.
The machine was pushed out of the room by its nurse, and two more nurses came to test my endurance, not having me run on a trade mill, but with a simple injection. They looked at my ankles and asked what kind of cola I wanted, to help me recover. I opted for Coke, no ice. Again I was hooked up with wires and cables to another machine which was probably linked to a distant lab or something like that. The injection was administered faultlessly in my right shoulder and took effect in a few seconds; I felt like I was finishing a 1500 meter race. The fatigue was incredibly powerful for a few minutes, after which I was disconnected from the wires and I drank a Coke from a can. No drink ever tasted so good and it put me back in shape. I kept sipping and thinking how a pharmacist from Georgia invented the drink one hundred years ago, but sold only some 40 gallons in one year. Disappointed, he sold his formula for a small sum of money, without guessing that today the refreshment is the most sold all over the world; Warren Buffet said that it is the only stock he never has to worry about. After I regained my strength, I was asked to lie in bed and swallow a handful of pills. Everyone except my wife left the room, allowing me to rest.
But forget resting. My room door had been left wide open and the flow of people walking, talking, and laughing mixed with voices coming out of the loudspeakers. Add in the squeak of wheel chairs and movable beds, the dragging of heavy loads, and vacuum cleaners. I have my own theory about squeaky doors in grading a restaurant: if the entrance door squeaks, scratching my eardrum, it is a guaranteed sign that this is a badly managed place and the service is awful. If the kitchen door also squeaks, then I know that it is dirty, the food is bad and served cold. If the waiter holds water glasses with his or her fingers around the rim, I know for sure the employees have had no proper training. Despite incredible improvements in decorating and improving the food, restaurants with squeaky doors and bad service cannot make it. The reason I cared about that right then was that the choir of squeaks affected my sleep. To my amazement and relief, my coughing began to slow down substantially, and I wondered what was in the plastic transfusion bag.
An hour later, medical experts, mostly women, came one after another to take numerous blood samples; they wheeled in another sonogram, and more nurses and male doctors arrived, all wearing sneakers. Almost each one checked my ankles. I could not help noticing that all the medical personnel looked either obese or sicker than I was. Actually, it was the great Benjamin Franklin who discovered two centuries ago that there are more older drinkers than older doctors…True or not, alcohol has one more undeniable distinction: it multiplies birth more than any other fertility method. It explains why the Earth is overcrowded and why the number of idiots is larger than that of intelligent people…These are probably strange thoughts for a person in the hospital, barely breathing and looking for salvation!
I was given a few pills and told more were to be taken in the morning. So, there I was, in the most uncomfortable adjustable bed, being treated like I was in a five star hotel: I could choose my breakfast and go to a large bathroom, with a toilet and shower for handicapped people like me. It was the largest bathroom I had ever been in, everything except the ceiling done in a fine cream colored marble. To get inside, I had to drag an entire laboratory on wheels. My wife helped a lot, still in dismay about me, the symbol of healthy man, now in a hospital, wired and hooked to tubes. At 10 PM she left, trying not to look distressed, but she couldn’t help looked upset…to say the least…
I could not sleep, even though the cough was almost gone. Each hour, all night long, a nurse came to take my temperature and pulse and check the IV. I wondered about the oversize bathroom and I asked how a new hospital could afford such an expense. “The bathroom was the gift of a person who was healed in this hospital!” she told me. I was impressed by the donation, and my confidence in the hospital could not be higher. Yet, I could not overlook the noise in the corridors. Fortunately, the TV hanging in front of my bed proved to be entertaining, as I watched one cowboy movie after another, including my favorite, Bonanza. I noticed how women of the 19th century, living in the middle of nowhere, were well respected by those tough men. The reason was simple: while the cowboys were full of sweat and dust, unshaved and looked dirty, throwing punches and shooting at each other, the women were clean, beautifully combed and dressed, looking so distinguished that they imposed respect on the no-good men. To my amazement, older men were portrayed as homeless, heavy drinkers and fools, everyone making fun of them. And regardless of who won the gunfight, even if all died, only the women, the doctor, and the caretaker survived untouched. From what I see on TV, women did just fine in the Wild West. And according to my brief experience, in this hospital as well.
It seems to me that Equal Rights went a long way to make women employable at all levels and types of work. In the arts and music, pharmacies, banks, offices, schools, and hospitals, women are often the majority of employees. But the two-income family has meant that often children are raised by strangers and parents watch them grow up on Smart Phone movies late at night. A terrible upset of family balance has taken place in modern. Now women work even in traditionally male jobs, such as in the police department, construction, and government—and they do good work, but there is an effect resulting from so many economic and social changes. Young women with a good income look for men of similar or higher status. The result backfires in Effectological terms, leaving many uneducated men without a bride, while women decide to become a single parent or to live alone. Women in the military began to sue because of discrimination, asking to be sent to fight next to men on the front line. Only the Russians had their women dying behind machine guns in WW II. In any other army in the world, uniformed women have been kept in the rear, to avoid their being captured by the enemy. As a rule, historically speaking, a woman prisoner will experience more humiliation and hardship than a male.
I have a prediction for the future: women are perfectly capable of living without men. If they could reproduce themselves by cloning or other lab insemination methods, men could become an obsolete species, since women might choose only female babies. Indeed, now the male is needed only a few seconds for releasing sperm, and his conception job is done. In fact is the most wasteful job because out of millions of spermatozoids, only one will reach the woman’s egg to fertilize it. For the next nine months the mother is totally in charge of the life of the fetus, from protecting and feeding it with her own oxygen and blood, to providing needed antibiotics. In all this time, the male can be missing and he will never be missed. After birth it is the mother who breast-feeds and takes care of the baby, while the father may be the bread winner and the protector of the family. This all works until science provided the spermatozoid that made the man so vital, after which his role and existence is doomed. So, I predict it will take only three generations for men to self-extinguish after they helped more than 100 billion humans to be born, since the first Homo sapiens appeared.
Eventually small groups of men, similar to the Essenes male sect, will be saved and displayed in zoo-like preservation for further generations. The question then is, what will be the impact of men’s absence at all levels of human existence? The female zoo guide will explain: “No more wars and brutal regimes in the world!” As good as that may sound, I’m glad I’ll be dead by the time this happens!
In the hospital, as I thought about all this, I also realized how thankful I was for the women’s movement; the female nurses there treated me like a king...who, granted, could not sleep due to their loud conversation and laughter in the corridor in front of my open door.
The morning inspection by a female medical team plus my assigned male cardiologist found me in good shape, with my wife next to me. An hour later, after eating the breakfast I had ordered, I was discharged from the hospital with a white paper bag full of medication. The cardiologist showed my wife what pill had to be taken when. “How long do I take this medication?” I asked. “Hopefully, for many years!” answered the doctor who was not laughing. He asked me how many glasses of water I drink a day and ordered me to stop drowning myself and drink only when I was thirsty. And added, “Lose 40 pounds, exercise four times a week and stay away from sweets and greasy foods. I’ll see you in two weeks. For now your heart is functioning normally!” I felt like kissing the man. Another older woman, I believe also a volunteer, came to wheel me to the car where my wife was waiting for me. Getting out the hospital parking lot, I felt like the guy who wanted a motorcycle so badly that he did everything to buy it, only to have a horrible accident with it…I had finished the fish pond, only to end up in the hospital…