My father in law is moving toward his ninety-seventh birthday. Just before Christmas he fell and spent almost two weeks in the Trauma ICU at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. His injuries and subsequent difficulties seemed almost unreal given the fact that all he had done is fall down in his bathroom.
He broke his nose and his hand and had tiny fractures in a couple of ribs. The extent of the damage indicated that he was much more frail than he had seemed to be. As the son of a doctor he had taken good care of himself over the years. He exercised each day and took a regimen of eighteen pills recommended and prescribed by his doctors. He was always thin and wiry and never seemed to gain weight like most people so that was also in his favor but he has many different ailments including a slow moving cancer, heart disease, diabetes and essential tremors, as well as a tendency to develop gastrointestinal problems. To keep going well into his nineties he follows the dictates of his doctors like a man obsessed. He does not vary from his regular medical appointments nor does he question the advice that they give him.
When he was in the hospital with his injuries his body began to react in very scary ways. He developed a thoracic bleed, his kidneys were not fully operating, he was unable to eat and he had difficulty breathing. The doctors in the ICU attacked each of his symptoms quickly and with my father in laws full permission. What initially seemed like the potential end of his days slowly but surely demonstrated the brilliance of the medical community to which he has always been a faithful believer. Ultimately he overcame each and every challenge with the help of the doctors and nurses who doted over him. Now he is working to regain his strength and ability to walk and be independent once again.
I mention all of this not because I believe that he is somehow more blessed with health than others but because the doctors in our country are so advanced in what they are able to do. I have little doubt that if they had only relied on faux medicines and wacky beliefs he would surely have died. Instead they applied their knowledge, skills and medical machinery to bringing him back to a stable state of health. It was science and inventiveness that saved my father in law, not silly ideas that he was a chosen one who got to stay alive rather than someone’s brother or child or neighbor who died in the same moment.
We have a society in which all of the advances in medicine are being challenged by an untrained man who seems to believe that the very things that kept my father in law alive are actually hurting us. Vaccines are on the chopping block even as we forget how devastating polio was before children regularly received immunizations to prevent this dreadful disease. Few people have heard stories of smallpox like I did from my grandfather who nursed his father and stepmother when they became so ill that “their noses seemed to be in danger of falling off of their faces.” Few people have had measles of late like I did before there was a shot to prevent me from being ill with high fevers for over a week. I could go on and on and on because when I grew up most inoculations were only beginning to become commonplace in reducing the spread of foul diseases.
Our present government has unfunded many research programs that were designed to save lives. My oncologist niece has told me that advances from such programs have saved lives of cancer patients who might have died only ten years ago. It is shortsighted to attempt to save money by discontinuing the kind of programs that led to the procedures that kept my father in law alive in his recent visit to the hospital.
On top of all of that most of his doctors and even some of his nurses had come to the United States with special visas which are now being threatened. It is estimated that forty percent of Primary Care Physicians and Oncologists working in the United States have come here with such visas. Now many of them are considering leaving and the new supply of doctors will not make up the deficit. There will be rural areas without doctors as all.
My grandfather always called the present the good old days. He remembered his grandmother trying to help sick people get well with homemade poultices and tonics. While he was proud that they called her Doc Reynolds he also understood how important our advances in medicine had been in saving lives. He never knew his mother because she had died in childbirth. He mourned for an uncle who was his guardian who died from an infection before penicillin had been invented. He believed that the progress being made in science and the way we treated people was glorious because he had witnessed the tragedies the occurred because of ignorance.
I am lucky to live in a city with one of the biggest centers of medicine in the United States. I have wonderful doctors and know that if I need emergency treatment help will be available. I hope with all of my heart that we do not go backwards in the remarkable progress that we have made in saving lives. It would be foolish to attempt to save money by risking the health of the nation when these should still be the good old days.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 