Are We There Yet?

August 25-31, 2014

By Jay Edwards

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. - Mark Twain

I thought I wanted to be the health editor, well, sort of. The reason was I felt qualified, with everything I’ve been through personally and with mom. But PB (publisher boss, who has since become CEO boss) said, “Probably not a good idea.” I kept pleading my case, reminding him we would even have an MD on call, referring to my Asian friend, Dr. Sum Ting Wong. You may remember when I last called on him a few years back:

Me: Doctor, I’ve heard cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?

Doc: Heart only good for so many beats and that it ... Don’t waste on exercise! Everything wear out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take nap.

Then there was the time I took the antibiotic known as penicillin, and wrote about it in “The Itch.”

It got so bad, KM drove me to the ER, where we found a full house.

“Was this an outbreak?” I wondered. Anthrax in Little Rock distributed through Butterfinger Blasts! How diabolical.

The woman at the ER desk indicated without saying it that I was to write my name on a piece of paper and find a seat in the brightly lit room filled with depressed looking souls and sounds of late afternoon television. 

Then there was the time I was sure I was having a heart attack, or acute myocardial infarction (trying to impress CEOB). That was after a chilidog, and they came up with the diagnoses of acute bloated indigestion.

The triage nurse called me, and I gave him more information. He asked me what number my pain was, between 1 and 10. Suddenly there wasn’t any pain, and I felt guilty being there, so I said “2,” as if it were a question. “You don’t win anything,” he said.

That episode was lived through as well, and I still suffer through chilidogs from time to time, sans ER visits.

I had more episodes, but my memory is clearer about mom and her many visits to UAMS over the last six months of her life. She would fall a lot, fortunately without ever breaking anything.

“Mom, you know that walker sitting over there against the wall collecting dust would do a great job of keeping you perpendicular to the ground.”

“Hush.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

One time after she bonked her head pretty good, the nurse at the assisted living sent her to the hospital to check her out. We met her there and soon a doctor, also Asian (notice a trend?) came by to check on her. He gave her some simple cognitive tests, which she did well on. But I was a little concerned because after each diagnosis, he ended by grinning and saying, “But don’t quote me.” That, and the fact that his smock read anesthesiologist. It was all worth it though, to hear mom laugh after he left.

“Don’t let him do a heart transplant on me,” she chuckled.

So last week, I was going through a few health issues again. I was having night sweats and my face was breaking out.

“Sounds like the change of life,” three ladies at work concurred.

I scoffed and recalled for them how great I used to be at football and fighting.

But I arrived at my GP’s office, and the first magazine I saw in the waiting room was the new Time, with a picture of a half-naked guy on the front and a headline that read “Manopause.”

Oh, the humanity.

Jay Edwards is editor-in-chief of the Daily Record and an award-winning columnist. 

Contact him at jedwards@dailydata.com