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Of Aging, Military Service, and the Medical Bureaucracy
If your folks give you the ancient line about old age not being for the timid, you had best listen to them.
The advances of medical science mean that our idea of “old age” keeps getting revised upward, a curve that had the United States on the leading edge until recently.
That does not mean that living longer comes without cost.
I am taking a list of medications that is two pages long. Single spaced.
The pills have been prescribed by a list of doctors that is a full page. Single spaced.
Last week, I banged my left second toe hard. I was spraying enough blood to bring mosquitos from the next county to chow down. I was remembering when I was a kid, and the city had a jeep that drove all over town spraying DDT on mosquitos, dogs and cats, goldfish, human babies.
If I got tired of being type cast as Tonto, I could run through one of those white clouds of DDT and come out white. Then all I would need is one of those silly Lone Ranger secret identity masks and I could make myself look like a negative raccoon.
Not having any DDT to stop the bleeding, I went off looking for a podiatrist who would take my retirement insurance. The VA…
