Member-only story
VA Roulette 1
“If you’ve seen one VA hospital,” the young doctor told me, “you’ve seen one VA hospital.” I’m lying about the doctor being young, because he is the same age as me, but “young” is how I’ll always know him because we grew up together in small town Oklahoma. At least he grew up; I was just hanging on from one day to the next. He now speaks from having practiced his profession in the VA system and my opinion comes from having been a patient in the VA system from when I got discharged from active duty at age 21.
That would be most of my opinion. My earliest collision with VA care was visiting my grandfather, a Spanish-American War veteran, in his final illness. In those pre-Medicare days, my grandmother was served by the University of Oklahoma charity/teaching hospital in Oklahoma City and my grandfather by the VA hospital in Muskogee.
Grampa was always sick, but he always said that if he got sick enough to check into the VA hospital, he would not be coming back. He had been there many times for outpatient services and I had been allowed to tag along.
One of Grampa’s brothers, who I knew as “Uncle Bill,” worked in the oil patch in Cushing and had become as prosperous as anybody in my family. He would drive his Hudson down from Cushing, pick up Grampa and me in Bristow, and take us to Muskogee for the day.
