Ignoring the Experts: The Decline and Death of My Father

 In my father's last years, I would try to get him to a doctor.  He had medical complaints.  They made absolutely no sense.  That didn't mean he was healthy.  The issue was that what seemed to be the real problems were ignored.  I finally talked him into going to the doctor with me.

My father mostly talked about breathing.  His complaint was dust from the vents.  This was a serious issue to him.  He would regularly hire people to clean the vents.  He did this at his house.  He did this at the retirement condo.  As a non-medical observer, that made sense to me.  It seemed extreme, but what was the harm of having clean vents?

The other issue he talked about was constipation.  This was a serious issue to him.  He regularly went to the doctor to complain about constipation according to his medical records.  This complaint dominated our discussion when I went to the doctor with him.   

The doctor told him to take Miralax and Metamucil.  He said how much to take and said that if he needed to take more he could.  These products, if taken in sufficient quantity, were going to do the job.  He should try to take the same amount every day.  There was a process for figuring out the right amount to take each day.  Problem solved.  Right?  Actually, not.

I told you that my father's medical opinions made no sense.  Here is an an example.  Per my father, the air quality issues which were affecting his breathing were also causing the constipation.  What was the expert opinion on that one?  The doctor said it made absolutely no sense.  As a retired teacher of middle school health, my father knew that, too.  There is the GI tract.  There is the respiratory tract.  What is breathed into lungs will not cause constipation.

This doctor's appointment was the most drawn out visit I could imagine.  It went over an hour.  The visit approached two hours.  We went through the entire medical record.  This doctor was to soon retire and he might never see another patient, but he was going to treat us well.  That, and he didn't want the next doctor to hear my father complain about constipation.

Toward the end of the visit, I pointed to my father's swollen legs.  

"My wife is worried about that.  Should his heart be checked?  Those legs were even more swollen at Thanksgiving when he visited."

The prescription was TED socks.  We found them at Walmart.

I feel this doctor was extraordinarily patient.  What doctor spends 100 minutes with a patient?  We went over every complaint in my father's history.  

Aside from our two minute discussion, there were no complaints about circulation or swollen legs.  My father's imagination conjured most of what we discussed, I believe.  My father's father smoked and had asthma and would avoid pollen season via a trip to Texas.  My father's mother died of a blockage associated with colon cancer.  Breathing and constipation were issues to be taken seriously per my father's thought process.  Everything else that happened to him medically was irrelevant.  Circulatory issues were not to be acknowledged.

After we left the office, my father told me of his dreams about dust from the vent next to his bed.  The dreams sounded like a horror film.  He described these dreams as crazy.  Psychological issues were certainly not to be discussed with professionals.

My wife, based on her hospital experience, also had theories about my father's medical issues.  These theories were demonstrated as fact when my father died of heart issues a few months later.  My father passed away following a significant number of years of vascular dementia.  

I had tried to convey what I knew to the doctor.  It would have taken a three hour appointment to do so as my father was in the room.  It might have taken all day.  No doctor has that much time.

 I am sad that my father died in 2016 of causes that would have been better treated if he would have just acknowledged them.  

I feel I am blaming the victim.   He did live to be 85.  He spoke as if he had lived long enough.  He was a man who couldn't authentically ask for help.  Maybe, he would have listened to his wife had she still been alive.

My father's death was a learning experience for me.  When my wife tells me to see the doctor about an issue, I do so.  She earned my respect on all things medical.  I also learned that it is my responsibility to listen to my doctor, not so much vice versa.  The doctor is the expert, not me.  We need to rely on others as we get older.  We need to rely on others all of our lives.

Do we benefit from the experts we have at our disposal?  

Not all of us.

Retirement Dreams

 

I have been looking online at Real Estate lately.  Could I retire to Hawaii?  If I were to retire to Hawaii, where would I live?

Me, retire?  Didn’t I do that twenty years ago?  People retire once, not twice.

It turns out I still have some retirement dreams.  There are places where I would enjoy living.  Hawaii.  Shanghai.  Korea.  Of these, Hawaii seems like the least extreme change.

In Hawaii, I would be stuck on an island with limited shopping and limited things to do.  However, COVID-19 taught me and my family that we didn’t need to go to the grocery store every week.  We survived just fine without the malls and without the zoo.  If we were to live away from it all, we could!  COVID-19 gave us experience at this.

The Big Island offers a mountain with an observatory, a Toastmasters club, a university and other schools, a couple of Costcos, beaches, pleasant weather and 11 climate zones.  For me, this seems enough.

In Hawaii, would we move to a house with upkeep and a yard?  Would we move to a turn-key condo with monthly fees?  I would be happy with a turn-key condo.  A house with a yard offers other benefits my family might enjoy.  Options are available!

Shanghai, Seoul, San Francisco and New York offer metropolitan experiences that I also would like to experience.   Since I also enjoy big cities, I may have to retire a third time!

Making It Big

 

I dreamed last night about musicians, about how being an entertainer is fundamentally a profession.  I’m not sure most of us realize that our favorite actors and actresses, and those we choose to hate as well, are essentially middle class.  They work for companies.  They have bosses.  There is an audience.  They perform.  It might feel degrading or they might have great pride.  Either way, it is doing a job.

I first figured out that actors were middle class during my visit to Universal Studios, Los Angeles, in the 1990s.  I took the train through the backlots.  The announcer talked about how Jim Carrey often appeared during the tour, said hello and hammed it up.   What was Jim Carrey doing there?  Oh, that’s right.  He had a job working for a company where he needed to be at Universal Studios for the purpose of making movies to satisfy his contractual obligations. 

Why would he work so hard as an already highly marketable movie star?

 I imagine Jim Carrey worked hard because he had to.  The job is highly competitive.  There were lots of people who could do his job well and were very eager for the opportunity.  Any extra points for showing up every day and representing the company only aided his cause.  Unless Jim Carrey got tangled in drugs and bad investments and thieving managers, he did alright. 

What about the rest of us and what about our heroes who make film and music? 

My friend that I haven’t seen for a long time is a location manager with credits in major films.  That is success that would be hard to fake.

Then, there were efforts that made TV and Amazon Prime.  It’s hard to know if there was money paid out, but certainly a strong attempt was made.  A whole scene got involved in that.  

My acquaintance who has made small budget films over three decades is making the attempt as well.  Who knows what comes of it, but film festival credits and authenticity count for something.

I have a Facebook friend who writes scripts and directs plays.  A production was set at an Eagles Club.  I enjoyed it.  This is very likely what a person would have to do toward being asked to do more.  (I imagine the same production in LA would have a lot bigger potential career impact.)

Maybe you know people on the periphery of a Hollywood career.  I definitely do.  Do these people have real careers where good money is made?  From the outside, how would we know?  Let’s say they won an award.  Does that even mean anything? 

The hustle is something they go through whether they succeed in a financial sense or they don't.  Few if any are wandering the streets assessing artistic merit toward offering big opportunities.

This brings me to my music heroes of the past.

The band, X, was one of my favorites from the 1980’s.  They toured.  They had fans.  Ray Manzarek (Doors) liked them so much that he chose to produce them.  The mass market apparently never latched onto them.  They never did the stadium shows or got the real money.  Still, members of X showed up frequently in movies and Dave Alvin was in any band he wanted.    Likewise, Danny Elfman suggested that Oingo Boingo broke up because they weren’t popular enough to continue.  Oingo Boingo was in movies as well.  Danny Elfman moved on to a career scoring films.  Icons of the generation were not mass marketed toward financial success at that time as the Boomer market garnered 100% of the marketing dollars.  (At least that is what X and Elfman say.)

This brings us to today.  Do artists need a mass market to continue onward?

The means to self-publish a film, music or a book are out there.  Your release is available in Saskatoon via the Internet if not at the local record store.

First Friday of each month, I am finding non-mass market new releases by entertainers I have seen perform and met personally.  Others use Patreon.

I’m not sure how viable these approaches are for those paying a mortgage.  Most have day jobs, I imagine.  Nonetheless, I appreciate the effort and the art.  Success is not always measured by the size of the audience.

Last night, I dreamed some songs.  They were really powerful.  Were these songs by Grant Hart?  He was there in the dream.  The music faded from my consciousness in the morning dawn. 

Did you know Grant Hart, post Husker Du, wanted me to put out his music financed by my self-started record label?  We met.  A musician named Lori Wray, recently deceased, was there with me too.  We went where Nirvana recorded. A dream?  No, that really happened.

With my generation, from when the mass market never existed, rock stars show up on Christmas card lists.

I hope the Bandcamp musicians, Eagle’s Club play makers, Amazon Prime movie makers, and Kindle self-publishers are successful enough to keep making their art. 

They are the real artists.  Nothing against Jim Carrey.

 

Looking Through A Different Colored Lens

 

In the San Francisco Chronicle, reporter Rachel Swan wrote the tragic story of Laudemer Arboleda.  I subscribe to the Chronicle because it provides a different perspective on the same issues as what happen here.  The Laudemer Arboleda story was tragic for many reasons.  His life was ended when a police officer shot him for no well-defined reason.  What I felt was also particularly sad is that Laudemer had demons, he had untreated psychiatric problems.  His mother tried to get him mental health help, but the mental health system turned him away, spit him back out, without helping him. 

People look at this story through various lenses, such as untrained or incompetent or racist police officers.  I’d like you to examine a different lens—mental illness.  I’d like you to see a failed mental health system when you watch the news or many societal ills.  I’m going to tell the stories of three people who suffered from bipolar syndrome.  Each is no longer with us.

When I spoke at my mother’s funeral, many there did not know she had mental illness.  Though mental illness led to her divorce and loss of custody of her children, including me, there were only a few episodes of mental illness in her life.  It was a once every ten years problem.  Medication kept it under control.  There was the time she didn’t recognize me and was sure I was an imposter.  I showed her my driver’s license.  She still wasn’t convinced.  There was the time we called the sheriff who got us a court hearing so that she could get treatment.  We certainly would not have ever gotten her out of bed by ourselves.  My mother was a great piano player, a great example and a great mother.  She died at age 66 of kidney failure.

My aunt (my mom’s sister) also had bipolar syndrome.  I remember my grandmother and me driving to check in at her apartment one day when she was hospitalized, when I was 15.  Aunt Ellie embraced her illness just as she embraced roles when she appeared in plays.  Fellow patients were her friends.  Her psychiatrist was her hero.  When she was in hospice for lung cancer, she visited her doctor friends and fellow long-term patients one last time.  She had a productive role as a mental health advocate and politically active solid citizen of Des Moines.  My mother relied on family.  My aunt relied on her care providers.  Both successfully managed the issue, once it was identified.

Gary relied on his mother to manage his mental health issues.  When his mother died, he went off his medicine and was seriously mentally ill for five to ten years.  He moved out of his low rent house because of ghosts.  He declined free VA housing because they required him to seek mental health treatment.  He would “borrow” my father-in-law’s pickup until it ran out of gas.  One winter he moved into my father-in-law’s decrepit abandoned old farm house, no electricity, no water, mouse droppings everywhere.  He was discovered weeks later because of the $400 electrical bill after he connected a space heater to overhead power lines.  My father-in-law tried year after to year to help him by giving him money or whatever he said he needed.   Gary would tell the mental health hospital that my father-in-law was taking care of him in order to escape treatment.  As long as those demons were in his head, he was a danger to himself and others.  A passing truck hit him as he walked down the center line of a rural highway with a bicycle.  Treated, Gary was an intelligent man and good friend.  Untreated, he was a problem that the whole town knew about, nut mostly chose to ignore.

Mental illness defined my Aunt Ellie.  A person can choose to own who they are.  Mental illness shaped my mother’s life, but did not define her.    Untreated demons killed Gary.  After his mother died, mental illness controlled and defined him.  When I see homeless people on the side of the road, I see Gary and a failed mental health system.

  I challenge you to change your lens when you watch the news or drive by homeless people.  Will you see “poor people” seeking shelter?  Will you see substance abusers?  Will you see unhealthy people controlled by demons?

There are 140,000 homeless persons with serious mental illnesses in the US.

BTW, there is such thing as police officers who murder people.  Here is someone other than Derek Chauvin.  The officer who appears to have murdered Laudemer Arboleda just killed again.  Danville police say officer shot man who pulled out a knife (sfchronicle.com)