Tag: Lorie Sheffer

 

“By golly, Jim, I’m beginning to think I can cure a rainy day!” – Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy – Chief Medical Officer, USS Enterprise

Yes, I’ll admit it; I watched Star Trek. My son was a HUGE fan and his interest was contagious. What amazes me is that some of the things that seemed so futuristic on that show have become reality. Tricorders were a constant presence, used for data analysis and recording. Medical tricorders were used for analyzing a patient.

NASA now uses a LOCAD, which monitors space stations for onboard fungus, E Coli and salmonella. Not so different from the fictional Tricorder! In the not too distant future, we will benefit from handheld devices that check for cancer, diabetes and bacterial infections. Development is in the works!

It really is amazing when you stop to think of the recent medical advances we now take for granted. Joint replacements, cardiac stents, statin drugs and MRIs are all commonly used. Open-heart surgery for valve replacement isn’t that old a procedure and now, in some cases, is being done as minimally invasive surgery. In our grandparent’s day, having one’s gallbladder removed was major surgery; now it’s routinely outpatient, with three tiny incisions covered by Band-Aids. Cataract removal meant lying in a hospital bed with sandbags around your head to keep you immobile. My mother recently had hers removed by laser and stopped for lunch on the way home. My current amazement is the treatment for my father’s macular degeneration. My friend’s mother is now legally blind because of this common condition. For just the past decade, there is a treatment that slows the progression and in most cases even restores some vision loss. Monthly injections into the eyeball of the exact same drug- but in a much lower dosage- that is also used to treat colon cancer; my father is now able to read two more lines of the eye chart, and he’s only had three injections so far. I stay by his side through the process, which is pretty simple and totally painless, according to him. It always makes me smile and say a little “thank you” to those child science nerds who saw the future in the crew of The Starship Enterprise.

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Myside Bias. Confirmation Bias. “The tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.”

It’s a common occurrence. People want to prove they are right, and so they tend to filter any information they see or hear. Sometimes they will totally disregard anything that is contrary to what they already believe.

How sad that this happens when we have decided we don’t like someone. We will only listen to or believe negative things about them. What if we tried to find a positive for every negative? What if we slowly started to realize that the person isn’t as bad as we chose to believe? If that person is someone we don’t personally know, if they happen to be a public figure, then what we think about them has little affect on them. WE feel the consequences of those negative emotions. As the late comic Buddy Hackett so brilliantly stated, “While you’re carrying a grudge, they’re out dancing.”

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“What goes around comes around.”

“The circle of life.”

I sat by my father’s side, surrounded by several other midlifers sitting by their parent’s side in the large infusion room. Thankfully it was late afternoon and most, but not all, of our group was there for iron infusions to treat anemia. We were among the more fortunate who visit that room at the cancer center. And yet, the tension was palpable.

My dad was being monitored for an allergic reaction to his treatment, and my anxiety was mounting as I was trying to distract him with trivial banter, running options by him of where to stop for carryout on the way home. We’ve been through so much with him in the past three years that it’s hard not to get that familiar knot in the pit of our stomachs when things are even slightly out of kilter.

Suddenly I remembered the nights when I would come in past curfew. The time I dented Mom’s car. Having to bring home a less than stellar report card. Giving birth to my daughter a month after turning twenty years old. I remembered the look of worry in my dad’s eyes then, and wondered if he was now able to see that same look in my eyes.

Whoever coined the phrase, “Karma’s a real bitch” knew what they were talking about.

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