Medicine’s Iffy Gifts

Modern medicine’s gifts are many, but some should have a Return For Store Credit option.

Decades of wearing glasses had accustomed me to getting a new pair every few years or whenever Wife or Daughter’s yaps about “you really ought to get a checkup” became more annoying than the trip to the eyeglass store.

And, truth be told, I’d come to enjoy the experience as newly immigrated optometrists and I figured out the strange words together.

And those were just the insurance forms.

The last time was different. For one thing, the guy flipping the lens widget was an MD. For another, he said the reason things had become fuzzy was a cataract, not, as I had theorized, too much reading from the Republican National Committee’s guide to health care reform.

So cataract surgery was the suggestion and I agreed because the Code of The Guy says you can’t wuss out in front of another Guy, although you can certainly endlessly fret and whine later to your wife.

Days before The Event, I worked to put my affairs in order – seal-coating the driveway, putting the air conditioners in storage, doing the lawn, all the stuff you gotta do to build your creds with Wife for enjoying a period of choreless recovery. You know – the kind where you gamely try to reach for the TV remote or get another beer so you can follow the orders about proper exercise and nutrition.

Event day arrived, and in the space of two hours I was able to lie about following the fasting instructions, get shot full of happy juice and have Nature’s foggy eye lens replaced by a crystal-clear one from Bausch & Lomb.

Which is the problem.

Not the lens, of course, or the work that put it there. It’s the result – I can see clearly now.

Colors are much more vivid, so I now know that what I thought was the ruddy glow of good health is really the flaming-red face of an out-of-shape old guy who took the stairs instead of the escalator.

Distance vision is improved so I now can see clearly the smirks on the faces of cute young things I pass on a walk.

Field of vision is improved and it is now confirmed by observation that my toes are in no danger of sunburn, but my navel better up the SPF.

The mirror’s pleasantly hazy mature guy that walked into the eye surgery clinic has been replaced by the crystal-clear old man who now flashes wrinkles, age spots and sags. Not to mention grey hairs.

It’s all a miracle of modern medicine, I know, but forgive me if I don’t fall to my knees in thanks.

Besides, although knees hurt going down, they hurt even more when you try to go up, or so some old guy told me.

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Caution – Explanatory Aside!

 

There are lots of ways to tell you aren’t a kid anymore, and technologies to hide most of them, but none of us can evade the awful impact of the Explanatory Aside.

 

It’s how you at last must admit to yourself  that you’re older than dirt, which, by the way, is one of the phrases you should avoid using if you’re trying to pass as just yesterday’s dust.

 

The Explanatory Aside is a clever enemy, hiding in the grass of a lot of ordinary prose, waiting to deflate the self esteem of anyone who not only doesn’t see it coming, but doesn’t need it coming.

 

Here’s an example from an Associated Press report on an Obama administration tilt at the elimination of nuclear weapons windmill (italics added):

 

“In doing so, the White House official invoked the names of former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga. Kissinger was in the administration of President Richard Nixon while Baker was in the administration of George H.W. Bush.”

 

Now the AP, in common with just about all other major media, writes for a mainstream audience, one that shares a common understanding. And the obvious assumption of the writer and editors involved was that mention of these two historical figures would require explanation, just like mentioning Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s longest-serving Secretary of War.

 

So if the mainstream audience needs a tag explaining Dr. K and Jim Baker, those of us who don’t must be. . .

 

Well, let’s not say it out loud. If we have to speak of at all, we’ll call it “differently mainstreamed.”

 

Explanatory Asides pop up all the time. Reading the Sunday comics a couple of weeks ago, I saw a panel take a moment to explain what a typewriter was.

 

It might have been easier if the artist just put a footnote inviting the audience to “Dial 1-800-SAY-WHUT, except another footnote would have been necessary to explain the verb “dial.”

 

Those of us with grandchildren can look forward to more footnotes explaining LP records, floppy disks, tape decks, video cassettes and why “Twist And Shout” was something other than a George W. Bush Administration interrogation technique. So here’s a suggestion.

 

Study explanatory footnotes as though you didn’t already know them, and make it a habit. It might help in later years when you have forgotten so much you’re actually mainstream again.

 

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