Tag Archives: doctor

Beggar

Dictionary B

Beggar: (n) a person, typically a homeless one, who lives by asking for money or food.

I was always curious what was meant by the word “chooser.”

You know–the classic closer on the phrase, “beggars can’t be…” culminating with the object, “…choosers.”

So much is made of choice.

We extol it as a symbol of our control, prowess and independence. But an amazing percentage of the events that transpire in our lives provide us no opportunity to choose, and often make us look like beggars.

People diagnosed with cancer have certainly not been given a chance to select a disease, and suddenly find themselves beggars to the doctor–and if they happen to be individuals of faith, on their knees, begging the heavens.

I guess we’re afraid of the word beggar, because no one wants to be beggarly. As Webster has proven in the definition provided for us today, we relegate being a beggar to the bedraggled homeless element in our society, who should be grateful for our pocket change, while no real change is ever offered to them.

Are they just destined to be poor?

I don’t think anyone is a beggar unless we treat him like a beggar.

If you have a five-year-old child and you take him to the store, and you haven’t provided a plan to give him a treat, you will end up with a little beggar on your hands.

If you’re a well-employed, successful individual who wants to purchase a house, but find yourself a few points deficient in your credit score, you may very well turn into a beggar in front of your loan officer.

So perhaps a beggar is not a position, but rather, a judgment we lay on each other when we want to feel superior and make another feel inferior.

For instance, my children will still come to me, asking for money. I have a choice. I can roll my eyes and be disgusted that they have the audacity to request finance from me, or I can make sure to remove all the elements of “beggar” from their consciousness, and let them know how delighted I am to be of assistance.

Last week I gave five dollars to a gentleman sitting alongside the road. Feeling he had a role to play, he began to grovel and feign tears in an attempt to prove to me that I was his superior and he, the dependent.

I refused to be part of the play.

I told him it was my blessing–that I hoped that in some small way he would be able to use it to brighten his day.

I took the “beggar” out of the definition … and gave him the chance to just be a man who I was able to assist.

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Ashen

Ashen: (adj) (of a person’s face) very pale with shock, fear, or illness.dictionary with letter A

Whatever we plant grows.

I know there may be weeds. Sometimes the seeds don’t sprout quickly. But the truth of the matter is, what is sown eventually does reap.

I’ve been thinking about this.

I have casually made jokes, or even been careless in my speech with my fellow-humans under the guise of being honest or just joking around, never coming to the full comprehension that the little seed I plant is very easily watered and can grow.

A lady came up to me just three months ago and told me that I looked “ashen.” Of course, she couldn’t stop there. She said I should probably go to the doctor to have my liver checked. Actually, all I needed was a good night’s sleep, but the seed was planted.

It was so deeply engrained in my mental earth that when I saw the word “ashen” today, the incident came to my mind. She probably thought she was doing me well by warning me of my pale complexion, but actually she just stirred an insecurity in me which sprouted some overgrowth.

All of us are occasionally going to be foolish in our wording, but when we realize that we’ve planted something inside another person, we should probably take the time to let them know it needs to be extracted.

I just don’t know what good it does for someone to know that they’re ashen–because to run off to a doctor every time one’s pallor goes meek would leave one little time for anything else.

 

 

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Apprentice

dictionary with letter A

Apprentice (n): a person who is learning a trade from a skilled employer, having agreed to work for a fixed period at low wages.

Perhaps it is too late.

Yes, maybe Donald Trump has ruined the word “apprentice” for all time by misusing it as the title of his NBC show.

But I will take a risk. Yes, I will step out and say that if we could return the word “apprentice” to our lives, and especially to our business practices, we would be much better off than we are today in our commerce.

For the truth is, we send people to college, hopefully to gain general knowledge and for them to finish wild-oat-sowing, only to place them in an occupation where they start all over again as an apprentice. Because after all, every company has policies and practices which are different from the competitor next door.

To think that we can teach art, business or education in a college atmosphere and transfuse the blood of the business world into a student is absolutely ludicrous.

What we are hoping is that a twenty-three-year-old is going to be more prepared to apprentice than an eighteen-year-old.

We are assuming that the four or five years of maturity garnered by attending college, being forced to interact with other cultures and races, will make our potential employee a more well-rounded individual. Truthfully, it is dishonest to convey that a college education prepares someone for success in the market place.

It does not.

It does keep them learning until they can finally arrive in a place where they truly do learn.

It keeps the edge and acuity of thinking in practice while we prepare a place for them in line, to see how they measure up against the other applicants.

Are there occupations that demand higher learning instead of apprenticing? I will probably frighten you by saying that even a doctor could apprentice a student. Certain things would have to be done slowly and patiently, but eventually terminology and certainly, more importantly, operations, could be transferred from physician to intern.

So am I saying that a university degree is meaningless? Absolutely not. For some people in our culture just aren’t ready at eighteen years of age to listen to anything but their ear buds.

During the time of Dickens and Mark Twain, young men were allready mollified by the age of fourteen. It is not so with our rendition of humanity.

So college gives young men and women the chance to be kicked in the face enough to learn how to handle a punch. At least, that’s what we hope.

But we will do better in this country when we finally admit that no one walks from academia into the board room.

Everyone spends some time sorting mail before they get the privilege of receiving it.

 

 

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Apprehension

dictionary with letter A

Ap·pre·hen·sion (n): 1. anxiety or fear that something bad or unpleasant will happen.

A pall in the room.

This is what I created the other night when I casually mentioned that I was diabetic.

Some faces reflected horror; others, pity. But the general disposition of those gathered was that they would have to sit back and listen to a litany of my sad tale or a description of my medications and treatment.

I surprised them because I just don’t do that.

But rather than appreciating the fact that I did not bore them with the elements of my constitution, they looked on me with a bit of dismay. I think they found be blithe.

Yes, if any word has been thrown my way as an insult, it would be blithe and all of its friendly synonyms.

  • “Silly.”
  • “Not careful enough.”
  • “Short-sighted.”
  • “Immature.”
  • “Naive.”
  • “Overly optimistic.”
  • Or even occasionally, “Ignorant.”

But I do not find blithe to be the absence of awareness, but rather, the negating of apprehension.

Case in point: when my doctor told me I had diabetes, I deadpanned in his direction: “Well, now I know what’s gonna kill me.”

He paused, looking into my eyes to see if I was serious, and when I twinkled his way, he laughed. He also spent the next two hours explaining the rigors of my situation and the care I needed to give myself.

I don’t mind giving myself attention–as long as it’s half of what I give to others.

Apprehension has never made my journey sweeter or improved my situation. Matter of fact, it tends to do the opposite.

So if I were to be accused of anything, and I certainly will be, “blithe” would be my preference.

Because the power of living a life which “takes no thought” for certain matters is the realization that my thinking does not always produce positive energy and often fails to even release the serotonin that could make my thinking better.

Do I have apprehensions? Yes.

But I would consider them to be pesky mice in my house … instead of pet hamsters in cages.

 

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Antidote

dictionary with letter AAntidote: (n) a medicine taken or given to counteract a specific poison.

Sometimes I do dorky things just to make sure that people don’t believe I have become divine overnight through a particularly good sleep cycle.

Actually, it is my penchant in life to attempt new things, which always opens the door to the possibility of playing the fool.

I went with my wife and children to Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, where my mother-in-law had retired.

She did not like me.

I don’t know whether it was something actually problematic between us, or if she felt the need to act out the typical plotline for a sitcom between son-in-law and mother-in-law.

She had a house on the beach. So one morning I took the children out to enjoy the ocean, only to discover that the entire landscape was covered with dead jellyfish. Unwilling to be deterred from our sea-time pleasure, and since the jellyfish were up on the shore and not in the water, I let the kids splash around while I sat, carefully watching them,

Meanwhile, more dead and dying jellyfish were washing onto the shore. I didn’t think much about it, until one of them brushed up against me, and with his last aspiration, stung me on the leg.

It didn’t hurt. Kind of a magnified bee sting. But in no time at all, the wound began to swell and I was sick.

It was a strange sense of ill will. I knew I was in trouble.

I made my way up to the house with the kids and told my wife and mother-in-law what had happened. Being a great veteran of the region and the sea, my mother-in-law grabbed some Adolph’s meat tenderizer and spread it on my wound, telling me “that always works.”

It didn’t. I was getting sicker and sicker. My mother-in-law told my wife that I was just being a wimp.

So I finally had to bypass old mom and asked my wife to call the local doctor. He arrived about fifteen minutes later with his satchel, saw the sting and reached in and pulled out one vial of what had to be several hundred of antidote.

He explained that some people are just allergic to jellyfish. By this time I was quite frightened. He calmed me down, gave me an injection, and in a matter of about an hour, I was just fine.

It amazed me that something so small could make you that sick, and that something even smaller could make you better.

I was grateful for the antidote.

But unfortunately, my mother-in-law still thought I was a wimp.

 

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Aneurysm

dictionary with letter A

Aneurysm: (n.) an excessive localized enlargement of an artery caused by the weakening of the artery wall.

I sat for a moment, shaking my head in disbelief, unwilling to receive the information that had been imparted to me.

A friend of mine, twenty-five years of age, had suddenly died.

He had a brain aneurysm.

Rushing to the hospital and arriving on the scene, I found myself bouncing from one friend to another in search of meaning–some sort of explanation of how this could possibly have happened to such a youthful, energetic and healthy individual.

Nobody knew.

So I decided to ask the doctor. “How can he be dead? He was so healthy.”

The doctor looked me in the eyes and said, “It was a done deal when he was born.”

He went on to kindly explain that the weakness in my friend’s blood vessel was there at birth and was on a ticking clock of twenty-five years. And when the bell rang, his school was out.

I had so many questions. Were there any signs? How about symptoms?

But the doctor gently nudged me into the path of reason.

“We’re all going to die, and we really can’t change the date forward too much. If we don’t take care of ourselves we can hasten it. But sometimes, there’s one little blood vessel that doesn’t understand the value of jogging and eating broccoli, and just gives up too soon.”

How fearfully and wonderfully we are made, said the Psalmist.

Often we linger over the wonderful nature of the human mechanism.

But let us not ever forget how frighteningly fragile it can be also. 

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Anemia

dictionary with letter A

Anemia: (n.) a condition marked by a lack of red blood cells or hemoglobin in the blood, resulting in pallor and weariness.

When my doctor told me I was anemic, I fired back at her that she had a funny nose and big ears before I realized that she was just giving me the results of my blood test.

It seems that this exam pointed out that I didn’t have enough red cells doing their thing in my body.

She wanted to rectify this by having me take iron supplement pills.

Now, let me tell you–not only was this treatment fairly expensive, but it created constipation, which was only occasionally relieved by the painful arrival of bowel movements that resembled lumps of coal.

At my next appointment, she asked me if I felt better since beginning the iron supplements. I had to be honest and tell her that it was difficult to tell since it seemed that I had replaced one problem with another.

Without becoming too philosophical, that is often the case in modern life. In a noble attempt to improve one dilemma, we create a counter-irritant, which we convince ourselves is not as bad as the original in order to justify our actions in alleviating the former problem.

Well, back to my anemia.

Quietly, against her orders, without her permission and knowledge, I lessened the dose on the iron and loosened my difficulty. It was such a relief that I decided to stop taking the iron pills, and tell her that I did, so as to make her happy and keep myself…well, let us say, comfortable.

The truth is, I felt no more energy taking the iron pills than I did without them.

I just happen to be one of those big men who moves fairly slowly, still gets things accomplished, but looks rather ugly in the process.

So the next time somebody tells you you’re anemic and they’re not referring directly to your choices, lovemaking or personality, be fully aware that iron supplements are a two-edged sword.

And one of the edges of the sword really hurts during bathroom time.

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Anatomy

dictionary with letter A

Anatomy: (n) — the branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, animals and other living creatures, especially as revealed by dissection.

“To thine own self be true.”

I think the quote is attributed to Shakespeare.

Pursuing that path of candor, let me tell you that I often do a terrible job keeping up with my own anatomy.

For a season in my life, I went to the doctor regularly, as good Americans should do. It is also the only passage of time when I went to the hospital, took tons of medication and became overly concerned about my mortality.

It is also my understanding that normal people go to the dentist every six months for a good check-up. Fearing your condemnation, I must honestly inform you that I go to the dentist if I have a toothache.

It’s not that I fail to respect the complexity or fragile nature of my human anatomy. I am fully aware that disease, conditions and difficulties can arise without my knowing it from merely peering in the mirror. Cancer can even be growing in my body at this moment without me having placed an order or granting permission.

It’s just that I’ve reached a certain age … where I’ve reached a certain age.

What I mean is that in some ways I have exceeded my expectation for longevity, believing at one time that by now I certainly would have taken the “Great Leap” into the abyss.

But I haven’t.

And I do know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life discussing medications, consulting with my doctor or going onto web sites to track my symptoms.

What do I want from my anatomy? What do I desire my body to do for me?

1. Respond to my actions.

If I eat a double pepperoni pizza, my body is allowed to have revulsion over the concept. But if I eat well, I certainly anticipate quid pro quo.

2. Help me to exercise sufficiently for a man my age without believing that a shot of testosterone will turn me into a twenty-five-year-old male stud.

3. Be so kind as to warn me before killing me.

Yes, if my body would just send an eviction notice, giving me thirty days to “raise the rent,” I would greatly appreciate that.

4. Help me learn how to do “me” better.

I’m not telling you I will never go to a doctor. But case in point: upon arriving at a car dealership, it is very difficult to leave with your old vehicle without somebody trying to either replace it or update it.

The same is true with medicine. They are good at what they do, so they find things wrong with us.

It’s just that if it isn’t a “sickness unto death,” well … maybe I don’t need to know.

 

 

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Air

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Air: (n) the invisible gaseous substance surrounding the earth, a mixture mainly of oxygen and nitrogen.

I am a better person when I think about air.

I am more valuable to myself when I appreciate what I breathe and cease to act like a spoiled brat, contending it’s insignificant.

I remember the first time I went to a hospital and required oxygen. I didn’t know I needed oxygen–the doctor explained that the air I was breathing and how I was processing it was not producing enough restorative energy to make me feel good. It sounded stupid. That is, until they hooked the oxygen up to my nose, and within five minutes, my head cleared, I found myself breathing deeper and was completely in the midst of a rejuvenation.

Little did I know how much I needed more air … until the lack of air left me verging on a quiet desolation.

Now, I realize we can become silly or obsessed with appreciation. But candidly, I think very few of us risk that posture. We are much more likely to become jaded and sarcastic.

I don’t know how God came up with the right mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and other inert gases to place within the breath that fills our lungs fifteen to forty times a minute.

But the stuff works.

Stop and think about that. How many concoctions do we use every day that only partially fulfill their promise?

But air just keeps delivering the goods … and has eight billion satisfied customers.

Adequate

Words from Dic(tionary)

Adequate: (adj.) satisfactory or acceptable in quality or quantity.dictionary with letter A

 Five steps to building a loser (for after all, they ARE manufactured, not born):

  1. Teach him or her that they were born special and unique. (For if you’re going to fail and not measure up to the standards set around you, you need to be able to forgive it by mentioning your individual genetic configuration.)
  2. Tell him or her that all they have to do is their best. (Being human, our best is eventually defined as the amount of energy we are willing to expend at any moment on any situation.)
  3. You should also tell them that they deserve praise for just trying. (Addicting people to praise is leaving them to believe that they’re going to be able to acquire the drug on the street. They won’t.)
  4. Let them know that excuses are the same as apologies. (Can we make this clear? An excuse is the opposite of an apology. An excuse is asking someone to understand why it was completely impossible for you to achieve the goal. An apology is an admission that the goal needed to be achieved, and unfortunately, you fell short.)
  5.  And finally, communicate to him or her that everyone wins. (Matter of fact, print certificates of participation, place gold stars on their sheet or make sure the pizza party planned for the winners is diluted by including everyone who lost.)

We live in a world where we honor people who train, excel, pursue and win the prize.  There is usually only one.

Contrary to Mr. Webster (or Ms., so as not to be sexist) adequate is not satisfying. Adequate is also not acceptable.

Adequate is when people inform us that they don’t believe we can do better. It is why we will not put up with an adequate doctor, an adequate plumber or even an adequate person washing our car.

What we expect from others we need to apply to ourselves. Since we know there is no reward for the first mile and blessing only in the second mile, how could we ever think we should be applauded … at the half-mile mark?