Shake Hands with a Dog

We appear to have an odd view of health, life and death in our country.

At physical therapy the other day, I met a lady who was ninety-four. She was getting physical therapy for a stiff knee. She wanted to get around better. Ninety-four.

I talked to someone about it. They said, 'she's ninety-four, what do you want?' I thought, what I would want is for someone to think that her pain is just as valid as anyone else's and until proven otherwise, just as treatable. In fact, the knee was injured and inflamed and swollen. It needed treatment and treatment would improve it and her quality of life.

I visited a nursing home to see a woman who was seventy six and confined to a wheel chair. She had broken her leg falling out of bed. She had fallen out of bed because there is a great deal of paperwork that has to be done before one can put up the rails of a bed in a nursing home. And that takes time. During the time of the paperwork being done, she fell out of bed a number of times. After she fell out and broke her leg, the rails of the bed were put up.

The nurse said, 'She will never walk again'. Her leg seemed to lie at a crooked angle to her body, as if it had been set carelessly, or as if the muscles had not been rehabilitated. I was puzzled. I asked, 'Why won't she ever walk again?' The nurse shrugged and said, 'She's seventy-six, what do you want?'

What I want, is for people to not say, 'She's seventy-six, what do you want?'

When a friend reported she was tired and stiff, her doctor said, 'You're fifty five, what do you want?' What she wanted was help. What she needed was a diagnosis. There were nerves and arteries in her neck being compressed, and if it was not decompressed, she probably would have had a fatal stroke.

There was another woman in the nursing home. She was the same age as me. She had catatonic schizophrenia. I was told that occupational and physical therapy would get her walking within a few weeks, but that Medicaire would not approve the therapy. Why not? Because when the therapy was discontinued, she would stop walking. She would need continuous support and encouragement if she were to continue walking. Medicaire would not pay for that. The nurse talked about her as if she were deaf and blind. I felt acutely uncomfortable, ashamed and embarrassed. Catatonic people can hear and remember everything that goes on around them.

I drove home in a daze that day. It was one of those 'make yourself numb or you will pound the steering wheel', things. I kept thinking about what it was worth to a person, psychologically, to be able to walk. Few people, thankfully, will know the sense of vulnerability and helplessness that comes with being bedridden. There was also something rattling around in my mind about how medication adjustments had ended a number of cases of catatonia.

What was it worth to the state or country financially, I thought, to have a person who is less disabled, and can be more self-sufficient? Not walking tends to create other health problems; a person who can stand up and walk may have better circulation and fewer health care expenses overall. I did a little calculating and decided that it cost the state about ten or fifteen times more to leave her an invalid than to get her up and walking every day.

I found a park and stopped the car and sat, while my dog whimpered as if to say, 'Good heavens, this is a park, we have to get out and walk and scare some small animals'. The lady had been lying down in bed, curled up, facing away from the traffic in the hallway. Her arms and legs were as thin as railings. My dog went around to her side of the bed and put his nose up to her face. She was silent, but she reached out a slender little pale hand, just an inch or two, and stroked the dog's white ruff. The dog is normally a bit timid, but he licked her nose and seemed to regard her as an old friend. He wagged his tail a bit, and lifted his paw, a trick. The dog's paw went down onto the little white hand and held for a moment. I thought perhaps she smiled, just a little bit.

So maybe the difference between the catatonic lady and the ninety three year old woman riding the bicycle, is a few dollars worth of health care, or a relative that has a little money.

But who is to say who deserves hope, and who does not?

I suggest a test. Anyone who the dog is willing to shake hands with, gets the health care they need.

The Horsehair Nest

I had just spent some months recovering from an injury I received in an automobile accident. I spent much of that time wondering how well the injury would heal and if I would be able to continue some of my favorite sports that seemed so important to me. I was frustrated and angry. So I did what I usually do in that case: I stopped trying to focus on my summer reading list, and went for a walk.

I couldn't walk very far without wincing in pain. So I just walked around the farm, through the long bright pasture grass I walked and thought about my family, my parents, long dead, and my brother and sister who lived far away. I thought about how I had spent thirty years so busy with work that I rarely had time to contact them or think about them. I thought about how a professional life passes so quickly, and how little time there is for things like pulling weeds, or walking with no destination or goal.

I grieved for the days when I could jounce along in a third class train to some unknown village in Indonesia to attend a country fair, or toss a heavy backpack on my back and walk in from the Upper Works to Lake Colden in the Adirondacks. I thought bitterly about how I had covered eight miles in one hour and fifty minutes sliding down the Maumee River in a knife edged kayak. I thought about free climbing Rattlesnake Point in Ontario. I thought about what a hollow, stale substitute a walk around my poor little farm was for all those wonderful things.

By the time I had made one circuit of the farm, I was in a thorough swivet. I noticed the pile of fire bricks we had bought to line an outdoor bread oven. Grass was eagerly growing up along the edges of the pale bricks. Well, I would not be doing all that heavy lifting for quite some time. Whenever would that project be done now?

Something caught my attention. It was a robin's nest, lined in black horse tail hair. The hair had been woven and stuffed and meticulously threaded into the nest's fine grey twigs and dried grass. There were a few pale bits of shell in the bottom of the deep little nest, a small miracle of blue. Just as carefully as the nest had been woven, my partner had placed the nest there for me to find. He had thought of me. Doing my farm chores for me, he had thought, 'she will enjoy this'.

I picked the nest up and held it in cupped hands, and examined each bit of shell and feasted on the beauty of the weaving and the glossy black horse hair. A spindly june bug floated by in the air, a hundred little gnats jazzed in a complicated pattern in front of me, like a moving parabola. A dragon fly with irridescent black and clear wings shot past. I smelled the unbearably sweet perfume of freshly cut grass, and looked at the perfect, luminously edged soft yellow petals of the magnolia tree. I heard the soft grunting of brown ducks, crouching in the shade, and the distant barking of a frantic dog.

Being alive is like the little horsehair nest. Things happen that are inexplicable. We feel joy, we suffer. These emotions are like waves that break over us and pass, leaving ripples in the water. Afterward, we are but left again with ourselves, floating on an endless sea, woven of the smallest beautiful things like the horsehair nest, and of the limitless little acts of love that lead us to the horse hair nest.