PISS POOR LOGIC

PISS POOR LOGIC


Here I am now at sixty two having spent most of my life advocating for universal health care. Not universal health insurance, because that makes this a financial transaction when we should be talking about conditions of life. If you were to call it anything, call it Universal Health Care Assurance.

However, all of this is beside my point. The point is my advocacy; because I have felt that nobody should have to make a choice between eating and treating their heart disease or their diabetes or hypertension. Life is hard enough than to have to make choices between health and a warm place to put your head; or feeding your child rather than seeing a specialist for further diagnostic workup.

Or when you have tried to take care of yourself and you find that there is that just one thing wrong and there are lots of considerations to ponder. So you have a regular check up and because you are older, and male and you piss rather poorly, your doctor, who has been following your prostate, does another PSA and this time finds that it has gone over the limit of normal. What do you do?You go to see the specialist right?

Well not so fast!

First you have to take many things into consideration, not the least of which is whether the chances that this could turn into a diagnosis of cancer is likely. And the person with the greatest degree of denial will think of all kinds of reasons to say, "well there are good scientific reasons in the literature as to whether PSA is even a valid measure or reflection of prostate cancer." I would like to say that I fall into that category but I also fall into the category of "I pee poorly so I should see and should have seen the specialist a while ago regardless of the lab test." So denial should have no play in this decision.

But, then, I am also an alcoholic and I can look for other reasons to avoid that "delicate digitator" (the urologist) as only an alcoholic can. Or like any other person filled with cancer denial I could be just a routine denier and flee from reasonable investigation for any other pretext. But what I should not be doing beside pretending, is to be unconscionably forced to pass up the exam because I do not have the money to go to the doctor.

Yet here I am, after thirty years in medicine myself, short on funds, not being able to see my doc because I am broke and I have to wonder if I am avoiding my decision because I am just being skeptical of a test I have long held to be suspicious of or am I just avoiding more credit card debt?

Now that's a sober thought for one hell of an alcoholic!


© res 3/14/11