It’s a frustrating situation of my own making, you might be tempted to say. And yes, it certainly is frustrating because what I get are snippets of the visit to the doctor / dentist / physio relayed back in incredible sketchiness.
‘The doctor said it’s common? She clearly has no idea what she’s talking about!’
Somehow, a six-hour operation followed by five nights in hospital and twenty-four months of intensive physiotherapy gets translated into the doctor telling her, ‘You need to put a Wiggles BandAid on it.’
‘You must have misunderstood what she said! Oh, why didn’t you just take me to the appointment?’ I’ve pleaded with Mum more times than I can count. ‘Can you please record the next one so I can hear for myself what’s been discussed?’
‘Get out, Toddy. I’m not going to record it or sit there taking notes!’ Mum dismisses my clearly outrageous suggestion.
As you age, if it’s not one thing your body seems to be giving up on, it’s another. Or, worse yet, several things at the same time. One faulty muscle will make it harder to do a task, but not doing that task will make a different muscle stiff and sore. A disease radically alters your body’s chemistry and, overnight, you’re asked to change a lifetime’s habits of eating or to take up ‘moderate’ exercise when it’s the last thing your body feels capable of doing. And why do most doctors insist on delivering news in medico-jargon? Is it just to confuse you or deliberately keep you in the dark so you don’t question their decisions too closely? Not to mention one of the most important organs in your body, the old noggin, letting you down more regularly too. What was it that Specialist A said again? And wasn’t that the complete opposite of what this new Specialist B is now saying?
Any doctor visit seems to result in another pill being prescribed but, since you’re already taking eight a day, what’s another three to add to the mix? Sure, they might give you a ten-page brochure to read all about your latest affliction, but it’s so full of mumbo jumbo that not a lot of it makes sense, and directing you to find a website isn’t much more helpful either. No, it’s quite clear: medications come first. If they fail you can try surgery and, as a very brief aside, you can also consider diet and exercise but you ‘got through the last eighty years without eating lentils’ and you’ve ‘never walked around the block a day in your life’ so they’ve got another thing coming if they reckon you’re going to start now.
And in the back of your mind is that constant fear, as you recall all those stories you’ve heard about older people who went downhill rapidly after a particular operation. She just went in for a routine biopsy . . . and then she was gone.
For my parents it’s a delicate balance between innocent confusion, wilful ignorance and downright rebellion. In conversations at bingo with similarly aged and afflicted mates, they will get recommendations for yet another remedy (just like Millie). It works for me. I swear by it! Then if I might happen to see a box of pills next to the kettle, pick it up, google the ingredients and tell them it’s this poison that’s making them feel sick, tired and confused, and perhaps it would be better to stop taking it altogether.
‘Do you want me to come to your next GP appointment with you?’ I ask again, with only the best intentions. Despite those ‘best intentions’, I admit that often I must make the situation even more confusing or make them feel guilty for simply following doctors’ orders to the best of their ability.
Mum and Dad must both think: As loving as Toddy may be, I haven’t seen any framed medical degrees pinned to his wall!
But then, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone manage all of this for you? Just juggling which pills to take when, which specialist to visit when, what treatment to undertake – it’s a full-time job in itself. And it’s true that sometimes procedures don’t work as well as the doctors have promised they would.
For Dad it was a long slow recovery after his knee replacements, but the new joints didn’t provide that miracle solution to his leg problems. He proclaimed the operation a resounding failure. One evening the following year, he went out to dinner with Mum, Glen and James and, being the driver for the night, he went to collect the car while they finished their last drinks. On a set of slippery tram tracks in the road, Dad took a tumble and fell heavily to his knees.
‘And that was it, I was fixed. That fall was all I needed to get my knees working properly,’ he said joyously.
To think a local thug with a baseball bat could have saved the surgeon all that effort, not to mention months of post-op recuperation.
For me, if not for Mum and Dad, it is confounding to watch the way our health services operate. None of us can ignore the fact that medicine is a business and the purpose of any business is to make money. If I were a hip surgeon, for example, and someone came to me complaining about pain when they walked, wouldn’t I look for signs that their hips needed replacing? In Dad’s case, like his knees, a hip replacement did nothing at all to alleviate the underlying issue with his legs either – reduced blood circulation due to diabetes – so new hips and knees have made little difference to his life, or levels of comfort. And if you’re a GP, and a patient comes to you with a diet-related disease, would you suggest a change in their lifestyle that could cure the disease, or would you prescribe a chemical (for which you’re probably getting a kickback from the pharmaceutical company) that also means your customer (sorry, I mean ‘patient’) keeps returning to you time and again?
I met an ex-vet once who told me she’d quit the profession because the surgery had become too focused on the bottom line. It wasn’t uncommon for them to recommend procedures on beloved pets that weren’t essential but, if phrased just so, prompted the owner to agree and part ways with thousands of dollars. There’s nothing quite like a distraught pet owner if you’re looking to find someone with very deep pockets. I should know.
I fear our parents’ generation have been taught to revere doctors, and to never question them. On those rare occasions I have sat with either or both of my parents at a desk across from a doctor, it’s as though they’re having high tea with Lady Pouty Lips of Poshville.
‘My son has generously offered some of his limited spare time to attend this afternoon’s consult in order to ensure we adequately digest all of the information you intend on disseminating, doctor,’ Dad says like the post-educated Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. I do an old-fashioned comedy double-take to see who the man sitting next to me is.
Mum tends to say doctor as many times as humanly possible. ‘Yes, doctor. If that is acceptable to you, doctor. Thank you, doctor. Doctor.’
Every human is fallible, including those who have spent a few years with their heads in medical textbooks. If we only rely on one person’s knowledge of modern medicine, it’s highly unlikely to be the most thorough, up to date or unbiased information we receive. Add to that my parents’ deference to their doctors and either their inability or unwillingness to absorb critical information and this can start to sound alarm bells in even the least sensitive of us. A friend of mine relayed an experience where he asked his doctor if he could record a conversation because, in the moment, he knew he wouldn’t be able to absorb everything clearly. The doctor was not only outright offended, but also refused to allow it.
‘And what’s wrong with you at the moment?’ I cautiously throw in Jude’s direction over the back of the car.
‘Me? Nothin’,’ she replies, all doctor-induced eloquence gone.
‘That doesn’t sound to me like the woman who once sarcastically remarked, “The joy of getting older is waking up wondering which part of your body is giving out next.”’
‘It’s true. I did have to go see our doctor last week to get one of my prescriptions refilled.’
‘Ka-ching,’ Jeff begins, but Mum clearly isn’t going to acknowledge the tease today.
‘I had to go to get new blood pressure tablets,’ Mum says instead.
Every time a doctor measures her blood pressure, it is off the charts.
‘The doctor sent me home with a kit to take measurements throughout the day.’
‘How did you feel wearing it?’ I ask.
‘It made me anxious worrying that it was going to tell them I had high blood pressure and needed to go to hospital.’
‘And did you explain to your doctor that just seeing doctors gets you anxious?’
‘Of course, but the machine doesn’t lie does it?’
Jude has chronic white coat syndrome. It’s as simple as that. Yet when she mentions this to any doctor they respond with nothing short of a patronising pat on the shoulder. You just have to say the word ‘doctor’ and Mum’s face drains of colour and her pulse rate skyrockets. So just imagine her heart rate when she says ‘doctor’ fifteen times in one sentence!
‘So you’re still on that medication?’ Jeff asks. ‘The one that, if you go off it suddenly, you’ll suffer a massive stroke?’
‘Well, it’s not that bad,’ Mum says feebly. Thus, my mother is now resigned to taking blood pressure pills for the rest of her life because heaven forbid her doctor tells her to get more active, lose weight, drink less and eat more foods containing potassium. Or stop visiting doctors’ surgeries.
‘I really don’t like your doctors,’ I say for what must be the tenth time over the past few years.
In Jude’s defence, sometimes the news is bad, though not as bad as she’s expecting. Not long after her radiation treatment a few years back, Mum developed severe pain in her hip bone and I hadn’t even dragged her up any steep mountains to admire pretty views. Of course, it could only have been bone cancer, come to ravage her. Mum soldiered on, walking with great difficulty, but didn’t want to cause a fuss or bother anyone with facile complaining. And she certainly didn’t want to subject herself to more poking and prodding and hearing the inevitable death sentence. As Millie always says, ‘If I’m dying, I’d prefer not to know.’
Eventually the pain got so bad for Mum that she went to her GP, who sent her to Emergency. After countless tests and possible diagnoses, ultimately the doctors were all stumped — until some brainiac sent her for a hip x-ray. Mum had a hip fracture.
‘Oh, that’s quite common with patients who have had radiotherapy in the same area as you,’ the doctors said nonchalantly. Then why had it taken them over two weeks to identify the problem?
