THANK YOU TO VA HOSPITAL, LA JOLLA, CA

 

As a service-connected disabled Navy vet, I received excellent medical treatment yesterday during my visit to the hospital. I fear for the impending death of the Affordable Care Act.

There are MANY fewer employees nowadays working at the VA due to trump's consolidation of the money supply, but those who still work there are at the top of their games. Polite, professional, on-time, genial, helpful, and I am grateful to them.

Millions of Americans are worrying today about how they will be able to afford health care when Republicans strip them of it. Quality, affordable health care is a human right..

.

WHAT? Another surgery done. The VA got me good and removed a bad cancer deal--total thyroidectomy last week. ADD in more pain!

RODEO AND THE PAIN THAT COMES WITH AGING

     

THE ICE CHIPPER THAT STICKS INTO MY L3 - L4 NERVES

TWO SIDES OF THE LUMBAR SPINE TAKE TURNS STICKING IT TO ME. 

The right L3-L4 spot is my worst pain spot. My ice pick reference is a memory from childhood where there was an old cellar with some VERY old tool implements left by a previous seller. Think of a screwdriver with a rough wood handle, then 5 inches of thin steel with a tip sharpened by years of use actually chipping blocks of ice into smaller chunks. I guess this was before ice cube trays. I imagine a tool like that sticking into a nerve, a sensory nerve, nudging the nerve and poking in hard and persistently unannounced throughout the day. The stab prompts an immediate pain reflex that kicks my right leg out at the knee while jerking my head and upper torso backward. It's ridiculous! It scares the dog and annoys any person nearby.

This stabbing takes turns, switching back & forth multiple times during the day. It alternates sides. When the left side suffers, the right side gets a break. Vice versa, the right side prods the nerve, giving the left side pain relief. My right side is much worse than the left. Getting injured sitting on a bull when the chute gate opens puts the rider at a 50/50 chance of incurring an injury. On probably 2 out of 3 rides something gets injured, a muscle pulled, a bad bruising, etc. One Saturday morning in 1978, a certain bull threw me hard against a broken steel fence post and dislocated something in my right L3-4 area, about 3 inches to the right side of my spine; I get to think about it every day since I was about age 50. He busted a rib also on that same ride but that's no big deal.

The good thing about getting injured when you're young is that you heal up fast. What you don't know is that 30 years later the pain is gonna' come back and it's gonna' be there to stay. And this injury GROWS to affect lots of parts around it. An interesting aside to this bull wreck is that my right leg was out of whack for 2 days until something popped back into place. I sure wish I knew what it was but the physician on duty in the Navy Hospital ER that afternoon refused to give me an x-ray. Why not? He chewed me out because he had strong feelings that rodeo was cruelty to animals. 

Rodeo? A fine traditional American pastime? Why, it's 'Americana!' I wonder what he thinks about baseball....