An excerpt from Wishes To Die For: A Caregiver’s Guide to Advance Care Directives.
The great poet Rumi ascribes, “I should be suspicious of what I want.” Like many others, as I become older I look forward to Medicare paying for health care expenses. Being enrolled in Medicare makes health care available, yet access to health care does not ensure good health. Eating an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but once people can afford to get sick by having health care, I witness people choosing to see the doctor rather than consuming the healthy option of an organic apple.
The certainty of being right careens into the certainty of being taken for a ride when becoming ill. I stand in suspicion of people who believe they are treated well as I prescribe a multitude of medication and tests that conflict with my sense of living well. Are people becoming more realized as patients and less recognized as people?
Statistically, the older we become, the more likely it is for us to become ill and be hospitalized. Younger patients are more likely to take risks with their heath, making boastful claims of not having seen a doctor in many years. I recently treated a 32-year-old man who had been diagnosed with a hole in his heart septum. Once again he had passed out during sex. He did not have insurance and could not afford medication. However, he seemed content in not taking medication and had been compensating fairly well physically. His comfort level with risk rather than medication suggested something to me about dignity. The ability to take risk along with the certainty of being right may actually be a useful tool in self-restraint.
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