Medical Ignorance

I told y'all about when I got my ear pierced last week and the young girl assured me that pain, redness, swelling, and pus don't mean you have an infection. Remember? And I said "Really?" And she said that people think pus means you have an infection, but it doesn't, not at all.

And I've been thinking ever since, "Who spawns these people?" Because what completely baffles me is how people can be so completely, totally, astoundingly medically ignorant. Now, I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on tv. And the only reason I can put my hand over the area where my spleen is located is because I just now googled "where is my spleen" (no, you don't have to use the "?") and found this. OK, so I have some significant gaps in my own knowlege. I know that. But I know lots of useful stuff that helps me out--like I know where my ascending, transverse, and descending colon areas are, and I know where my stomach is and that it's not down there by my belly button, where most people think of when they say, "My stomach hurts." They should say, "My transverse colon hurts," but hardly anyone ever says that. I think most people like to pretend they don't actually own intestines.

Also last week I had someone's mom explain to me that the reason you get dizzy when you stand up is because your "body dumps all the sugar." This was news to me, and I'm still not sure what information she mangled to come up with that. Although googling just now and reading some of the forum posts makes things much, much clearer. Holy moly. I *hate* forums, I really do. So much misinformation presented in a format that encourages people to believe they're getting facts and useful advice. Yikes!

So yesterday we were at Starbucks talking to two women--I think one was one of The EGE's former students--mother and daughter. Both a little overweight. Smokers (at least the mom was), coming in for a caffeine and sugar hit to get them through the rest of the day. The daughter was drinking an "energy drink," which I think is just a canned coffee drink pumped with some extra caffeine--and she said that she'd read that if you drink one every day, it will decrease your life by ten years. And they both laughed and agreed that that was OK with them. And they said something about smoking and about caffeine and sugar for energy and how it was OK if it killed them earlier.

And I'm sorry, but I just snapped. I went into rant mode. I could see their eyes widening and the look of concern on their faces, but I couldn't stop. Here's kind of what I said, waving my hand around and talking in a rather loud and impassioned manner:

"But that's not what happens, that you just do whatever you want and then when it catches up with you, you die. It would be great if that's the way it worked, because then you could enjoy everything and then check out when it begins to take a toll on your body. But what actually happens is that it catches up with you and starts affecting how you feel and whether or not you can walk, or--like my parents--breathe on your own, and then you have another 20 years of living with those effects. That's the part no one thinks about:  the part between the time your bad habits catch up with you and the time you finally die. Unless you're going to commit suicide or somehow luckily just drop dead, you're going to have years of living with the effects of smoking and eating bad food and not exercising. So it's not when you're going to die; it's how you're going to feel every day between now and then. And 'then' could be a long, long way off."

Like I said, they were kind of stunned, the way you are if you say, "Hi, Grandma," and she goes into nutso mode over how you're just like your Uncle Charley after he came back from The War and started talking to the aliens on that radio he rigged up in the basement. You can't really say anything; you just sit and listen and think, "Where the hell did *that* come from?"

But I can't stand it. I really can't. I can't stand that people don't realize they get one body--just one--and that it has to last them their whole entire life. Oh, I understand that kids and teenagers don't get it--they're immortal. They have to be to navigate toward adulthood. But after you're about 30, you've gotta have the sense to stop and do some thinking about what you want the last couple decades of your life to be about. Do you want it to be about oxygen tanks? My parents never thought of that when they were smoking several packs a day. Do you want it to be about multiple amputations and a wheelchair as a constant companion? Our friend didn't think of that when he was rolling his eyes at the prescribed diet and weight control for his diabetes. Do you want it to be about ill-fitting dentures or just a pretty much total lack of dentition? Someone I know didn't think of that when I was urging him, 20 years ago, to get some good dental care and forgodssakes FLOSS. 

Nope. We don't think of that. We think we can do whatever we want, and then one day it will catch up with us, and we'll drop dead. Maybe a decade early, but happy for having eaten pork rinds every evening after dinner, along with a 32-oz Coke and some M&M's. We smoke because, we say, we enjoy it. Also because we're sick and tired of people nagging us to quit--it's our body, and we can smoke if we want to. It's no one else's business whether or not we "choose" (because we always think we're still making the choice) to smoke. 

[This, by the way, is true only if you smoke only in your own house with all the windows closed; go read some of the findings about the dangers of third-hand smoke. And you thought second-hand smoke was your only worry.]

We won't go into the costs to taxpayers, including increased insurance premiums, to cover the health care of people who haven't taken care of themselves or prepared financially for the care they'll need. We won't even go there. Because my point is this: it's everyone's job to know about their bodies, what they need, what's good for them and what's not, and what they need to do to be able to live the rest of their lives in that body with a minimum of pain and horror. (And if you think I'm exaggerating, think of the emotion you'd feel if they told you there was no saving your leg and you realized that, if you'd made other choices 20 years earlier, it wouldn't have come to this. Horror pretty much describes it.) Sure, most of us are going to need help as we get older. Some of us will need rather a lot of it. But most of us can make choices now that will help make those last years enjoyable rather than just a long, slow, painful creep toward death. When I see people my age who are still treating their bodies like they're nothing--it makes me crazy. 

And then I think, "Whoa. Making yourself crazy isn't any better for you than Cheetos." That's when I quit ranting and just smile and hum to myself, drinking my decaf soy latte, no sweetener. What is it they say? No cake tastes as good as skinny feels? Something like that. Well, that decaf soy latte doesn't taste as good as a triple caramel coffee frappacinno with extra caramel (which The EGE gets some days and  shares, in small bites), but it tastes way better than worrying about the effects of Splenda and caffeine mixed with whipped cream and chocolate and three extra pumps of toffee nut on a daily basis. 

That can't be good for your spleen.