Bedside Manner

Someone asked me today how long ago it was that I came down with a case of breast cancer.  (It was 1998.)  I couldn't help thinking back to the day I heard the dreaded diagnosis.

Six years before, something "suspicious" showed up on a mammogram and I underwent a lumpectomy, performed by a local surgeon, Carol Slomski, M.D.  A few days afterward at her office, I sat in an examining room waiting nervously to learn if the pathology results showed the tumor was malignant or not.  Finally the door opened, but even before she came fully into the room, the doctor was saying cheerfully, "I've got good news!"

Not cancer, all gone, no further action required.

The next time something "suspicious" showed up (1998), Dr. Slomski performed a lumpectomy once again.  The next day I was at her office waiting nervously once again for the verdict.  This time the doctor came into the room and quietly closed the door behind her.  "Hi," she said, as she walked over to me, "how are you doing this morning?"

Bless her heart, trying to break it to me gently, but the contrast in her manner with the 1992 event told me immediately that this one wasn't benign.

Further action required that time -- chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and five years of Tamoxifen, as a matter of fact, but that seems to have taken care of the problem.  Knock on wood.

Upstairs, Downton

For over 35 years I told anyone who asked, and sometimes anybody who didn't, that my all-time favorite television show ever was the 1970's British drama, "Upstairs, Downstairs."

I never missed an episode during the five years that it was broadcast on PBS. I believe, in fact, that I would have killed to be in front of a television on Sunday evening when it was on. Luckily, that never became necessary, but it is a clear indication of how much I loved that show.

It also indicates how stupendous a moment it was when I threw over "Upstairs, Downstairs" and proclaimed that my all-time favorite television show ever is "Downton Abbey," currently in its third season on PBS.

There are parallels between the two programs, of course. Each one involves an upper-crust British family (upstairs) and their servants (downstairs). Each has a likable if imperfect upstairs patriarch with a formidable wife (Richard and Lady Marjorie Bellamy, Robert and Cora Crawley, Earl and Countess of Grantham), and a downstairs patriarch in the steadfast and steady butler (Mr. Hudson, Mr. Carson). Each has a wholesome and worthy head housemaid (Rose Buck, Anna Smith), strong-willed, scandal-prone children (James and Elizabeth Bellamy, Ladies Mary, Edith, and Sybil Crawley), a cheerless, uppity lady's maid (Roberts, O'Brien), and an imperious, acid-tongued cook (Mrs. Bridges, Mrs. Patmore). Both families suffer mightily from the sinking of the Titanic, fight their way through World War One, and lose someone to Spanish flu.

Both shows have magnificent casts of actors who play characters you love or love to hate, and both have continuing story lines that blend drama and comedy. So why did "Downton Abbey" replace "Upstairs, Downstairs" in my affections?

It has to be the creator and writer of the show, Julian Fellowes. The guy is brilliant. And it probably doesn't hurt that he has Maggie Smith to deliver all his best zingers.

Tenacity in Winter

Looking out at the snow this morning reminded me of a similar winter day long ago, when I was in my early twenties.  A friend and I were driving in her Volkswagen beetle.  We had had a major snow storm, and on an unploughed side street, the car got stuck.  We both got out and pushed the little car forward about ten feet.  When we got back in the car, we found it was still stuck.  Again we got out and pushed it to where we thought it would be out of the deepest snow, but when we got back in the car, it still wouldn't go.

Since we were only about a block and a half from a major road that had been cleared, the logical thing was for her to stay in the car while I gave it a push, and then she could just keep going up to the corner and wait for me there.

I got out of the car and grabbed hold of the rear bumper, rocking it a little.  She gently engaged the transmission, and the car started to move forward.  I kept pushing for five or six steps to make sure it was unstuck, but the speed suddenly increased, and I lost my footing, landing flat on my face in the snow behind the car.  As the car kept moving, I hung on to the bumper for dear life.  I remember actually yelling to my friend to stop, which, of course, she couldn't hear.  The car went at least another 100 feet before it occurred to me that the way to stop being dragged through the snow on my belly was to let go.

Even if I'm not terribly bright, I am at least tenacious.

A Few Good Women

Women in the United States passed another milestone in their long and arduous journey toward gender equality yesterday when the Pentagon announced that women in the military will be allowed to serve in front-line combat units.

There is only one reason that women have historically been banned from soldiering.  It has its roots back in the misty eons of time when primitive humans became consciously aware of what their instincts already told them -- that survival of the species depended upon reproduction.  Since the male's only role in the process was to impregnate the female, a single male could serve an entire community.  A tribe could not sacrifice its women, so when war came, it was the men who were sent to fight and die because they were expendable.

I think lots of them still are, but that's a topic for a different day.

How to Mortify Yourself

There's an old riddle about a father and son who are involved in an automobile accident.  The father is killed, and the badly-injured son is rushed to the hospital.  After taking one look at the kid, the surgeon on duty says, "I can't operate on this boy.  He's my son."  How is that possible?

Even in the 1970's that riddle stumped people.  Feminists bandied it about a lot in those days to show people how bigoted they were.  (If it stumps you, please call me.  We need to talk.) 

I was reminded of it this morning when I saw in the New York Times it was on this date in 1849 that America's first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned a medical degree from the Medical Institution of Geneva, N.Y.

I really shouldn't be so smug.  I had a startling experience of my own when I was a student at Michigan State back in the early 80's.  I had run out of a medicated shampoo that back then required a prescription.  (For  more on that, see my posting, "Logic and the FDA" from April 16, 2012). 

Anyway, I called the university health center and told them what I needed and asked if somebody could just write me a prescription without a lot of rigmarole and recording my entire medical history and such.  The woman I talked to told me to come on over.  "I'll have you see Dr. Johnson," she said, "who's very good about this kind of thing."

Excellent, I thought, but all the way over there I rehearsed what I would say so that the doctor would be only too happy to write the prescription and send me on my way.  When I got there and announced I was to see Dr. Johnson, a young woman left me in a little examining room, saying, "Just wait here.  She'll be right with you."

WHAT?  She?  I had just failed Feminism 101.  They said doctor, I saw a man.  I was mortified.  I had humiliated myself in my own eyes.  Is there anything worse?

Yes.  Before I was done castigating myself, Dr. Johnson came into the room.  She was black.

Double whammy to my feminist/liberal consciousness.  But I haven't made that mistake since.

Old is as old does, I guess

I've been hearing and reading that the current flu epidemic is especially hard on the elderly, and I wonder if that includes me.  How old is elderly?

I Googled that very question and found many different answers, but 65 was the minimum age anybody proffered.  One person said that elderly meant over 90, because "that's older than most people."  Well, okay, but since the median age in the United States is 35, if you're 40, you're older than most people.

Elderly must, of course, be relative, especially to one's own age.  My sister-in-law recently told me about the death of an acquaintance, adding that he was "only 69."  That might be considered a ripe old age by some, but apparently not by someone who is just a couple years shy of 69 herself.

In three years, I'll be 69 too, and I'm on Medicare and Social Security and have a pacemaker.  But I think of elderly people as frail and feeble with mobility issues, wrinkly faces, liver spots, and hearing loss, so I would never count myself in with that lot.  But if it's true that you're as old as you feel, I admit that some mornings I am really freakin' elderly.

Not a good excuse

Lance Armstrong has always been larger than life, as sports hero, as survivor, and now as big-time confessor. I mean, really -- if you want to come clean, why not call a news conference? Well, because Oprah Winfrey offers more hype, that's why. And maybe Barbara Walters was busy.

As much as I wish it weren't true, I think heroes do have a responsibility to the public that worships them. My father was seven years old when the Black Sox scandal hit. I am convinced that he was a very hurt and disillusioned little boy when he learned that players on his home-town team had thrown the World Series. He talked about it often and in a way that makes me think he never really got over it.

People are always disappointed when they find their heroes have feet of clay, but Armstrong's admirers probably feel doubly hurt and disillusioned because his indiscretions are linked to what made him a hero in the first place. Tiger Woods, another disappointment to many, cheated on his wife but not at golf, not at that which made him famous.

Armstrong's claim that the cheating was simply to level the playing field, since everyone was doing it, won't justify his actions any more than knowing what a scumbag Charles Comiskey was would have caused my father to forgive the Eight Men Out of Chicago.

All right. I'm tired of Lance Armstrong already. Let's move on.