Shade Tree Wisdom 8/15/08

Another August day, hot, humid, summerish, and we are grateful to have it for it is His gift to us, after all.

Quite a few have asked, "what did the doctor have to say". Let me give a sort of a summary. She had checked all the notes and charts and was pleased, really, with what she found. Kept telling me, “I’ve seen people of 50 who are in worse shape than you are”, and "for your years, you are in good shape." So, taking everything into account, we will do nothing except add one medication, isosorbide, to prevent angina pain, and to make the arteries more elastic. So, unless there is a severe change, the doctors do not anticipate any kind of by-pass operation.

She mentioned that for me, at this stage there is always the risk of a stroke during such an operation, and “we do not want to take a healthy person and have him end up a sort of helpless vegetable because of stroke”. Indeed not. There is always such risk, and it increases as the years go by.

This visit was to their new offices. They had just moved the week before, and it started on a sort of wrong foot. When I checked in the clerk handed me one of those electronic pagers and told me it would light and buzz when my turn came. “We’re really ‘state of the art’ now”, she said with a smile.

So my daughter and I sat down to wait, chatted and paged through some magazines the way one does. I did notice a nurse standing at the counter sort of looking my way, but the pager was quiet. Then she called my name. My pager malfunctioned. “State of the Art” indeed.

All the while the doctor was talking, I kept seeing the Word of God telling me that “all my days are written before they ever came into being’. Psalm 139. So I put myself into God’s hand with a sign of relief, knowing that His plan is the perfect one. And that is sufficient for me.

GPD 8/15/08