My mismatched inheritances from my father are a yen for the high country and really lousy hip joints.
I wore out my left hip by 40, replaced it at 43 and wobbled along on my cartilige-free right hip until Dec. 19. The Friday before Christmas, Dr. Aaron Hoffman and his team of orthopedic wizards at the University of Utah cut open my right hip, sawed off the ball, gouged out the socket and replaced both with metal and plastic.
The next day, I took a walk with a walker.
That afternoon, crutches. And on the Sunday after surgery, I left the hospital.
Pain, my constant companion for the last seven years is pretty well gone. I feel tugs in the incision when my kids jump on me, but that’s about it. I’m already sleeping better and when nobody’s watching, I cross the room without a crutch or cane.
Today, I’m back at work, spelling the holiday crew.
I’m thankful to my coworkers for the insurance that covers most of cost. (The Post Register is self-insured)
And I’m glad to live in a country where such luxury is within reach of a working stiff.
But a dozen years’ volunteer work at a summer camp for kids with muscular dystrophy taught me that kids who really need orthopedic care have a damn hard time getting it.
In fact, even reasonably healthy kids don’t have the basic preventive care they need. The week before surgery, I’d been back and forth on the phone with a local mother trying to get boots for her 12-year-old, who had outgrown his only pair. I can’t imagine that boy has the kind of insurance that covers my kind of treatment. If he’s in pain, he probably has to just wait, like my Grampy Miller.
I called him Grumpy, but in recent years, I’ve come to realize he probably had the same lousy hips. I remember him as a crabby old Black Pole (Lyzsensky is our real name) who rarely moved from the chair in his Coeur d’Alene backyard. He listened to baseball games on a shirt-pocket transistor radio, griped at my grandmother and was no apple-cheeked old man from a Rockwell painting. With the benefit of experience, I see him clearly now as a man in pain.
Constant pain, untreated, is a sure-fire trigger for depression. When pain told me my hips were shot, I got counseling - Thanks, Janet Allen - and medication. I doubt Grampy did. The founder of Idaho’s VFW, I’m sure he pushed Congress to keep its promises to veterans, particularly those wounded as he had been in World War I. But he died long before cognitive therapy and hip replacement became routine. He just lived with all of it.
So, now my artificial hips allow me to live without constant pain and should permit me to ski the younger Millers into the trees for a few more years.
But no mattter who wins the health care debate, Democrat or Republican, I have to wonder…Can we as a country afford a universal insurance that covers a luxurious operation like mine?
I may write more later about the obscenely inefficient billing system that clings like a leech to U.S. health-care, the laughable grandiosity of doctors’ offices and larger-than-life-sized oil portraits of hospital benefactors. Bad priorities sidetrack money from kids with Duchennes muscular dystrophy.
But as one of the senior managers who tries to keep health care costs from swamping the Post Register the way they have General Motors, I have to also ask myself if we as a country can afford two artificial legs for a healthy middle-aged man and still take care of every uninsured child in the country?
I hope the new President and the Senate and House will speak honestly to that choice, because I suspect it will be a long time before we can afford to provide health care as a right, instead of a privilege.
Until politicians of courage pull the leeches off the health care system, the most realistic target is going to be to force guys like me to slow down and get by on our hips so that kids with muscular dystrophy can get the wheelchairs and medicine they need.