Wellness Is Yours, If You Are A Proponent Of It Elita Sohmer Clayman

I am up at one thirty a.m., unable to sleep. The bad knee extends in pain to the bad calf in back of the bad knee. This sounds like a rapper song. It is not, it is the feeling I receive because I have an Arthritic knee and the calf part is from the way I walk from the pain. My doctor said today, the new brace will strengthen it and the physical therapy scheduled for the 9^th of July should put me in better shape-knee, calf and ankle which I will shorten to KCA.

This happens to people, some younger than others and it hurts a lot. When my Mom use to come visit every Saturday afternoon after her time at the hair salon getting her red turned gray hair done; she was in discomfort and pain from her back. Doctors were doing nothing much for her and she had been to several of them through the year. She is gone now twenty-eight years, so some remedies or cures are different know. I do not remember which if any pain pills were given her; but if so, they did not work well.

I would try to get her mind off of her pain; which when I look back now was sort of silly. I would say “try not to think about it.” That was more than silly, it was super silly. She was in pain and it hurt. Finally, we found a doctor at Johns Hopkins who specialized in geriatrics and he said he would perform a back operation for Lumbar Stenosis, which was the name of her ailment. I was against it because she was seventy and to me at forty-three, that was quite old for a serious operation. My brother Herbert and her brother Lou were for it. I was afraid she would not wake up as my Dad had not for his operation at seventy-two. The two men won out and she had the operation, woke up and lived another seven years without the severe pain, she was feeling when I would tell her not to think about it. Of course, at that age of forty-three, I was pain free and as I look back, I could not ‘feel her pain.’

I am glad she had the operation with the encouragement of my brother and uncle because she had a few good years after that and the operation gave her those years.

Trying not to think about something is a good psychological line; however it is not too logical. When you have pain, you have pain which I know now with my KCA pain mentioned above.

We have to take action and try to eliminate the pain somehow and that is what I am doing with the knee brace and the physical therapy prescribed for me coming soon next week. I have had PT before and if you adhere to it and do it and you have an excellent therapist; it can help. Here’s to PT helping me. They never suggested physical therapy to Mom, way back then twenty-eight years ago. I knew nothing about it, so I could not have proposed it to her or and the doctors. She did try acupuncture, which did not help.

The moral or theme of this story is that we have to try to help our self when there seems to be no help suggested to us. Now with insurance companies trying to curtail some medical attention or procedures, we have to take charge to obtain what we need by suggesting things to our medical people. Insurance companies try to tell us that this test or that ultrasound or MRI may cause more problems than it is worth. You can bet, these people get all the procedures, tests and drugs they need. They try to reduce them for us. It used to be that women got PAP tests every year, and then they started to say that older women needed them only every two to three years. You could not get your doctor to write an order for it with any reasoning. Now they say, definitely every three years. I told my GYN doctor, I want it this year which will be two years to the date of the last one. Finally, she said OK. I told her I would pay cash for it myself, if the insurance said no to the bill.

I believe we have to be the custodian of our own health team and we have to be the leader. Sometimes, the leader has to be YOU and you not be a prisoner of the claims of health insurance clerks who seem to be deciding what is proper for us. I heard a prominent Senator last year say on a popular talk show, that he indeed had the same health insurance that we the people have. Sure, he does, we are the peons and they are the royalty. Believe me; government workers like the Senators have a wonderful policy that enables them to have great perks, we the people do not have. Why would the GYN doctor not give me an order for a test, we women have been receiving yearly for many dozens of years, when I stated that if the insurance did not pay for it, I had the money to do it and I wanted it for my health. Someone in the insurance agency, and I believe not a medical person, decided they could save millions and billions to stop these tests. He or she most likely got a ‘bonus’ for this wonderful suggestion and its saving to the companies. A doctor was on The View today telling about unnecessary tests we should not have. Joy Behar tried to pin him down when he said no to some and then he said well maybe, if the symptoms show it to be necessary. He was very wishy-washy about it and when he was finally finished, you did not know why he was there in the first place. It was very confusing to the panel of ladies on the show and even more perplexing to the viewers.

The claim was supposed to be that over the age of seventy, women no longer needed this test every year, that two and probably three years was enough time to wait. Now they have come up with the theory that men do not need the blood test yearly for prostate cancer screening. That is probably suggested by the same person or persons who want to deny PAP tests. Who are we to believe?

First it is made almost mandatory, we need these tests and then it is said, wait time in between or no tests at all after a higher age. There is a new movie out called Marigold Hotel; where all this is discussed in a story line theme. People go to this place and get whatever medical test they need and then they decide to live in that country and not here.They also derive other benefits from living now at senior age in India. It has gotten rave reviews and its marvelous acting has been noted too.  I have not seen it, but my lawyer friend Emma told me about the plot and the operation story line as being  an interesting parallel/analogy to us being told, we do not need this or that at this later age.

Take hold of your own health needs as much as you can and if you see something does not seem right and you think a test would help; research it on the Internet, in health books or wherever you can have light shed on the subject. If in the days of 1964, there had been an Internet, possibly I could have looked up why my Dad was not feeling so well. He knew he did not feel good, but waited until the doctor he used came back from a month long vacation. By then, it was too late and he passed away at age seventy-two. If I had known his symptoms or my brother had known too, we would have pressed him to see a specialist and not wait for the absent doctor.

In those days of 1964, there was some health insurance and the rest was paid out of personal funds and that would have been OK, but he waited and a month was too long.

I am only a layman, novice, and a reader of advice on medical issues either in books or online or the old fashioned way of asking our medical professionals. Then you separate from all of them, what is best for you and for your loved ones. Then you go about accomplishing what is the superior way to go about your own or their health issues and or problems. My friend Steven Behr is a Wellness Educator and that is his profession. I will talk with him about what he does and it is probably a preventative profession where people are educated to learn, know and to take care of themselves before and I guess during health problems. I will write further on this subject shortly.

Be your own leader and proponent of your life. It is yours and no one else’s. Live it, know it and care for it, it is the only one you will ever have.

You need not go to the Marigold Hotel in India, do it here.