It has been six years since the AVM in Virginia’s brain broke. At the end of February. This is the first year that we made little to no special notice of the anniversary. And it is the first year we have not been back to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center for any reason. I am glad of that. In these six years we have been hanging around hospitals of various sorts a lot. We go to Health South rehab center in Concord twice a week for OT–occupational therapy—therapy for above the waist movement. For walking it is called PT–physical therapy. The Health South place reminds me of the mental hospital I was in for a few days back in college in the sense that it is off in a grassy park of sorts and inside it is institutional. Not as bleak and smoke-stained as Eugenia Memorial Hospital was back in the 60s, but mauve and calmatively silver-gray with huge southern style crown moldings running along every ceiling. I wonder if they are not architectural versions of the plantation dresses of fabled yore. In every hospital the social drama continues behind that overly perky and polite veneer of weary caregivers and professional samaritans everywhere. Visiting the ER now gives one a break from all that fake good manners. Procedure has now taken precedence over healing—thanks I guess to the accountants—and ER care is now as slam-bam stepbystep as the now bygone factory system.
One excitement to watch for over the next ten or twenty years is to see who will pop up as the Bernie Madoff of health care. And who the AIG and so on. Saving the financial system from the Savings & Loan scandal-robbery of thirty years ago should have been warning enough that another version was bound to happen and so our current financial malaise is surely foreteller of what health care will face soon enough. But then my skills as prophet are jaundiced by experiences now part of history not the future.
