11 March 2009 
 
Eye on the Ball


 
It is refreshing to be on the same sheet of music with Nobel Laureates.
 
I was right there with Dr. Steven Chu, the last time I saw him. We had a broad agreement on the fact that America needed to free itself from the curse of dependence on overseas oil.
 
The only difference was that he had his Nobel, and was in a position to do something about it. He is now Secretary of Energy and is moving along with his plans. I am still working on mine, or would be if I could narrow the fields down to something I have a knack for. I drink pretty well, but I have not found anyone who is giving out medals for it yet.
 
I also don’t have much of a knack for economics, but I had a Eurika! Moment this morning when I saw what Tom Friedman was saying about the banking system.
 
See, I have a bunch of pals, loosely aggregated by the times and places I met them. I have a Trotskyite group I am very found of that is pretty vigorous. They have been wanting to string up the Bush people for quite a while. Then there is the military and Spook buddies who actually have been stringing people up for some time, and I have to keep things straight or risk excommunication from one or more of the groups.
 
Take Friedman, for example. I think he is a pretty straight shooter. I don’t agree with him all the time, but he is the smart guy, and I am the chump. I have one friend who thinks he is a political fraud, and his elevation from OpEd in the New York Times to Laureate was a cruel Swedish trick.
 
What Friedman said this morning distilled everything I have been trying to articulate for weeks and failing. Of course I am upset about taxes. I am pissed because I have no idea where they are going. If there was a focus to it all, a direct point, it would be a lot easier to shoulder the load and move out.
 
But there is not. The money is going to go to some ten-year health plan, which may or may not be good, and education, which is swell, but years away from anything concrete in outcome. In the meantime, the banks- the financial system- are on the brink of complete and utter collapse. If they go down, they take everything with them. All the credit, all the pretty houses and cars, all the savings.
 
Everything.
 
It is enough to make you crazy. Friedman thinks that the Administration is taking its eye off the ball. Nothing can happen if that is not fixed, and all the other noise about Education and Health Care is just distracting us from the Main Event. He thinks it may take another trillion to stabilize the situation, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars on other initiatives is just going to allow the whole enterprise of our global system to collapse.
 
Grandma used to encourage my Dad to walk along the tracks on the way home from school and pick up lumps of coal that fell from the trains. Every bit helps. My pal the Admiral remembers when he was a kid on the farm in Iowa, and they closed the banks up tight as a drum and there was no money. No Money.
 
Think about it. That is where this is going if the banks and the money fail.
 
The notion that a Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste is compelling, I know. President Bush and Vice President Richelieu used the War on Terror to accomplish a bunch of things that had little to do with the real problem, and everything about an ancient political agenda. They took their eyes off the ball.
 
But we cannot do it again, and yet we are. We must save the financial system, and it that means that Health Care and income redistribution are just going to have to wait. The Administration is not acting boldly enough on the only problem that matters, and we are at Big Time Risk, no kidding, all stop.
 
I know the feeling, and the temptation to do things you want rather than what needs to be done. If I keep my eye on the ball, I do pretty well. But that has been a challenge with the new medication. I picked up the Meds on Sunday, and three days later I decided to figure out what I am taking.
 
One of them- or maybe the combination- produces an interesting spacio-temporal dysphasia that delivers me to the office about fifteen minutes late, and has me writing “2007” on my checks.
 
The pain Doc who prescribed them is a nice guy, a tall man with tending to a slight paunch, sandy hair, and a ubiquitous laptop connected to his long fingers. I found out in the course of the initial exam that he was Navy-trained and stayed in the service for the minimum obligation. He dealt with the Submarine community as a General Practitioner, probably with the not-so-secret agenda of monitoring the Nukes to see how they were handling months underwater armed to the gills with nuclear weapons.
 
Now he specializes in the alleviation of pain, two days a week in Virginia and two in Maryland. 
 
The Doc's name is derived from the town on the Dalmatian Coast in the Former Yugoslavia, and he has eyes the color of seawater. The TriCare people authorized four visits to him, and I was on the edge of despair about the whole thing. I mean, I could still move around, even if it was painful. The stabbing feeling was only acute on rising, or until I got moving in one direction or another. He manipulated my joints, scowled and went back to his laptop. 
 
At the end of the session he came up with a diagnosis of acute osteoarthritis that was radiating outward from everything that moves on my musculo-skeletal frame, which I agreed with, and a recommended course of treatment. It was a relief, since the only thing the military had suggested was that Cox-2 inhibitor that makes your head or heart explode, I forget which. That scene in Alien when the nasty critter breaks out of Harry Dean Stanton’s chest is what comes to mind, more often than I would like.
 
I see the beast with the face of Fed Chairman Ben Bernancke these days, I don’t know why.
 
Celebrex was the drug, I think, one of those names Pfizer and the other drug giants cook-up names that make you want to put on a party hat. It cost a gazzilion dollars to develop and was therefore too expensive to fail, like Citicorp.
 
I don’t know if they are still in business, and I know that it is our own system that makes all this so expensive, getting past the FDA, so that the patents can expire and let the Canadians give the generic stuff away and make everyone here think out system is broken.
 
Got it. Note to Administration: This is harder than it looks.
 
There was a vial of Celebrex in the medicine cabinet for years, as you may recall, and when I looked at them it was with suspicion. I don't know if I threw them out or not. I hope they didn't wind up in the Potomac, where the fish could explode.
 
Anyway, I left the office a little optimistic that maybe I could start sleeping through the night again and worry about the banks only when I was awake. 
 
I know that betrayed a certain cavalier attitude toward the course of treatment, personally and nationally, but I had tried. I sat over at the Rader Clinic at Ft Myer ("No Emergency Services!") for an hour waiting to see the contract-pharmacist with the rows of scary-old retirees trying to get the prescriptions that the Doc recommended. 
 
After ensuring that I was really good and late for work, I was summoned to one of the windows and the harried civilian told me none of the drugs was in the military health care system, and one was available over the counter and why I was I bothering her about it?
 
I took that onboard and stuffed the prescriptions back in my briefcase and went to work. I called the Doc's office a couple days later, saying that the follow-up appointment would not be necessary, since I was a bad patient.
 
Well, perhaps not a bad patient, per se, but at least ill-informed one.
 
“I don’t know much about being a civilian,” I said. “And I have no idea how to get medicine in the real world. I asked that he suggest some medication I could get through the Bethesda National Navy Medical Center, though I seriously doubted I was going to visit there with any regularity.
 
They condemned venerable old Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District and are consolidating all military medicine at Bethesda, which makes the campus there a zoo and a half.
 
Unless I get laid off, of course, and have a lot more time than money. The secretary said she would address my concerns- not about the economy, that seemed beyond her job description- but about changing out the drugs. I put the matter out of my mind, and was startled to get the call reminding me of the appointment I didn't need to review the effects of the drugs I had not taken.
 
I wasn't exactly besides myself, exactly, since that would be difficult and I don’t move that fast any more. I was concerned that on this second visit I had nothing to report, since I had not actually acquired the drugs. 
 
I explained the situation, and apologized for wasting his time. He was remarkably chipper. He said he wouldn’t charge me for this visit, or count against my limited number of calls. He had to fire his assistant, since she did not pass along his phone messages.
 
That made me feel worse, thinking of the poor woman at home, with no one calling that she could ignore.
 
The Doc wrote me some new script for generic drugs that he swore would not cost that much, and told me how to do it.
 
“Walk up to the window. Hand the lady the pieces of paper. Then wait. They will come in a bag. Pay for them. Go home. Take as directed.”
 
I thanked him profusely. First things first. And thanks to the miracle of medication, that is how I come to spend at least part of the day in 2007, where things are not that bad.
 
I wish there really were better living through chemistry, don’t you? But I think it is really time to concentrate.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com