Pass The Pills

A couple of days ago I may have given the impression that mail order prescriptions are a sign of having one foot in the grave. Of course, by "giving the impression", I mean that is what I said. A couple of folks kindly pointed out that many of your younger people use mail order prescriptions too and that I should not to worry because I remain a strong and virile fellow. I may have read between the lines a bit. What I was trying to say is that as I get older, I find myself being slowly sucked in to a world where I actually know the ins and outs of my health coverage plan. Ten years ago my motto was, Doctors, who needs them? Now I find myself talking to helpful patient care advocates about getting my pills and other health-related stuff. My poor old dad was an extreme example of what happens to a guy with too much health insurance and too much time. He became a world-class hypochondriac. At the end of his life he had a Lazy Susan on his kitchen table, covered in pill bottles. Ask him what a particular bottle was for and he would often say he couldn't recall what it was for but since the doctor gave it, he was taking it. He had a stable of doctors that he saw for a variety of ailments both real and imagined. I use to kid him that if he kept going for tests they would find some really serious problem and then he would have more medical care than even he wanted. He found out he had lung cancer because he was complaining to the doctor about arthritis in his shoulder. The lung tumor showed up unexpectedly on the xray. He died less than a year later. My dad always had a list of his medications on him. On Sundays he would come over with a bottle of this or that to show Older Son Sneed, who is a pharmacist. He had a bottle of eye-drops that he carried and delighted in pulling out this tiny bottle and loudly complaining that it cost thirty-five buck. My old dad never met a medical test he didn't think a guy should get. At eighty he went and got a PSA test for prostate cancer because he could. I'm pretty sure that if you get prostate cancer at eighty, no one is providing aggressive treatment. I would prefer not to know, since it takes a long time to kill you anyway. So, you see my concern. First it's mail order pill and before I know it, I have a standing weekly appointment with my doctor. It's a slippery slope folks. Tomorrow the Lovely Mrs. Sneed and I will be off to Long Beach, California so that she and Daughter Sneed can attend a counseling conference. We will be there through Sunday. I will, along with Daughter Sneed's significant other Mr. Peterson, be entertaining Sneedlet One. My experience with Long Beach is limited to those times when I got off a freeway at the wrong interchange, so I don't quite know what to expect. Peterson got a travelers guide from the Long Beach tourism folks and it seems nice enough. We are staying at the Westin in Long Beach. It is always a crap shoot with these business class hotels, but the reviews that I found on line for the Westin were positive, except for Nadine, from Rancho Cucamonga, California who gave the hotel a score of one on a one to ten scale. Nadine rated the cleanliness, the staff and the amenities as an eight out of ten, but gave the hotel a one overall because on the weekend she stayed there was a school kid convention going on. Nadine must really hate kids. I do know that we will be visiting Disneyland for the about one hundredth time (I'm not kidding), since it is only twenty-five minutes away from the hotel. Sneedlet One enjoys Disneyland almost as much as Mrs. Sneed enjoys him enjoying it. An old curmudgeon like me doesn't stand a chance. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky