Of Aging, Military Service, and the Medical Bureaucracy

View From FOB Prosperity, Green Zone, Baghdad. Photo by Paul Russell-White Used by Permission

If your folks give you the ancient line about old age not being for the timid, you had best listen to them.

The advances of medical science mean that our idea of “old age” keeps getting revised upward, a curve that had the United States on the leading edge until recently.

That does not mean that living longer comes without cost.

I am taking a list of medications that is two pages long. Single spaced.

The pills have been prescribed by a list of doctors that is a full page. Single spaced.

Last week, I banged my left second toe hard. I was spraying enough blood to bring mosquitos from the next county to chow down. I was remembering when I was a kid, and the city had a jeep that drove all over town spraying DDT on mosquitos, dogs and cats, goldfish, human babies.

If I got tired of being type cast as Tonto, I could run through one of those white clouds of DDT and come out white. Then all I would need is one of those silly Lone Ranger secret identity masks and I could make myself look like a negative raccoon.

Not having any DDT to stop the bleeding, I went off looking for a podiatrist who would take my retirement insurance. The VA would be a long drive and the Indian Health Service would be a longer drive.

In the first office I found, a woman gave me a clipboard of papers and I was proud of myself when I finished them in a little over an hour. I handed it back with my insurance card, three picture IDs, and a small blood sample that was easy to provide because my toe was still seeping.

A minute later, the office person summoned me to the front.

“It says your left toe is injured.”

“That’s right.”

“And your left toe is on which foot?”

“Is this a joke? My left foot, unless I have more than two.”

“It says plainly in our Yellow Page ad that our practice is limited to right feet.”

I don’t think it was said plainly. He had some advertising slogan that contained “right foot” but I just looked to see if it was followed by:

You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about

That’s what it’s all about!

I am so damn tired of hunting for doctors maybe I don’t pay as much attention to their ads as I should. But it, like me, gets old.

Am I complaining about being alive?

Well, kinda sorta. I should be long dead by now even without playing in clouds of DDT. I’ve been morbidly obese for most of my life, with a few exceptions.

The first was military boot camp, for which I had to “make weight” or the Air Force recruiter would not take me. That’s a serious deal, because this was at the hairiest part of the Vietnam War and those guys had quotas to meet. He was unable to fake my weight or I’m sure he would have.

I wonder what was going through his head when he told the fat 16-year-old who claimed to be 17 that he had to bring his weight from almost 300 to 235 or the Air Force would not even spend the money on a bus ticket to Oklahoma City, where the physical screening got more serious?

The Marine Corps recruiter on whom the Air Force guy tried to palm me off had no problem with my weight. He said I would be recycled in boot camp until I came out at the “correct” weight. But I was in love with the Air Force, partly from my experience in Civil Air Patrol. I wonder if the bureaucrats knew what an effective recruiting tool they created by giving out that old two seater military surplus aircraft?

The military surplus jeep was kind of fun, too. I don’t recall the multi-colored civilian jeeps all over the place. I don’t even recall a single civilian jeep in Bristow. Not even one jeep in a rural Oklahoma town cosmopolitan enough to support not one but two Volkswagens. I started out on this paragraph not capitalizing “jeep,” and when I realized my error, I decided not to go back and fix it because the small letter J makes a correct statement about the history of the thing.
Interior of WWII Jeep in Imperial War Museum, London.. Photo by Ekem at English Widipedis, Shared Under Creative Commons License 3.0

Jeep is a proper noun now, and probably a registered trademark unless it became too generic too quickly to register. Jeep as a marque survived corporate bankruptcies as a freestanding asset of great value, just like the corporate bankruptcy that listed Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies as assets.

Of course, we all know there’s no secret recipe for chocolate cupcakes with a little squiggle across the icing on top or for itty-bitty sponge cakes with a filling inside. Those are not chocolate cupcakes; those are Hostess cupcakes. Those are not finger-sized filled sponge cakes; those are Twinkies.

Even without secret recipes, they are valuable because a corporation spent millions of dollars to make the names valuable. Consumers will reject an identical product at half the price because to own the names is to own the right to claim your cakes are the real McCoy. This is not true of jeeps, because three different companies made them in WWII, not counting identical machines made in several allied countries from the same specifications.

Everybody was too busy with the war to advertise beyond military recruitment and war bonds. What made jeeps special was that the GIs who drove them fell in love with them. They would go anywhere. They were simple to repair. Their cost was measured in hundreds rather than thousands, and lots of them simply got left by the side of the road when U.S. forces withdrew from the European Theater to head for the Pacific Theater.

The GIs who had been told “the way home is through Berlin” were about to get a new slogan, “the way home is through Tokyo,” but there was not enough time between the German surrender and the Japanese surrender to rearrange the veterans of Europe.

There were a lot of jeeps among the leftover stuff from the war, and I’ve always wondered if that elderly airplane the C.A.P. in Bristow got was of WWII vintage. Both the fuselage and the wings were covered with fabric. Rotten fabric — I poked a hole in a wing one day with my bare finger, but did not report it for fear of being grounded. The adults who did the flying were of WWII vintage and they also taught us kids the ground school part of getting a pilot license.

Those military leftovers sold me on the Air Force. The Marine Corps? I was not afraid of combat; I was afraid of boot camp, of washing out and getting sent home. So I made weight, and made it before I turned 17. But they caught me in Oklahoma City and put me up in a hotel until I turned 17 and could get sworn in. Looking back on it, the whole thing went slicker than goose grease, leading me to believe I was not the only kid who lied about his age in war time.

Too bad the recruiter could not fake my weight. I had to take something called the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The recruiter told me that, because I had no high school diploma, I would have to get better than the 50th percentile on all four parts. I had to look up “percentile” to learn that meant I was scored against everybody else who took the test. I found that scary, a fear that seemed justified when my scores (in percentile terms) came back 99, 98, 87, and 45. He handed me a load of BS about making an exception because my other scores were so high.

I did not learn until I mustered out four years later that it was BS. He pencil-whipped me into the Air Force by changing the 45 to just over 50 and lowering the ungodly high ones — I guess so I would be less likely to attract attention. The 45 was mechanical, which did not surprise me. My idea of a successful repair was always doing no further damage to the object being repaired and not injuring myself or anyone else in the attempt.

My son later ripped through Marine Corps boot camp, and ever since he did that I am no longer allowed to complain about anything that happened to me in Air Force boot camp. I am, he says, a veteran of the “Candyass Corps.”

After two combat tours in Iraq, he is medically retired on 100 percent service connected disability. His dad — that’s me — is a one hitch wonder with 60 percent service connected disability. We have matching disabled veteran license plates — -just joking — -my plates say Air Force or, as my Marine son puts it, “chairborne.”

So now I’m a geezer, more of a geezer than I ever expected to be. It’s a slow week when I have less than three medical appointments. My attempt to find a podiatrist got off on the wrong foot, but I came back to the same office a week later.

She remembered me, because she said, “You said your left foot hurt.”

I replied, “It did, but now both feet hurt.”

You see how quickly I’m picking up on how this medical stuff works? I can even translate some of their codes. They have a common appointment called “follow up.”

Translation:

The doctor is finished with you but not finished with your insurance company.

Universal health care has been in the Democratic Party platform every year since Truman. Political party platforms are shelved in libraries next to fairy tales, textbooks from Trump University, and the multi-volume set, The Wit and Wisdom of Donald John Trump. In the last, the pages are all blank because the author is certain that his audience will not care.