What You Should be Thinking as You Fill Out Your Paperwork at the Doctor’s Office

When you arrive at the doctor's office to check in with the receptionist, you are often handed a small pack of paperwork to fill out. Until that moment, you have probably been focused on your own ailment or your own medical worries. Luckily, for most of us--most of the time--our own health concerns will more or less resolve and life will more or less go on.

For all of us, however, that typical pack of doctor office paperwork contains a magic page that has the power to boost our happiness through the roof, if only we employ the correct frame of gratitude.  I'm referring to the page that looks something like this:

This page gives us the opportunity to breathe a cosmic sigh of relief that we do not have most of those ailments on that list.  That's how I try to see it as I check off all most of those boxes with a "no." Thank goodness I don't have most of those medical problems. And this is merely the beginning of what I'm proposing as a journey of gratitude.

Instead of thinking about my own health problem, instead of being frustrated that my own body is not operating perfectly, the above page is a reminder that my body is an extraordinarily complex adaptive system--lots of little parts have self-organized into something so complicated that it seems miraculous. No humans could possibly make a tongue or an eye or a liver as high functioning or as elegant as the natural versions.

Imagine that humans in the distant future worked very hard and came much closer to making a reasonably functioning robotic human. Then imagine their supervisors sending down a new work order to make sure that this robot is also sentient.  Imaging the groaning you would hear from the engineering team! Then imagine that the supervisors send down another new work order to make sure that this artificial human could also repair itself if it became damaged!  Imaging louder groaning, especially when the supervisors remind the team that this self-repair must respond to hundreds of millions of microscopic threats and do it as well as the human immune system. 

Then imagine that the supervisors send down yet another work order advising the team that they must design their human so that it runs on almost anything that it puts in its mouth.  Even louder groaning.  Mutiny is threatened.

Finally, thousands of years later, when millions more engineers (and their great great great great grand-engineers) have successfully created a passable artificial human, the supervisors call down with one more new request:  Make sure that these artificial humans can create tiny artificial humans the size of a pinpoint that will grow, within the body of one of the robots, into large artificial humans who become wise through their interactions with any of dozens of environments.  Then imagine all the engineers quitting their jobs.

At the doctor's office, our question should not be "Why doesn't my body work perfectly?"  We shouldn't even complain that we sometimes have one or more of those ailments on the long checklist handed to us by the doctor's receptionist. A better question is "How is it possible that the actions of countless individual molecules self-organize into trillions of cells that result in emergent coordinated macroscopic behaviors such as the ability to walk into a doctor's office?"  Even more simply, the first question should always be "How is it possible that human bodies work at all, ever?"

Answer not forthcoming.

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The Upsides of Death

My family and I are currently working through a sudden death of someone central to all of us.  Anne Octavia Jay, my ex-wife, suddenly died.  For months, she was working through some medical issues that seemed surmountable, but then there was some extra-bad news. Then, about two weeks ago it started pouring bad news. This deluge included a sudden diagnosis of stage four cancer.  On Christmas Eve, she suffered cardiac arrest, which led to forty minutes of CPR. In the ICU we learned what kind of damage can happen to a person's brain after forty minutes of CPR.

On the day after Christmas, my two young adult daughters and I gathered around Anne in the ICU to say our goodbyes. I learned that for a patient who has suffered this sort of damage, the fact that she occasionally opened her eyes means nothing at all.   I learned what "comfort care" means. I am learning what it means to be the only surviving parent.  I am learning how hard it can be to lose a parent.  I am learning the awkwardness of being an ex-spouse who loses one's ex-spouse. What am I to be called?  An "ex-widower"? What is the proper name for a person in my position, someone who still cared deeply for my deceased ex but who feels awkward because our marriage fell apart and we divorced each other?

I don't really have an end in mind for this post. Mostly, I'm emoting, but I wanted to share that I was particularly right about one thing. I've always assumed that one can use most "bad" events as good experiences, not just as good learning experiences. We the survivors have learned a lot together.  I now know how to be a better friend to other people who have lost their loved ones.  I now know better how to appreciate the complexity of the human body.  We shouldn't be surprised when our bodies don't work; rather, we should be more more surprised that they ever actually work, given their mind-boggling complexity.  I've learned to appreciate the human heart.  Anne's heart faithfully beat for 59 years, which is a stunning achievement regularly exceeded by the heart-beating streaks of countless other people such as me (I'm in my 60's).

Mostly, I've learned to appreciate the importance of community.  I've seen many dozens of people come out of the woodwork to offer comfort and assistance for my daughters and me in many major and minor ways.  I now have increased respect for the way healthcare workers treat the family of dying patients. I've learned to appreciate straight talk from these professionals.  I've learned to appreciate the patience and kindness of all the people at the cremation service we are using.  We are surrounded by good-hearted people, including countless friends and relatives.  They are everywhere.  They are constantly bringing us flowers and soup and snacks and offers of ever-more help. It has been humbling.

We are in our George Bailey moment and people are running to our rescue in droves to tell us that we are not alone. It feels wonderful.  I know that the hard part will be when all of the adrenaline is gone and when my daughters and I will experience unrelenting emptiness.  That leads me to also appreciate the many friends and professionals who offer grief counseling individually and in groups.

Death in one's family can be one of the better ways to learn what it means to live a good life.  And to paraphrase Tim McGraw, I have better learned to live like I am dying.

I'll end with a Facebook tribute I created for Anne. More than anything else, she wanted to make sure her children were OK. This was her prime directive.  My daughters are working through this with me and I am strongly convinced that we will be ultimately be OK as we continue our life journeys stronger and wiser. Thanks for reading through to the end.

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Keira Bell’s Case is Unfreezing News Media that Have Been Reluctant to Discuss Rampant Transgendering of Teenaged Girls

The legal proceedings regarding Keira Bell are forcing the reluctant news media to begin discussing this serious issue regarding a vulnerable population of teenage girls being cajoled into harsh medical treatment for undiagnosed gender dysphoria. The silence of the news media has found synergy with bad science and dangerous medical practices.  Here's an excerpt from Quillette article titled "Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Conversation About Gender Dysphoria":

The policy reckoning we are now beginning to observe has been a long time coming. And Ms. Bell’s role is an important one, as trans activists have long sought to discredit or ignore the growing ranks of desisters—those, such as Ms. Bell, who once presented sincerely as trans, but later reverted to an identity consistent with their real biological sex. Even media that formerly had toed the progressive line on the issue of gender dysphoria are now finding the courage to run articles about vulnerable girls—many of them autistic, depressed, or socially insecure—who suffer regret after a period of trans self-identification.

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