Working Together for Common Good
At age 82, having survived a six-hour open heart operation and been equipped with a pig’s valve to replace a worn-out aortic valve, I am one of the world’s lucky people.
For the second time, cardiac surgeons at Hoag Hospital sliced through my chest and heart and implanted a pig’s valve to replace a worn-out aortic valve. The last aortic valve lasted 13 years, and it allowed me to skipper three sailing boats back from Honolulu following the Trans Pacific Yacht Race.
After Christmas 1995, my heart began to give signs of wear that I mistook for the heavy breathing of asthma that I had when I was younger. I complained by phone to my doctor and was given an appointment within an hour. She immediately sent me to a cardiologist who had me operated on the following day.
Strong drugs knocked me out, and I don’t remember anything about the surgery. I woke up in a private room in the intensive care unit. Nurses were as close as a button on my bed. I was not in pain.
Lying there in a warm hospital bed, I thought of the old people (and young ones too) I had seen pushing a shopping cart filled with their belongings or wearing a backpack and sleeping on park benches or under stairways or bushes.
How many of them needed medical help? Then I thought of eating dinner at home and watching on television the hordes of homeless people walking down dirt and muddy roads in Bosnia, Croatia, San Salvador, Rwanda, India and many places more.
I started paying into Social Security in 1937. My primary care physician said the operation and the hospital care probably cost more than $100,000. But it is countless individuals who provided their time, work, education and intelligence into building a system that was able to keep me alive.
When people cooperate and work together, they create a world that solves incredible problems. I look around me and can hardly believe the wonderful things that are the collective inventions of my fellow human beings.
Our two-legged ancestors have been around for millions of years. They arrived in various sizes and colors. Modern medicine owes its history and its skill to the curiosity, hard work and education of our colleagues and our ancestors.
When human beings work together and make cooperative use of their constructive inventions, they produce marvelous things. Since my life began, there has been the extensive development of the telephone, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, X-ray machines, television.
I am one of the lucky humans who is alive today because doctors around the world profited from knowledge and learning.
