Medical Check-In

I have healthcare through WVU Hospitals. I see a general practitioner annually, a cardiologist, dermatologist and allergist usually twice a year, and I have an annual check-in with a Medicare doctor. They GP, cardiologist and Medicare doctor  were scheduled for this month, but the general practitioner was postponed and they asked me to do an online with the Medicare doctor. I've seen the same Medicare doctor for four years, a soft-spoken Italian woman. This year they told me she was on leave and gave me a physician's assistant. There were complicated instructions involving an app on my phone, but they relented somewhat and said I could do it on a laptop. The app on the laptop wanted permission to go into all the other apps on my desktop and change them, so no. The phone app was better, but then there was a WVU app on top of that that wanted to access everything on my phone. When I clicked "No" it said I couldn't use it, so I said "Yes."' Later, I sent a note to WVU complaining.

The PA was an older woman  (I checked. Her degree was from 1979, so maybe sixty). She had issues with the technology. They always ask the same questions "Do you have rugs or rickety stairs?" "Do you have a bar in your bathtub to hold on to?" "Are you afraid in your house?" No, I'm afraid out of my house these days. They test your memory, and ask if you are depressed. "I'm a 70-year old gay man living in West Virgina," I said. "Of course I'm depressed." I said that.

I told her about being sick all of January after spending a glorious week running around Manhattan at the end of December. Is it possible I had a mild case of COVID-19? Mild, like not going out of the house for ten days, then no more than an hour a day for the next ten, not being well until the end of February. She told me there is a test, but we don't have it, and if you had it before, we don't know if you can get it again. The regular test for the virus would show if you had it, but you don't qualify for the test.

Meanwhile, our Governor wants to partly reopen the state this week. Maybe outdoor dining if separated from others (and if it ever stops raining) and haircuts. Our county is not included, because we are considered a "hotspot" in the state with 107 confirmed cases. My constituents are already asking City Council here in Morgantown to block off a lane on certain streets to add space for cafés on the expanded sidewalk. And Delegate Evan Hansen, from our district, and a scientist by training, points out that, although the state has recorded fifty deaths from COVID-19, statistics show that deaths in the state since the first of the year are running 1,600 above what one might expect, with most of the "excess deaths" in March and April. So maybe the pandemic is worse here than people think. Certainly everyone should be tested, and everyone should be covered by healthcare, not just rich people or people who are here "legally." People who lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance must be covered. You can't stop a pandemic if there is anyone excluded from treatment. Anyone.

Joe and I have still been going to the grocery store twice a week. All but one worker at our local Kroger is masked, but the vendors who come in to stock the shelves are typically not, and many of the customers are not masked, especially the younger ones. With pressure from the state and federal government to reopen quickly, I fear going out in the future will be terrifying. Even our city manager's office has proposed reopening. There's a meeting tonight (Tuesday) and I know some of us will object to opening city offices too soon.

In addition to my OLLI class and City Council, I've been reading a lot, five books at a time. I'm reading about the music from the Brill Building in the 1960s (my next class), a haunting collection of short stories from Carol Shields, purchased at a library sale in New Vienna, Ohio on my trip to Clinton County in December of 2018, a Pulitzer-winning book about people who are evicted, and how and why that happens. I'm reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' book We Had Eight Years, a collection of his writings during the Obama presidency with new commentaries, and Vikram Seth's more than 1500 page novel about India in 1951 and 1952, which I'm reading for the third time, A Suitable Boy. Coates attended my high school, briefly, I think, and twenty-five years after I graduated.

I read Morgantown's Dominion-Post and Charleston's Gazette-Mail every day, and Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times. We get Consumer Reports and Rolling Stone for me, and The New Yorker and The Economist for Joe. Joe has stopped reading news for the most part. It makes him too anxious. I have to read about the virus in New York City and the politics in Washington in short doses to keep from losing my mind completely.

I'm traveling in my dreams. Last night, I told the bus driver parked on 6th Street by the Los Angeles County Art Museum that I wouldn't be going on the trip to New York because I had been there with Joe in December, and last year with my mother and sister. I had a memory in the dream of visiting some elderly relative in The Bronx in an apartment house on a hill. I was, in reality, in New York with Joe in December, and in New York with my mother and sister (and nephew) not last summer, but in 2002. I haven't had relatives in the Bronx since the 1950s. That scene was filched from another dream. My friend and classmate (second to eighth grade) Rodger Kamenetz writes about dreams. Maybe I should ask him what this means.

The PA at WVU was only worried that I get up to pee five or six times during the night. She doesn't think it's heart failure because I run several days a week, and that seems to be getting better. Maybe it's kidney failure or prostate problems. She wants tests for all of those. The cardiologist told me that  my heart works at 40% of what it should do. My father died of kidney failure (refusing dialysis) when he was a year and a half younger than I am now. And Medicare won't cover a prostate test.

So, the future doesn't look bright. My generation had too many people to start out with. They sent some of us to Vietnam to reduce our numbers, ignored AIDS for many years to kill off those of us who are gay men, and now that we are old, we are expendable so that the economy can reopen. Without the possibility of contracting or contracting again COVID-19, I still have plenty of medical issues that could end my life. I was able to answer most of the questions in a good way. I generally remember to take my meds, I can still keep track of money, carry grocery bags, remember most things, cook, clean (although I pointed out that we generally don't). I don't fall or feel dizzy. My goal now is to keep it all going as long as possible. I said the other day "If I can have ten more years of decent health, I'll be happy." Then I remembered that one of my grandmother's friends said that sitting around the lake in her Florida condo development more than fifty years ago. I guess that's where I am now.

5777

If the Jewish calendar were more correct, Rosh Hashana would have been September 4 and 5, instead of October 3 and 4. That would have nixed our early August trip to California, but it would mean all the holidays would have been in September, and already over. Meanwhile, Osher Life-Long Learning, where both Joe and I are teaching six-week classes, started September 26. And I've been involved in some election campaigns, trying to attend an almost daily run of candidate events. I am on the Morgantown Library Commission, which meets October 19. I've been to one meeting, where they handed me a 96-page handbook, which I should have read by now.  I won't make my monthly trek to another county this month- no time. For Rosh Hashana, I agreed to chant haftarah, about three pages, in Hebrew. I'm chanting Torah at Yom Kippur, using a special holiday melody, 19 verses, mostly from memory, as the text has no notes, no vowels and no punctuation.

This year, I looked at Rosh Hashana as more of a burden, an inconvenience, getting in the way of my preparation for my class, called "The Great Hits of 1962," interfering with my social life and my desire to be something of a political player. I feel like this last year has been a separation from the temple and Rabbi Joe's shadow, making my own friends outside that circle, finding other things to do and places to go. Still, I agreed to read on the holidays, because no one else can do this, except Joe, and he is already overwhelmed.

Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashana day. I was prepared in my one good suit. I helped Joe with the early childrens' service before the regular one. The day was sunny and warm. Joe spoke beautifully, as he always does, I chanted well, the sanctuary was full of friendly faces. We threw our sins, in the form of bread, off the rail-trail bridge over Deckers Creek, then twenty of us went out for pizza.

Something happened during services. I saw the faces of my parents and grandparents greet me, and, as if I were dying, my whole life flashed by. I was comforted, not threatened in any way. I felt the ancestors were stopping by for a visit, and I saw good things from the past.

 I will be sixty-seven later this month. When I read the paper, I look at the obituaries. It's rare for me to know someone in Morgantown, but I count how many of the people listed are younger than I am. A lot. Sometimes I feel that I can look back at my life from a high mountain I've been climbing for the last sixty-seven years. I worry about falling off the mountain if I look back for too long. Better to look ahead to the fog-covered peak in front of me and keep going.

As we were leaving Los Angeles, in mid-August, I found out about the death two years ago of Danny Kolker, one of my first friends there in 1984. My high-school-and-after friend Darryl Ruder died from cancer earlier this year. I hadn't seen him in decades, but he friended me on Facebook, where he rarely posted. His children "tagged" him in a Facebook post after he died, which is how I found out. They told me he had spoken to  them about me.

In my class today (October 6) I will show a clip from "West Side Story," which won Best Picture and lots of other awards at The Academy Awards in 1962. I remember, maybe not accurately, how that movie affected me my overly sensitive twelve year old self.  I had never seen such sexuality, beautiful dancing, handsome men, some as dark as I was. This week, I cried watching George Chakiris and Rita Moreno dancing to "America," overwhelmed by the beauty of it, and by the passage of more than fifty years.I think about my spiritual ancestors, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim, all furiously creative gay Jews. Chakiris, Moreno and Sondheim are still with us, now in their eighties. I wonder how they feel looking back down the mountain they have climbed.

I've cried a lot lately, not just for my friends who have died, or for my advancing age and rapidly decaying body. Not to worry: my tests are good, and I'm in better shape than many men my age. I can see how things are going generally, and I understand the rules about end of life. I'm more likely to cry for art than real life: watching a scene from "West Side Story," reading from Vikram Seth's now thirty-year old novel in verse "The Golden Gate," hearing a perfect sermon from my husband,The Rabbi, or even listening to the new Radiohead album, "A Moon-Shaped Pool," as I am while writing this.

I guess I did what I was supposed to on Rosh Hashana, after all, examining my life, expressing gratitude to God for what I have and what I've accomplished, and vowing to keep going and do better in the future.

I wish my few readers a happy and healthy 5777