We should expect health care in our old age

Getting old is serious business. Rochester is booming off the boomers. I was fortunate enough to pay a visit to the Mayo Clinic last week and see a man about my bum.

The Gonda Building gleams in art deco white marble packed several stories high with the world’s top medical specialists who don’t work cheap. The money coursing through the construction zone of a downtown dedicated to medicine boggles the mind. If you can’t own the Gonda Building, it would be nice at least to own that nearby Italian restaurant for just a week.

Modern medicine has been good for Rochester, which has doubled in population to 120,000 over the past half century. It has become a destination for the world from an unlikely rural setting. If they can’t do it at Mayo, the funeral home is ready to assist.

I was there hoping for someone to stick a probe up my back end and freeze out the prostate cancer that has been nagging me for a couple years. It appears I arrived at the right place at just about the right time after a journey down a winding road.

The urologists from Spencer had been watching my PSA levels for years, and in 2023 diagnosed me with cancer. It appeared that I would go through a series of 28 radiation treatments at Spencer, where the radiation oncologist is quite a doctor himself but who lacks all the devices in the tool box.

A friend suggested that I might avoid the radiation regimen by consulting his doctor in California who could treat me with a minimally-invasive outpatient procedure. It’s called focal therapy, and it involves freezing the cancerous tumor. After-care follow-up requirements were such that California appeared impractical. So I found a doctor in Rochester, and of course he wants to ream me for another biopsy to make sure I am right for cryoablation. Grin and bear it, soldier. I should know more by the end of August.

The cancer has been arrested by knocking out my testosterone, a chemical castration, with a shot last July. I can think of a couple ways to have more fun, like mixing it up with Hulk Hogan or working in the blood-drying room of a packinghouse — you sweat plenty either way. It buys me time to shop around for the best trick to cheat death temporarily. Please excuse me while I have a good menopausal rage/cry.

Meantime, all the testing for cancer found me with an enlarged aorta. That was fixed in February with stents installed at the University of Iowa Hospital by Dr. Nanette Reed. She was trained as a surgeon at Mayo. No monkeying around. A sure hand and acute mind. Dr. Sabrina Martinez of Storm Lake tracks me to make sure I don’t fall off the treadmill.

I have experienced the medical complex in the most intimate of ways the past couple years. Dr. Edward Uchio out in California kept me off the ledge by assuring me that I was not going to die of prostate cancer. He knew because he did the tests to convince the both of us.

I’ll be fine until they find something else.

This because of doctors and nurses who are committed to their profession as a cause. Martinez and Reed know 16-hour workdays well. Uchio called to consult with me on a Sunday night. They earn it.

They are having their legs cut out by a bunch of weirdos running the government. RFK2 thinks you can cure yourself by eating right. Broccoli does not cure prostate cancer. Neither does weed. Bob Marley died of cancer. There should be more research on diet and lifestyle. There should be more research on environmental exposures. They cut the funding. Cancer trials stop when the cash doesn’t flow through the National Institutes of Health. Slashing Medicaid will not make rural health care more attractive for doctors or patients. There is a terrible shortage of providers. Anybody knows it can take months to see a doctor.

The University of Iowa lives off Medicaid and Medicare payments. I am alive because of it — which could be an argument for defunding, but what about your mother? Iowa City is the place to go if you are an average schmoe about to have a cardio catastrophe like me. How do you make up for $100 million in lost NIH annual funding? Have a nice wave on football Saturdays for the kids on Medicaid-subsidized Hawk-I insurance getting cancer treatment, because they might not make it to the end of the season. They bear the brunt of this aimless zeal to destroy the health safety net.

The doctor at Mayo told me my procedure will be covered by Medicare. It will be hideously expensive because everything about medicine is. Mayo cashes in on patients wearing burkhas or new Stetson 10-gallon hats. Those wearing bib overalls on a pension did not pay for the Gonda Building. Thank goodness it’s there full of doctors willing to see the likes of me, for now. If you paid into Social Security since age 14 you earned healthcare in Iowa City or Rochester that you can’t otherwise get because you are where you are. That deal is being undone.