Pain Prophets

Samples of so-called palliative care designed to improve the quality of an older patient's life: "You're never going to be without pain, " says the pain specialist to my father. This verbal jab is delivered after several epidural injections into his spine, to relieve the pain from vertebrae fractures. The website advertising the practice has a poem from Emily Dickinson, intended to emphasize how empathic the doctor is:

Pain has an element of blank/It cannot recollect/When it began, or if there was/A time when it was not.


From another medical professional, several days later: "Because you have osteoporosis, you will keep breaking your back," said the physician's assistant to my father after an examination. This practice's website has lovely photos of Italy's Cinqueterra mountains as a backdrop, and plays classical music when you click, anywhere.



Seven hundred miles north, listening to the story of how my father was up all night with back pain, I make semi-frantic calls to any physician who has made the mistake of calling me on his personal cell phone. I sweet-talk receptionists who have names like 'Ginger' and 'Dottie' and schedule appointments for my 88 year-old mother to take my nearly 91 year-old father for more medical treatment.

Today, my Dad will see his cardiologist, a hail-and-hearty German doctor who tends to be more positive-minded with my father, and, later, an internist who took care of him--twice--in the hospital. We hope he has more sense than the classical musician doctors.

I sit down and eat a bowl of left-over risotto, with no thought of the calories there-in, and play Joni Mitchell on the piano, the song 'Willy' (he is my son, he is my father).