A lady invited me out to eat with her and some friends, and I said okay even though I'm not big on ladies luncheons. There was no use for us all to drive separately, so a woman picked me and two other women up, and another car full of ladies would meet us at the restaurant.

On the drive down to the restaurant, the driver of our car was talking about having had a heart attack. As a nurse, I can't resist aking questions. What symptoms did you have, I asked. She said none of the left arm pain or other expected symptoms; she had what she thought was really bad indigestion and broke out in a cold sweat. She went to the ER because the heartburn wouldn't go away. Blood tests and EKG showed she'd had a heart attack. (If blood is drawn for cardiac enzyme tests in a narrow range of time, it is proof that heart damage has occurred.

Now she has stents in her coronary blood vessels to hold them open and improve blood flow. That's pretty serious.
Then the woman sitting in the passenger seat said she has dialysis three times a week. She has an IV implant in her chest feeding into her heart where the machine hooks up, and for four hours at a time, she sits and lets the machine "wash" her blood. I ask what symptoms she had to know she had kidney disease. She had none. (Kidney disease is a sneaky disease. You can be in end stage renal disease, ESRD, and not know it.) A doctor drew a panel of blood tests and found her problem. She says she naps and reads and bides her time for those four hours--it's just something you have to do to stay alive.

A kidney, an organ smaller than a fist, can do what bulky machinery has to do. The thought of your blood being pumped outside of your body, run through the filtering mechanisms and pumped back in in a continuous cycle is amazing isn't it?

The elderly lady sitting next to me says she just had her IV implant taken out after four and a half years of intermittent chemotherapy. She had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She said the worst thing was losing her hair. She unsnapped her blouse and proudly showed me her scar, which surprised all medical personnel by how neatly it had healed, and I agreed with her her surgeon had done a great job. But nodes had kept coming up so she has been in chemo off and on for years till recently.

Well, I had been meaning to kvetch and moan about my trick knee and being stove up since I fell in October, but hearing those stories shut me up and felt like an amateur next to those ladies and would have sounded whiney to complain, so I didn't. These ladies were so stoic and accepting of their fates.

At the restaurant, a lady sitting across the table from me was nervous and chatty--she went to the restroom and her sister said You'll have to overlook her--she's been like this ever since her house burned and she had that liver transplant. (Or she may have had the transplant first and house burned after, I don't remember the exact sequence of events.) Anyhoo, it was a day when it was brought home to me other people can be a lot worse off than you think YOU are. It was worth going if for nothing but that.

susil