The man who taught me how to live died today.
Most of my experience with the health care system, before my father’s health began to decline a few years ago, was through the movies, television, newspapers, magazines and the web.
On shows like “House,” ailments are exotic and are diagnosed and solved in 60 minutes, with a couple commercial interruptions. On TV talk shows, talking heads scrap over health care policy and try to score political points. What’s typically missing is the human element—how health care decisions actually affect flesh-and-blood people.
Sitting in a dimly-lit room in the ICU of Rochester General Hospital, in Rochester, NY, with my ailing 88-year-old father, I soon came to realize I wasn’t in a scripted episode that was going to end happily. And politics and rhetoric were far from my mind.
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