Skip to main content

Impatience

I will be getting my right knee replaced in thirteen days. I have met with the surgeon to discuss the surgery; met with his assistant to go over my pre-operative steps; discussed with a hospital nurse which of my medications to stop before my surgery and when.  My wife scheduled her Family Medical Leave months ago.

But I have life to get through before then. Final exams occur next week. I have a couple more class meetings before then. I'm still meeting with students for office hours and by appointments.

The cortisone shots that have allowed me to function (walk without pain on flat surfaces but still needing the elevator to avoid painful stairs) are wearing off and I can't have any more this close to surgery. So I am beginning to limp. I think I can make it through final exams without using a cane.


I have good health care through my employer. I am affluent enough to pay for the co-pays. Why do I merit these when so many of my fellow citizens don't?


Why does our economic status determine our freedom from physical pain? Why is that our default moral choice? What noble principle requires us to treat people better or worse based on their wealth?


I have lived with these questions for decades. I felt as if under Obama and Biden we were moving toward a better society with respect to health care with agonizingly small baby steps. Trump has come down hard on treating the wealthy better and the poor miserably.

So impatient.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more