Thursday, December 3, 2009

One of the little gifts from the Ottawa Heart Institute last week was a prescription for Nitroglycerin Patches. You stick one of these little suckers on at 8:00 in the morning and take it off at 8:00 in the evening. I often have to leave the house before eight but I of course I know that the magic is not in the “eight in the morning” but in keeping it on for only 12 hours.
Straight off the web: Nitroglycerin Patch is a nitrate. It works by relaxing (widening) blood vessels. Chest pain occurs when the heart needs more oxygen than it can get. Relaxing blood vessels allows blood to flow more easily. This reduces the heart's workload and the amount of oxygen needed by the heart. I have been lucky (at least I think lucky is what to call it) that I have had no chest pains but my two cardiologists thought that I should give the patches a go. As long as I did not get headaches or faint, they figured it was a good thing for me.
So the patch joins the emergency nitro spray , the beta blocker, that small aspirin, the statins, the multivitamin, the fish oil, the vitamin D, the psyllium and the …. I guess that’s it. I don’t pay for most of this, I am on a drug plan, but someone does. This is just a guess but I would imagine that the cost of my drugs is at least five bucks a day. That is in many ways modest, but it makes one think of what $5.00 a day , $35 a week, $150 a week could do for a family in Africa. Or where would I get $150 a month extra if I were unemployed.
And yet here I sit, warm and comfy, listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing Christmas carols and my only worry is to make sure that I take the patch off in time. If nothing else, I have leaned how lucky I am in all of this. Here we sit in North America, at the very top of the consumption pyramid, bickering about e-mails that maybe get us off the hook for global warming, spending the money of our future generations, and the biggest worry seems to be Kindle or Sony eReader.
I am no different. I am a consumer. I sure as anything want my expensive surgery. It is just all of this Christmas Music that is maybe getting to me …… I just wonder if the story of the Nativity took place in 2009 how Luke would describe the likes of me. I fear that I am more Herod than Wise Man....

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