September 6, 2008 8:21 AM

 

Harvest Morning

It's looking gorgeous out there this morning, and we have lots of fruit to pick and food to eat and great music to hear--so come on up!

 

More Water-Retention Dream Life:

This week, I dreamt I was asked to host a last minute interview between Barbara Walters and Ben Stein. Thirty seconds before air time, Barbara and I were still trying to decide what the show was going to be about, and Ben Stein was no help at all. We decided to do a "life path" piece where I asked Barbara, (who was somehow an old friend), and Ben where they saw themselves as young people, and if they had taken careful steps to become what they were, or whether it was all just serendipitous. The live, pool-side audience didn't seem too interested, and before the show completely bombed, I was called off to the bathroom at precisely 3:33 AM. I will admit to a certain amount of superstition about clock times. 9:11 AM and 9:11 PM make me pause, but 3:33 in the morning seemed weirdly symbolic after a three way "life path" interview dream.

I also had a dream that the family and I were in a travel office somewhere and an Ibex happened to get trapped inside the waiting room with us. It was a beautiful animal, but it kept menacing us with its pointy horns, and my attempts to gently pat it on its rear, with the broadside of the pitchfork I was holding, didn't do any good, so when it lunged at me, I had to end its life. It was 4:11 AM when I woke up.

 

Marcus Welby

I've had some great doctors in my life. When I was clobbered with a golf ball line drive at 14, saintly old Charles Petty, oral surgeon, opened his office for me on a Saturday and stitched me up. My own Loma Linda doctor, Sonny Lee, is a farm fan and he is a GREAT doctor. When I was a kid, my dad actually walked me over to Dr. Nebeker's house and he diagnosed a hernia on a Tuesday night, with no Blue Shield and no waiting room.

The strange thing, though, about the world of medicine these days is that it has become so specialized and so pressured for time, that I think the average health care seeker should spend about three hours on Google prior to any doctor visit. An example: some years ago, I thought I had broken my foot. It was so painful. In retrospect, this malady went back to college, when my feet would get sore for no reason. Well, one weekend about five years ago, it was so painful that I went down to an urgent care and had someone look at it. The doctor looked at my foot, x-rayed it, concluded it was a "soft tissue" issue and told me to get some Alleve. He asked me about my blood pressure medication and hesitated for a moment, but said nothing. Well, he was on to something, but he didn't pursue it. When I got on Google and self-diagnosed myself, Dr. Lee looked at my foot and confirmed my judgment, "yes, you have Gout." The diuretics for high blood pressure can sometimes aggravate this condition. Most of the drugs specifically for gout have some weird potential liver side-effects, so I opted for a holistic thing--dried cherries and baked potatoes. They work.

The point is: the Urgent Care doctor was just about to make this diagnosis, but he knew less, effectively, than I did about the matter. Sometimes the presumption that a doctor knows what he's doing keeps us from suggesting a diagnosis.

Questions are the answer, I guess.

And sometimes cherries and potatoes are too.

 

 

More of the Farm Journal -- September 4, 2008