It always amazed me to listen to my dad’s attitude toward doctors and hospitals. He had seven hernia surgeries, several of them for double hernias; major back surgery; carpel tunnel surgery; knee surgery; numerous skin cancers removed; arthritis; high blood pressure — and Dad was a borderline diabetic! He was in constant pain. One day I said, “Dad, don’t doctors and hospitals freak you out?”
He said, “Nope! They’re here to help me.” If we live in these mortal bodies, each one of us, individually, and as families, will encounter tribulation. It’s a promise. It’s a fact.
Of all the people I’ve ever known, I think my dad understood the problem we face better than most: In this world, we will have trouble. Dad was just an ordinary, normal guy whose life was filled with extraordinary problems.
For Dad, the trouble began at birth: The stock market crash of 1929! From there it was pretty much downhill all the way: He contracted whooping cough as a child and they literally overdosed Dad with radiation treatments — so much so that his skin turned black! The result? In his 50s Dad was diagnosed with leukemia — and there can be little doubt it was a byproduct of his radiation treatments.
Dad told of many other “episodes” in his life: A tricycle accident in San Francisco when he rode down a steep street, flipped the trike, and skidded on the pavement — chin first (leaving a pretty bad, permanent scar).
On another occasion he was running across his backyard at night and tripped over his bicycle handlebars — with one end jamming up under the skin, nearly puncturing a lung.
Later, in high school, he threw his back out while lifting weights, never had it checked out, and as a result suffered lifelong back problems — even major surgery in the late 1960s (accompanied by a staph infection resulting in the need to open him back up, clean up the wound, and redo the sutures). The bad news was that the surgery did not help him in the least. In fact, he then began to have hernia issues because he favored his back — eight hernias to be exact, seven of them being double hernias!
In addition to all this, Dad coped with Mom’s frequent bouts with pneumonia and pleurisy most of their married life; he lived with high blood pressure, was borderline diabetic, and had multiple skin cancers — all of which resulted in a forced disability retirement from the county at age 49!
Well, unfortunately, the problems didn’t end at retirement: Dad was broadsided on the Pala road just east of Temecula, CA, which put him on crutches for months. The next “event” was carpel tunnel syndrome which required surgery.
The worst was yet to come: Dad began manifesting clear signs of Alzheimer’s disease at age 56 and died ten years later, a few days short of his 67th birthday.
Now, was my dad some kind of irresponsible, lazy, low-life, boozing, womanizing bum who deserved all this? Far from it! You’d be hard-pressed to find a finer man anywhere. The truly amazing thing about Dad is I never heard him complain about how awful and unfair life is! I never heard him say “Why me?” or “I just want to quit!” Not once!
You see, my dad got a handle on this problem we face early on: In this world, we will have trouble — and so he was never caught off guard and he determined to get through it — no matter what.