responsibility

Letter to the editor

" Even if medical education and practice in the United States were more sensibly financed, the need for elder care would be overwhelming. There are about 7,300 doctors board certified in geriatrics in the country, and currently about 57.8 million Americans over 65. Each geriatrician can care for about 700 patients. Do the math: Most seniors do not get any geriatric care at all."

Herbert Rakatansky

My mother turned 61 last week and my father turns 73 in a few months. Most of our phone calls are about new joint pains, blood pressure logs, lab values shrouded in the mystery of acronyms that only a select few humans have been taught to decipher. 

I feel like I've been trying to distract myself with my own mundane problems to avoid confrontation with the fact that we all do age, and that my parents are getting older, and that everything is changing with every moment.

A lot of my friends in medical school find newborn nursery more exciting than cognitive aging or geriatric psychiatry. But isn't it the ultimate form of respect, to care for the people that gave us the opportunity to live our lives?

Isn't it because of women like Jane Goodall and Jane Fonda that I can wear Mary Janes to the lab and pipette antibodies onto miniscule slivers of mouse brain and work on a gene therapeutic

Their stories and their lives are what make us, us

And it is the ultimate honor 

It should be 

And I should stop running away from reality 

And realize that time moves

And people age

And it's okay