It’s anecdotal, but I think it illustrates an important principle in 2020, that of self-ownership.
Back in February, my dad was supposed to have surgery to repair torn muscle in his shoulder. As he’s getting on in years, there were some concerns raised during his pre-surgery physical regarding his heart. He was told that his heart was not strong enough to survive being under anesthesia, so his procedure was delayed and he was given medicine to alleviate some of his symptoms and allow his heart to strengthen (I’m simplifying, of course; he was on several different medicines with all kinds of interconnected side-effects, but tl:dr).
Anyway, he was sent off with this new medicine. After each successive dose he felt worse until, after his third dose, he told my mother that he needed to go to the hospital because something was very wrong. Over the next several days in the ICU, they estimate that he had several heart attacks and mini-strokes, as well as experiencing sleep apnea-like symptoms that stopped his breathing and heart numerous times each night. After discontinuing his new meds, he began to improve, and all of the tests were supposedly negative, so they sent him home. After about 15 minutes at home, he had a stroke. The timing was lucky; he was planning to take a shower and have a nap, and my mom was going to run some errands and pick up meds and would have been out of the house. As it was, she was there and they got him to the hospital in time to administer tPA meds and minimize the damage. After another three days in the hospital they were again pretty sure he’d be okay and they sent him home. They then took a wait-and-check-in-a-few-months approach to rescheduling the shoulder surgery that started the whole odyssey.
Fast forward several months, and we now have a four-way battle going on; in one corner are the anesthesiologist and cardiologist who do not want to allow the surgery to take place. In the other, my dad and the surgeon. At issue; the cardio and sleep docs still don’t think his heart can take it, and argue that he hasn’t been on his new meds long enough for there to have been enough benefit, and the surgeon doesn’t think there’ll be enough good muscle to save if they wait much longer. So it’s 2-to-1 for the experts and my dad, who only even kinda gets a vote because he is who they’re arguing about. Buncha back and forth and it’s left with a relocation from an outpatient surgery clinic to a hospital, and there are conversations up until 8pm the night before the surgery with everyone voicing their various misgivings. My dad and the surgeon remain adamant that they will proceed, as they both think that quality of life matters. If he can get a few more years with a bad ticker and one functioning arm that’s one thing, but my father’s plan is to survive the surgery and live many many more years with two functioning arms. Remember; they would have delayed until it wasn’t even worth doing the surgery.
He did fine. Absolutely fine. In fact, they all just kinda shrugged afterward and said it was no big deal, just cutting on an old wrinkly guy. Big surprise, the experts that urged caution above all, while there were definitely chances of a negative outcome, neglected to acknowledge that risk is part of a life lived and there are many facets to every decision. That, to me, is a microcosm of the world in 2020; a few experts with narrow perspective have been allowed to essentially set policy. Not only that, but they have set policy based on the worst-case fever dream of someone who has been crashingly wrong in every gloom-and-doom prediction he’s made, and there have been many. His name is Neil Ferguson, look him up.
