Leaning against the wall at the check-in desk

After nine dutiful years of keeping faith with cardiologist appointments, I find myself in limbo.

Visiting a cardiologist there these days, it seems, you are likely to leave with a prescription for one expensive test or another, performed by an expensive machine. Much of this testing is important to the middle-aged, who I deduce from a scan of the waiting room seem to be the chief customers.

Trouble is, I am one of their success stories, still walking about, haltingly, at 92. And with needs now that belong to old age.

What I don’t need at present is a Nuclear Stress Test. I already get a distinct sense of my limitations under stress as I climb the straight-up, take-noprisoners stairs in my 200year-old house. Both of us arrive at the top, still functional, though in my case short of breath.

Visiting my doctor at 92, what I’m looking for is comfort. A bench in that long hall upon which to catch my breath before attempting the next long hall. But neither hall is graced with side rails to grab at with a faltering step; neither has a floor that looks like it might go easy on a person hit with a sudden dizzy spell.

At the outpost where my doctor waits, there is no water fountain. For that you must locate the restrooms, up front near the elevators.

“Please do not lean against the wall,” as someone previous to you in line chooses to argue some of the finer points on his bill at the check-in desk. Not leaning indeed, ahead of me the last time in line was a customer holding it together by gripping his walker. Not leaning indeed, but where are the chairs? Unfortunately, they remain tantalizingly near but still yards across the hall, beyond easy reach.

And when I do get called in, the examining table, which fills one side of the small room, can seem a climb up Pike’s Peak to this joint-weary arthritic.

In short, what I need in my unexpected extra years on this Earth is an understanding environment, a sympathetic doctor, one who perhaps has experienced at least a whiff of that chill wind named mortality. But with today’s myriad opportunities to innovate and practice technological advances – and a Medicare system willing to pay for them – that’s a rare bird to find these days in most medical practices.

Length of life is certainly the goal, but any such as myself who have reached their late eighties and nineties will tell you is that the time left becomes not as important as the comfort and ease with which one may be allowed to enjoy it.

But relief may be coming. Those ubiquitous Baby Boomers, who are now entering their sunset years – with all the joys and some unwelcome surprises that will hold — their numbers will demand it. And one day not too far off, when the newfangled machines have become a given, no longer a golden novelty, ho hum ordinary, that needed bench, that well-placed water fountain may come to mind. And practitioners may recall that theirs is a healing and comforting profession, as well as a diagnosing one.

They may even begin thinking of the stress levels that may prevail in a health care situation where tests and technology override compassion.