The Veterans Administration

A reader (gosh! someone actually READ this! There is an echo after all!) asked me to write a little more about my background. Due warning, Dear Reader - this could backfire on you!

After sixteen very happy years in the Navy, I started having some problems with my health. After a year or so of misdiagnoses (and accusations of malingering, which bothers me to this day) a rheumatologist at Bethesda Naval Hospital told me I had lupus. Needless to say, the Navy booted me out with all due speed. Since lupus is an autoimmune disease in which one's immune system attacks normal tissue in the body, about a year after that one of the valves in my heart failed, with necessitated its replacement.

(My valve is made of titanium and is warranted against failure for 150 years, which makes me wonder if I should leave it to someone in my will.)

A series of other problems with my health, which are far too boring to go into, left me with balance problems, trouble walking any further than 200 feet or so unassisted, and the requirement that I go to the VA every other week or so to have my blood tested for what's called a protime, which is a fancy way of saying how thick or thin my blood is, which is critical, it seems, for the efficient performance of the valve.

In the night silence when I'm drifting away to sleep, I can hear the valve in my heart ticking.

I started going to physical therapy because when walking into a local veterinarian's office this past June, I tripped over a loose carpet and landed with all of my considerable weight on my left knee, which tore the anterior cruciate ligament and ended up hemorrhaging into my leg. (I also have bleeding problems because I take a blood thinner, again to protect the artificial valve.) I'm still having residual problems with that knee buckling when I least expect it, so the therapist is going to try to address my balance issues and strengthen the knee at the same time. I'm hoping that when all is said and done I'll be able to get around without the walker.

Still, all in all, I shouldn't complain. Before the walker, there was the wheelchair... two years of which I'd rather forget.

Despite all this, I'm not doing too bad. So far, the only body parts I've lost were a valve in my heart and one of my eyes (I'm blind in my right eye from a benign tumor that presses on the optic nerve.) In my three months of wartime experience in the Persian Gulf, I didn't get blown up or shot at. Mostly the ship I was on ferried supplies and ammo to the guys on the front lines. My war didn't even last six months; my war was over in a matter of weeks. I never saw any of my friends get wounded or die. I never saw the result of a suicide bomber, other than what I and everyone else in the world saw on TV as a result of 9/11.

I consider myself very lucky indeed.

There - I think that's enough ranting for one day!