Vet, pharmacist say, ‘not a doctor.’ So where can senior find help, with so few docs?

Carrying my friend’s old tabby in a screened carrier, I descended just one of three front steps and tumbled. The fall barely bruised my leg. But by reaching out to steady me, my elder companion scraped both her arms on the door screen, leaving caterpillared scratches and bloody bruises.

Still, her 20-year-old kitty needed a long-delayed vaccination from Jill, a nearby veterinarian. We drove there and watched the young woman make quick work of the shot. Then she cradled my friend’s arms in her gloved hands.

“Ma’am, this might get infected,” she said. “You need some care.”

From whom, we wondered. I recalled a Saturday midnight visit more than a decade earlier to a jammed University of Kansas Hospital emergency room, during which my desperately ill wife and I waited seven hours. We reached an end point of exhaustion as an aide there pleaded with us to stay and wait for care. He seemed almost desperate to help us. We stayed, and at last got help that kept my wife alive for a decade longer.

As for using my own overworked family doctor to help my friend with the scraped arm, she already has trouble keeping up with heavy patient flow — not to say difficulty offering patients more than a single annual visit. If not an emergency room or my family doctor, then where else could we go for the injury to my friend’s arm? Could this young veterinarian help us?

“I’m not a doctor,” she said. “I’m a vet. I’m not allowed.”

Yet she helped. She wrote us a list of medications and quick-use dressings costing about $20 that could stop an infection. My friend and I bought them and, together, applied them. Still uneasy the next day, we went to a Price Chopper pharmacy and found Paul on duty. Could he help?

“I’m not a doctor,” he echoed the veterinarian. “I can’t treat you, but I can walk you through it.”

He added another $10 for bandages and moved us to a little alcove. Then he did walk us through the procedure. It’s weeks later now and my friend’s arms are almost healed.

Still, I wonder why I can offer my friend unskilled medical help, while far better-qualified veterinarians and pharmacists cannot. That is dumb, given that in America, it’s often hard, and tricky, to get medical appointments. Because of symptoms like dizziness, and because I am 90 years old, I very much want to see a geriatrician, a specialist in elder care. I called their office in spring 2024. Turned out I was already way late.

“I’ll put you on the list, but please understand,” said the secretary. “We will be taking on no new patients before Jan. 1, 2025. At that time we will start working on those signed up in 2024. Already more than 100 patients will be on the rolls ahead of you.”

It was a crisp and honest summation of my, and other elders’, predicaments during these busy physician days. My family doctor sometimes gets me good care through sub-specialists — few actual doctors, but nonetheless smart people. Within three months, Dave, a physical therapist in Overland Park, cured my leaky gut problem. Another therapist there, Josh, helped me work on dizziness with strange exercises like walking while wagging my head side to side and up and down, trying to awaken balancing mechanisms of my inner ears.

Nothing in all that therapy has been more fun than his teaching of the complex karaoke step, which originated in Japan. Nowadays in my living room I tune up my Amazon Echo Dot and ask Alexa to play the “Vienna Waltz.” I swing my right foot behind the other and across, then just the opposite with the left, then the first foot back, always to that fabulous rhythm. It makes me dizzy but each run-through seems to straighten me up a little.

Sometimes the greatest help comes from therapists who know the system. Kaitlynn, a physician’s assistant at an Overland Park urology clinic, prescribed me the drug Gemtesa for a urinary condition. Thanks to U. S. government drug patent laws that make American drug prices the world’s highest, a monthly prescription for a single pill per day costs $511 — another of our state and federal governments’ countless giveaways to the very rich.

ProPublica reports that the anti-cancer drug Revlimid is one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products of all time, with total sales of more than $100 billion. It’s priced at nearly $1,000 for each daily pill, though that capsule costs just 25 cents to make. Since I am a U.S. Army veteran, Kaitlynn navigated the system and acquired Gemtesa for me at a fraction of list price. Here’s a line I hope never to hear from my doctor:

“So you feel bad? Well, man, what do you expect? You’re 90 years old!”

However diminished, I enjoy this life. What I want is a physician who — regardless of my age — will go after my ailment like a bulldog stalking a burglar, seize him by the leg and shake till he yelps. I want to die of natural causes, not corporate greed or medical indifference.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.