Any twit can handle a crisis.

Spending eight hours a day, five days a week listening to and transcribing dictated medical reports can twist your brain in odd ways.

For instance, we’ve probably all heard horror stories about catastrophic events in other people’s lives--car crashes, cancer diagnoses, disappearing children, stock market downturns, election of a black guy to the presidency, etc.--and said to ourselves, “there, but for the grace of God,” and so on.

But in the immortal words of Flo Capp, “Any twit can handle a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that whacks you.” (Or something like that--tried to Google it, came up with a lot of variations on the same theme.)

My own day-to-day living hasn’t particularly whacked me lately--I’ve been lucky in that regard--but still every day I hear stories of people surviving day-to-day stuff that WOULD whack me, if I had to endure it.

It’s not the crises that get my attention. Instead, it is the “little stuff.”

I transcribe mostly acute care reports, hospital stuff--admissions and operations, etc. Many, if not most people admitted to hospitals these days are in pretty bad straits, health-wise, already, or their care would have been handled on an outpatient basis, and damned near anything can be handled on an outpatient basis, these days. That means every day I hear the “worst,” not the “everyday.”

Sometimes it seems, though, that the "everyday" has become the "worst."

Even if the health problems, the diseases or acute events or whatever brought the people to the hospital didn’t get my attention, the details of their everyday lives would. Seems like every patient, every PERSON, is on a dozen or more medications and supplements. Imaginative guy that I am, I envision these poor people imprisoned in a daily routine of taking their heart medicines and cholesterol medicines and diabetes medicines and hypertension medicines and on and on and on, at a dizzying array of intervals, when looked at all together. I cannot imagine even what it would be like having that many medicine bottles in my medicine cabinet, much less remembering to take every one of them at the appropriate time, much less remembering to get them refilled, MUCH less managing to pay for them all.

For an awful lot of people, just keeping themselves medicated strikes me as equivalent to a full-time job (with mandatory overtime).

From my so-far unmedicated vantage point, I cannot help but wonder if a life that has been relegated mostly to a medical regimen is really all that worth living?

At some point, don’t a lot of these folks just want to say, “fuck it, I’ve had a good life, I’ve enjoyed flowers, kittens, exuberant beagles, sunrises and sunsets, grandparents and kids and people, and I cannot even really see any of them anymore, don‘t really even remember them anymore--time to catch the “last train for the coast, today life’s music died,” or something like that?

Sitting here transcribing endless lists of medications and idly envisioning a daily life devoted mostly to taking those medications, and realizing that, unless I step unaware in front of a bus or get tackled from an unfortunate angle by a wannabe-linebacker beagle on one of my morning perambulations, or some other calamity befalls me, such a daily life is inevitably in my future. The medical profession has pretty much ensured that.

I’ve had this conversation with my near-octogenarian dad a few times. “You know who wants most to live to be 100?” he asked me once. I shook my head. “The 99-year-old,” he said.

As I say, my perspective is skewed by what I do for a living. I never hear about happy, healthy people of any age--happy, healthy people don’t check into hospitals and generate “medical records,” after all, so how WOULD I hear about them?