Medicine Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

America Collection/Humor/Lifestyle/Medicine

March 5, 2022March 5, 2022

Today’s Miracle Drug

photo medication pills on white plastic container

(Serious side effects may occur . . .)

As a public service, I have begun a trial regimen of the medication reported to be an answer to today’s needs. In case you have not yet taken such a step of your own accord, I am reprinting, below, the instructions and some minor cautionary details that came with my supply:

Enclosed please find your 30-day supply of Perfecto99. Taken as directed, Perfecto99 will improve your overall energy level, brain function and ability to achieve life goals.

Common side effects may include muscle pain, headaches, nausea and diarrhea. Do not take Perfecto99 if you are or plan to become pregnant..

Clinical trials have shown Perfecto99 to be as good as, or better than all similar supplements currently awaiting FDA approval.

Call your doctor if you have problems urinating, or if you notice involuntary or uncontrollable muscle movement, as these can be permanent.

Perfecto99, now the global leader in extending average life expectancy, has been shown to improve activity and longevity among Caucasian, AAPI, Black and LatinX populations. Even a few Swedes.

Perfecto99 can cause intestinal problems, serious abdominal pain and sometimes fatal bleeding. Also, occasional burning, crawling, itching, numbness, prickling, “pins and needles”, or tingling feelings have been reported.

Don’t drive, attempt to stand on your own or operate heavy equipment within 24 hours of taking Perfecto99. Just stay in bed and feel sorry for yourself.

Before starting Perfecto99, we recommend a thorough examination by the physician(s) of your choice, including but not limited to bronchoscopy, endoscopy, colonoscopy and cross-check by a qualified podiatrist.

Get help right away if you experience swelling of the face, mouth or tongue, or if you notice a rash appearing on extremities. In rare cases, severe upper respiratory tract and chest infections leading to death have been reported.

Perfecto99 contains alphanomaic acid, which has been shown to offer immediate relief for listlessness, joint pain and stressful family arguments.

Do not take Perfecto99 if you are allergic to its ingredients, or if you have Guillain-Barré syndrome, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Bell’s palsy, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or long-haul Covid. We may have left something out here.

Our trained Perfecto99’ers stand ready to take your calls at 999-888-7220; simply follow the prompts and do not despair. If you are dissatisfied in any way, a full refund will be promptly sent to you or your survivors.

General interest/Health/Healthcare/Lifestyle/Medicine

August 19, 2021October 19, 2021

Ten Top Reasons for Masking Up

by Fran Johns

The delta variant, no surprise, is felling our fellow citizens left and right and here we are back in the middle of the mask mess. Full disclosure: this writer is fully vaccinated but still pretty freaked about the possibility of becoming a break-out victim. That I probably won’t die is small consolation; the variant is seriously messing with my life.

Because I’m unlikely to get the virus from someone wearing a mask I have compiled my ten best arguments for masking up. Set aside the small detail that infection and death rates are going up at the rate of about 100% every week or two, most of which could be avoided if everyone were simply to get vaccinated and wear a mask. That seems not to matter to the unvaccinated and unmasked. So herewith my arguments:

1 – Why not? It’s just a piece of paper or cloth. Some of them are pretty nifty.

2 – That brings up the fashion aspect: today’s masks can be downright elegant. I have one that’s studded with faux rhinestones; putting it on equates to getting dressed up.

3 – Plus, the mask is today’s easiest way to make a statement (Go Green! Vote for My Person! Etc)

4 – I deeply regret the politization of the whole business, but some current opportunities for expressing yourself via mask are still pretty good. I recently passed a stout gentleman whose mask read “Because I’m keeping you from getting sick and possibly dying. What’s your reason for NOT wearing one?”

5 – And before I retreat from politics here, masks seem to offend Rand Paul. Offending Rand Paul is reason enough to mask up any day.

6 – Fall and winter are just ahead. Masks keep noses warm.

7 – You might want to make plans. Or at least not interfere with others’ plans. My poor niece, a doctor in a major urban hospital, has postponed her wedding multiple times. If her patients had been wearing masks they wouldn’t have become her patients, and she would not now have covid – and looking at possible postponement once again.

8 – Also, you might be protecting yourself against all manner of invisible evil. One scientific study estimated that the air we breathe contains some 1,800 bacteria. This was before the coronavirus joined them.

9 – Masks are today’s contribution to history. Sort of like the flapper dresses of the 1920s, history will look back on the 2020s as the Mask Age. Unless, that is, those pathogens and their viral colleagues carry us all off before the 2120s. Which brings us back to

10 – Why not? People are needlessly dying, every hour of every day. If we all just put on a mask maybe a few of us will survive to remember them.

Covid Collection/Death and Dying/General interest/Health/Healthcare/Medicine/Politics & Causes/USA

April 3, 2020October 7, 2021

Could We Use a Little Logic in Virus-Fighting?

by Fran Johns

This space tries hard to avoid overt political issues. But today, with the novel coronavirus sitting in front of our eyeballs on waking and hanging out in our brains throughout the day – whether we happen to be infected or not – it’s almost impossible to avoid how politics impacts the reality of the pandemic. The following is offered just because it seems such a ridiculously obvious way to address the problem.

Recently, this letter of mine appeared in the New York Times:

“At 86, I am absolutely fine with dying — although I’m healthy and active and would not turn down another five or 10 years. So if I wind up with Covid-19, give the ventilator to someone else.

“What bothers me is that if our national leadership had just a fraction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s brain, they would follow his very rational advice to send all available ventilators to New York until the curve begins to bend, and then ship them to the next crisis area. Under that system, San Francisco would get an adequate supply in time for my neighbor and me both to survive.”

About that “give the ventilator to someone else” line. I should say up front that this is not some lofty altruistic declaration. Ventilators are not a lot of fun, and many older patients (one physician friend suggested a scarily high percentage) wind up dead on them anyway. Even for just a few days, lying still with perhaps a hole in my windpipe and for sure a tube down my nose for nutrition approaches torture, in my considered opinion. Lying still would additionally involve being unable to write, communicate or do anything else that makes life meaningful. Thus, compromised with a dangerous virus and probably soon dying alone without loved ones of any sort nearby – no thanks. Shoot me with all the morphine on hand and let me go.

I am a grateful and enthusiastic board member of End of Life Choices California. As such I’m a firm believer in Medical Aid in Dying: the right of terminally ill, mentally competent adults to ask their physicians for life-ending medications. Now legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, MAID will, I hope, eventually be “best practice” for the medical professions. Refusal of a ventilator falls in the category of mechanical aid in dying, of sorts, and why not?

The second, less esoteric issue addressed in my brief letter is simply a plea for national response to the next pandemic – which Dr. Anthony Fauci, may he long survive and prosper, tells us is likely to come with a reappearance of the novel coronavirus in the fall. Assuming it doesn’t start somewhere they’re still convinced it’s a hoax – hello, Mississippi? – maybe we as a nation could adopt a fast and sensible strategy: throw everything we’ve got at the first peep-through, and try to snuff out subsequent peeps-through as fast as supplies can be diverted from the first. My degrees are in Art and Short Fiction, not medicine or policy, and I admit to having only a rudimentary left brain. But how does this not make sense?

I’m just saying.

For more about MAID, and a lot of other good information you can use, I encourage you to visit https://endoflifechoicesca.org/.

Death and Dying/End-of-Life/General interest/Healthcare/Medicine

March 4, 2020October 7, 2021

Cycles of Living and Dying . . .

by Fran Johns

Sebastian entered the world eight weeks ahead of schedule, weighing all of two pounds. His lineage is Korean/African American/German, which may offer an insight into how determined, individualistic and utterly beautiful he is. He had emerged from NICU (the neonatal unit at Kaiser) and gotten his fighting weight up to nearly six pounds when he first came to visit my husband Bud.

Bud w Sebastian 1.3.19 — *Sebastian (unimpressed) meets his honorary grandfather*

That was about mid-January. In early February, about the 11^th, Bud’s congestive heart failure of many decades took a sudden downward turn, and by Valentine’s Day he was in his last hours of life on this planet. Sebastian came to visit – well, he brought his parents too, but they are not central to this story.

His mom plunked Sebastian onto Bud’s chest, as he lay breathing heavily on his hospital bed, red balloons snagged from the downstairs dining room floating around. The last deliberate movement I can associate with my husband as he died was his left arm making a sort-of patting gesture toward the tiny pajama-clad bundle of new life on his chest.

We should all sign up for this: old life ending as new life begins. Seeing life as a natural continuum might not make much difference as we enter, but it could help us take more control of our exit – simply by confronting the fact that we will indeed exit. I like to think that my husband’s last moments were somehow heartened by the certainty that life does, and will, go on.

Bud was fortunate in other ways. Having reached his 90^th year, he had been vocal about his readiness to die and had expressed his wishes clearly in writing. There are many good options now: hospice or palliative care, enforceable documents like DNRs and POLST forms (Do Not Resuscitate, Physicians Order for Life Sustaining Treatment,) etc. And in a growing number of states there is a right to confront mortality by hastening one’s dying. In California where I live there is the End of Life Option Act which gives terminally ill, mentally competent adults the right to ask their physician for life-ending medication. For many, that is a way to meet life’s end with extraordinary peace.

A relatively new organization, End of Life Choices CA, is part of this continuum, this big picture of Birth/Life/Death/Peace. EOLCCA provides information and personal support re California’s End of Life Option Act and all other legal end of life options. It is among several nonprofits dealing with critical aspects of end-of-life care – and helping us all see more clearly that death, like birth, is a universal experience.

When training, recently, to be an EOLCCA volunteer I met a remarkable fellow volunteer named Lori Goldwyn, who may understand both ends of this continuum as well as anyone around. After earning an M.S. degree in Education and working in women’s health for several years, Lori had a homebirth 30 years ago that led her to become a childbirth educator and labor doula. “I came to believe in the value of supporting the natural process as much as possible,” she says, “for both the mother’s and her baby’s sake. A woman in labor contends not only with the pain of labor,” Lori adds, “but with the intensity of realizing that there’s no way out. She can’t escape, quit or divorce this one. The only way out – as is true with the rest of life – is through.”

Eventually the link between natural birth and natural death became clear. “While being with my mother in an inpatient hospice in 2010,” Lori says, “I was struck by the similarities between the birthing and dying experiences.” That epiphany led to her working in hospice and palliative care, as an End of Life Doula, and now also as a volunteer with EOLCCA. Her website, Comings and Goings, reasserts the validity of this continuum with this subtitle about Doulas: Caregivers to those on the threshold points of our Earthly existence. Moon & clouds

“When we get that terminal prognosis, or as we lie dying,” Lori says, “there’s no escaping this reality, this ultimate inevitability.” She quotes the Italian director Federico Fellini: “All we can do is try to become aware that we are part of this unfathomable mystery. We are a mystery among mysteries.”

As he grows, I think Sebastian will also understand this mystery, this continuum, as well as anyone. Sebastian started off in a softly-lit incubator watched over by his mother, a nurse. Weeks later, his honorary grandfather was leaving the planet. And they were able to trade greetings on their journeys.

Death and Dying/End-of-Life/Family and Friends/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine

August 26, 2019October 7, 2021

Life, Death and Rebirth 2019

by Fran Johns

The envelope is lying right here on my left, now looking altogether spooky. It is even stamped and addressed; that’s how close I was to getting a note into the mail.

Then the phone rang. The note was to begin, “So, how are things going? How’s Gerry? How are you holding up?” The envelope is addressed to Gerry’s wife Kathy.

Several months ago our old, dear friend Gerry, age 75, was looking after the horses on their beautiful Southern California ranch when his heart failed. They got him to the hospital, but then came the bad news: his heart could not be revived or repaired. His only option would be a transplant. The good news? Because he was strong and otherwise healthy, he was a good candidate for a new heart. The further bad news? In order to be on the transplant list he would need to remain in the hospital, in intensive care, ready.

Kathy and Gerry are what I would call salt-of-the-earth Good People. They are deeply religious, clean-living and hard-working, and committed to living lives of service and gratitude. Within a few days of Gerry’s diagnosis they found themselves in the unenviable position of waiting for someone, somewhere, to die. Some generous someone who had signed agreements for his organs to be donated. (It would presumably be a ‘he,’ as Gerry is a fairly big guy, and would need a heart coming from someone roughly of equal size and weight.) After talking with Kathy early on in this saga I found myself also having queasy thoughts: How hard should I pray for some good person – do bad people sign organ donor forms? – to die in order for Gerry to live? It is an across-the-board existential dilemma.

The longer he remained in intensive care, the further Gerry’s condition deteriorated. This presented a scary picture but pushed him higher on the recipient list. In other words, the worse he got, the more urgent his need, the higher his spot on the transplant list. Another existentially fraught situation.

They waited.

On August 15 (or perhaps the hours before August 15 dawned,) a 34-year-old man died in another state. A man who was on life support in a hospital because at some earlier point he had taken the generous step of signing organ donor forms. One of Gerry’s doctors flew to that hospital, examined the heart, confirmed it to be a very good match for Gerry, and boarded another jet plane back to Southern California. Gerry was already opened up, his original heart beating – with a lot of help from outside sources – outside his body.

He is already back home. Part of the somehow endearing characteristics of these two old friends of ours is that they do not have email or participate in any social media. So it’s taken Kathy time to get around to calling friends with this lovely update.

Somewhere in the southwest a grieving family is saying goodbye to a 34-year-old they had not expected to lose. “Gerry cries every time he thinks of him,” Kathy says. “There are just no words.”

Other than these: “August 15^th is his new birthday.”

caregiving/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/Family and Friends/General interest/Medicine/physicians

March 12, 2019October 7, 2021

How Not to Die in the E.R.

by Fran Johns

“I promise,” I said, “that I will not let them admit you; we’ll come back home today.”

My husband, who had lived with congestive heart failure for decades, was so filled with fluids that he was like a walking (sitting; he was wheelchair-bound) waterbed. This was a Monday. I am not medically competent, but I’ve been a hospice, AIDS/HIV and Compassion & Choices volunteer, and I knew enough to know he was sliding toward end-stage CHF.

In the ER I mentioned to assorted intake people that we would not agree to hospitalization. The physician who eventually arrived looked my husband in the eye and outlined the ways she could help him feel better and perhaps live longer (he was 89.) “But it will involve being in the hospital for a few days,” she said; “and I think that is not what you want.”

“That is not what I want,” said my husband, looking her in the eye.

“Fine,” said this saintly, beautiful doctor (name on request; I’ve already sent her a thank-you letter copying everyone I can think of.) “We will do what we can, and send you home today.” Martini

So we went home. It was a long day, and my husband was too weary even to finish his martini (an indication to me that he really didn’t feel well. The nightly martini was important.) He said he didn’t want even a bowl of soup. Bed sounded good, he said, but he was beyond cooperation. I then had to summon the Wellness people in our retirement condo building to help.

“Old person. Unresponsive. Call 911” said the Wellness people, as they helped me get him into bed.

“Do not call 911,” I said.

“We understand,” they said. “We love him too. But we have to call 911.”

The paramedics arrived. Paramedics are invariably the most gorgeous hunks. Two of the six who arrived had been to our apartment months before when my husband landed on the floor – he was 6’4” (at his peak) so it took paramedics to get him from floor to bed. “I remember talking to him about all this art,” one said. “And he was a Marine,” said the other. What’s not to love about paramedics? But. “We must take him to the ER,” they said.

“You may not take him out of this apartment,” said I.

It became an interesting battle.

“We understand,” they said. “We agree with you, ma’am. But we have protocols.”

Finally I said to the guy in charge: “You call your head person at San Francisco General and tell him you have this little old lady standing here with her husband’s DNR, POLST form and DPOA and she says we may not remove him from their apartment.” Actually, I was prepared to go over that person’s head. I have friends at SF General. But to his eternal credit, the in-charge physician (may he survive and prosper) said, “Fine. Get him in bed and leave him there.”

One of the paramedics saluted my husband as he left the bedroom.

My husband died three days later, in his own home where he wanted to be, with me scrinched into the hospital bed hugging him into the hereafter.

Had I not argued against the retirement home 911 protocols, and fought against the EMR protocols, he would have died in a cold, bright-lit hospital room with strangers poking and probing him and we the taxpayers spending thousands and thousands of dollars to make his last several days miserable.

What’s wrong with this picture? Only the caption.

The caption 99% of us would want is the one below the snapshot of my husband’s death, at home, with someone we love best hugging us into the hereafter.

Fully 60 percent of the U.S. population get the hospital caption — the one that goes with that blurry photo above — instead . (Another 20 percent get the nursing home caption.) One should not have to have a ferocious on-site advocate to let one die at home in one’s own bed. In addition to the DNR, the POLST and the DPOA there should be a JLMA form: Just Leave Me Alone, for those of us who concede that we’re actually going to die some day and work to keep our end-times as inexpensive and comfortable as possible.

Until such time, I am grateful for the forms we do have, and for the two compassionate physicians who helped my good husband die the death he preferred. May he rest in well-earned peace.

General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/Optimism Collection

January 6, 2019October 20, 2021

Paying New Year’s Blessings Forward

by Fran Johns

In a new year with meanness and cruelty on the news every day, there are counter forces at work. Here is my favorite Pay-It-Forward story so far for 2019. It involves my lovely friend Eva Zimmerman, who agreed to let me to share it. Eva and her husband, Noah Schreck, welcomed their first child, daughter Zahra, into the world last spring. But the exuberant joy they were having was interrupted by Noah’s diagnosis of colon cancer, requiring surgery in December.

On January 2, Eva posted this story (lightly edited here) on Facebook.

“Noah is home! He has a lot more healing and resting (and eating) to do to get back to his old self and Zahra is being super helpful by screaming and screeching at a newly-discovered ear piercing volume, constantly. We’ll readjust and recalibrate and make this work. We’re thankful to be together.

“We are so fortunate to have so much support. Meals waiting on the porch, welcome signs and ice cream delivered, childcare, and just the love and prayer that we’ve felt this entire time… Thank you, all.

“As I was leaving the hospital with all of Noah’s belongings, taking everything to the car to load it and go pick him up in the patient loading zone, I stood watching a beautiful young black couple comforting each other as they were waiting for the parking lot elevator. The elevator opened, she entered, he motioned for me to go ahead of him, he held the door open for me. As we stood there, heading to the same parking lot floor, he wished me a Happy New Year. I told him that it truly was a Happy New Year, that I was taking my husband home today after almost two weeks in the hospital.

“The woman said, ‘Our son will be here for the next two weeks.’ I told her I hoped he’d be home soon, healthy. She said, ‘Hoping for soon and cancer-free.’ I told her, ‘My husband is leaving today, cancer-free.’ She said, ‘This is why he’s here, they are doing surgery to remove his cancer.’ I told her that this is exactly why my husband has been here, they got it, they got the cancer, and he’s leaving today cancer-free. She and I held hands and I said, ‘I’m sending the blessing to you all now. It’s with you now.’ As we walked to our cars, she told her husband of the chills that went through her and simultaneously, they went through me. Though incredibly hard, we’ve been protected through this, because of you all. I gave that protection and blessing back to another family just as we left. It was a moment I’ll never forget. I don’t know their name. But as I write this, I’m watching Noah sleep next to me, and I’m thinking of them, envisioning their son home safe, soon and cancer-free.”

Take that, meanness.

Family and Friends/General interest/Health/Healthcare/Medicine/Optimism Collection/seniors

July 1, 2018October 20, 2021

Weird Times and Guardian Angels

by Fran Johns

“I don’t know where I am,” I said. “I don’t recognize this place.”

“Well, you did get here. Where’s your car? Did you drive?”

“I don’t know how I got here.” And since I also didn’t know where I came from or where I lived, it was not going to be easy to get home.

My short-term memory had totally, inexplicably vanished

I had just told the story of my long-ago (1956, to be precise) back-alley abortion at a fundraising event for nonprofit TEACH (Teaching Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare) in a San Francisco theater. One five-minute speaker followed me, and the program ended. When we got up to leave – I was on the second row next to my young friend Alexa and her visiting aunt and uncle – I didn’t know how to get to the lobby. Since I had met with other speakers onstage before the event and had led my guests to our seats, something was obviously weird. We finally did get to the lobby, where we had met and visited before the event, and the above exchange took place. At that point something weird turned into something frighteningly wrong.

Alexa left her aunt and uncle to find their own way back to their hotel, summoned a cab and gave the driver my address. Later I would have a dim fragment of memory about being in the cab, and another fleeting memory of entering our building, going up to our condo and then seeing my husband.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “I need to go to the hospital.” He and Alexa had long since come to that conclusion. She had been texting with one of my children on the east coast and on the phone with my husband since the exchange in the theater lobby. Finding my car safely in its garage space, she had already called a cab to get to the emergency room. But after that moment of seeing my husband, the next four or five hours are lost to me forever.

Its official name is Transient Global Amnesia. If you have it, it’s a good idea to be among friends.

Since I come from a long line of stroke victims, that had been the immediate fear. But it only took a few tests in the Kaiser ER to rule out stroke, a few more to rule out other serious afflictions and arrive at the diagnosis of TGA. Sometime around 2 AM my conscious memory swam back to the surface of reality, which was Alexa sitting on the side of my bed. Then, with a little help from some drug they gave me, I fell asleep.

Fewer than one half of one percent of people in the U.S. experience episodes of TGA every year. It is most common in people between ages 56 and 75, with the average age being approximately 62 – unless I’ve now upped that by a decade or so. For the victim, TGA is really no big deal. You don’t remember anything anyway; but there’s no pain, no suffering, no after-effect and no permanent damage. All I do remember is the comforting vision of my lovely friend, who is known as my West Coast Daughter (now additionally Guardian Angel), sitting on the side of my bed. I was visited by numerous concerned physicians and nurses, several of whom said they’d never heard of TGA.

But now we all have! Before sending me home the next day the very cautious Kaiser people did an MRI of my head, and lo, my brain was still there. Actually, it was functioning on remote even while I was malfunctioning. When posing the traditional questions about what year it was (Nope, didn’t know) etc the ER doctors asked if I could say who is the president of the U.S.

“Noooo,” I said, “but I know I don’t like him.”

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