Heads up Friends: taking you on a bit of a journey the next few weeks. It’s going to be a departure from normal preambles in that it’s going to be a series – almost like separate chapters. Hoping you stick with it.
Part 1
In early November 2023, I received a call that would change my life.
“Hello Mr. Frankel? This is XXXX from your doctor’s office.”
I had gone to see my a$$hole primary care physician earlier that day. I call him Dr. Finger Guns.
You absolutely know the kind of guy. His go to entrance is to saunter into a room, look an ill person in the eye, say “’Sup?” and give a double finger point like he’s Isaac from the f^cking Love Boat…
On top of it all, Dr. Finger Guns is a damn Millennial and really could give 💩s about listening to patients or exhibiting any sort of bedside manner.
Lots of empty “uh-uhs” while he types away at his laptop. It’s drive-by, private equity fueled, just get ‘em-in-and-out and collect the copay healthcare at it’s finest.
NOTE: long time FoDs might remember back then some good rants about this here around that time.
I have to say, on the most part I have been in pretty decent health as I have gotten older. Maybe put on a few pounds, occasional aches and pains, got through COVID scott free. But since that September I had been having some increasingly nagging respiratory issues – wheezing and shortness of breath that wouldn’t clear up after an early Fall cold.
Nothing debilitating or anything, but annoying enough to disrupt my sleep and make me uncomfortable most of the time. I kinda just needed to get the situation resolved with some sort of prescribed medicine.
While I was there, Finger Guns decided to order an EKG and a blood test for me just to make sure my vitals were in check – he looked at my records, didn’t think anything would come of it, but warned without looking up from his laptop that “sometimes, like only sometimes, things can come back as false positives. But dude, that is like rarely.”
What did I have to lose?
I felt like crap, sounded like I had the Black Lung from working 80 hours a week with Mr. Zoolander in a coal mine, and just wanted something to make it all go away.
I figured if Dr. Finger Guns needed to check my heart and get a blood test to get me there, as long as it wasn’t one of his Finger Guns having to probe an uncomfortable place, I was on board.
I left with a prescription for an Albuterol inhaler and a heads up that I might get a call later if the tests showed anything…..oh, and I also got an exploding fist bump…. before being directed to the checkout desk to swipe my debit card….
It was Monday and my wife happened to have just started a week long business trip to middle of nowhere Western New York of all places, leaving me home with our teenage son. She texted me late in the afternoon to check in on us and see how I was feeling (and I suspect, knowing my seething disdain from my physician, to playfully needle me about my visit with Finger Guns just to get me riled up) when my cellphone rang.
“We have the results from your tests,” the nurse on the other line reported. “Mr. Frankel, we found some potential abnormalities with your heart function.
We advise you to immediately go to the emergency room for further tests and observation.”
WTF?? I was stunned.
“What?” was all I could keep thinking. “Aside from some wheezing, I feel fine. What does this mean?” I asked.
“Mr. Frankel, you need to be under observation in the emergency room as soon as possible. While the abnormalities may turn out to be nothing, if further tests show that you are in any cardiac distress, you should know they will probably admit you for an emergency heart procedure. You need to GO AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”
Holy f^cking sh!t. Could my day get any worse?
I thanked Dr. Finger Guns’s minion and ended the call.
TO BE CONTINUED……..
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
The World Economic Forum (WEF) surveyed over 900 experts to determine the most critical short- and long-term risks facing the world.
This infographic, based on the WEF’s Global Risks Report, highlights the top 10 most impactful global risks over a short term (2 years) and long term (10 years).
Studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work, and lead.
A recent survey reported in Forbes noted that Gen Z respondents consider the threshold of “financial success” to be an average annual salary of $587,797 and a net worth of $9.47 million. As you can see most of us don’t talk about money very much with our kids. This leaves a vacuum that is filled with a lot of misinformation, most of which comes from social media.
We looked at whether there was one act that carried music through from post-World War Two to the 60s and 70s, and were the embodiment of that final stage of 20th-Century music – and we realised it was Zeppelin – Bernard MacMahon
Led Zeppelin’s multi-million-selling catalogue is laced with blues, hard rock, folk fables, African, Asian and Latin grooves, macho bombast and avant-garde flair. They gained a rep for scandalous excess, while mostly shunning the press – but now Becoming Led Zeppelin, their first officially authorized documentary, promises to capture the band's "untold story" for posterity.