Health Care

This morning while working on my elliptical glider I got to thinking of the fantastic things that have been developed in my lifetime. Our world has completely changed in the past 50 years. One of the areas that has changed probably more than any other is the area of health care.

We often complain about the cost of health care, and it is high, but think of the lives that have been saved. I went to summer school in 1965 at North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND. We had a futurist speak about what changes we might see in health care. He predicted that organ donations would become commonplace. In fact he foresaw organ banks filled with all sorts of organs including skin and bones as well as the vital organs so that when a body part was needed for a transplant it would be available from the organ bank. I believe that organ banks are now feasible except the rate of donation lags far behind medicine's ability to use them.

I have been the recipient of some of the life giving wonders of medicine at least twice. The first was when a cancerous tumor was found on my kidney with an MRI.
A few years later a cancerous polyp was found and removed in my colon with a colonoscope. In 1968 my dad died of colon cancer that wasn't discovered until it had invaded other organs.

I have been thinking about my fight against kidney cancer since it was 10 years ago that I was told I only had six months left to live because the cancer had metastisized. Modern medicine missed on that one and I'm glad. I attribute my recovery to prayer and a positive outlook which can sometimes trump medicine.