Message from the President

A funny thing happened on the way to November, at least in our house the clock on the VCR lost one hour. You have to love the technology if yours did the same thing. When they made the machine, it was considered advanced planning. The engineers said “lets design it for automatic daylight savings time adjustment” and it worked well until the experts (?) changed the date and stretched daylight savings time. If you haven’t fixed it and you need help call me, I might be able to talk you through it.

You may remember the program for August; it consisted of a walkthrough of the new hospital facilities. Our guides Dennis and Lou gave us a very thorough tour, particularly the emergency facilities. Little did I realize at that time I would get a chance to check it out firsthand.

During a scheduled visit with the rheumatologist, I was asked to bend over and touch my toes and I did. When I stood up quickly the room began to spin and I began to spin with it. The doctor was aware that I’m a heart patient; she thought it advisable to determine the cause. That meant a trip to the ED. Remember: it’s no longer ER; the new facility is no longer a single room and no longer a two-hour wait. Within about 10 minutes, I passed through triage and was assigned a space, a nurse and doctor. The nurse took a blood sample as soon as I was in the space. The results were on the computer screen and the doctor had a print copy for discussion within about 10 minutes. The team was able to immediately go through my past JSUMC history at the computer station and when they decided a chest x-ray would be valuable, I was moved quickly down the hall. The X-rays were taken and the results were on the doctor’s screen before I got back to my space.

I’ve had several emergency room visits in the past and I believe this is the first one that didn’t decide to keep me overnight. I remember the topic of our program was titled “The hospital of the future is here now.” They made a believer out of me.

It’s getting around that time of year again when we all have to say there’s so much to eat and so little time. The weather is not exactly conducive to taking those nice long walks again and so we drag out the old excuses. Don’t even think about it. Keep your exercise program, even if it’s an indoors program; the important thing is to do it.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in the past but I’ve had a project going for the last two years that involved the finding and reading of all of the Nero Wolfe books in print. The author Rex Stout wrote 73 Nero stories. As of today I have read 72 of them the last one is a book titled “CORSAGE” and it was released in 1977. Unfortunately, it was a specialized publication and only a limited number of the books were released. If you’re a book collector and never throw anything away look and see if you have a copy of it. Of course, I always return books that I borrow.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.