In our house growing up if you had a health issue it was handled like this.
You (you being the sick or injured person) get sick or injured.
We (we being my parents) wait to see if you get better.
You get better or stay the same or get worse.
We wait some more.
You get better, or not, or worse yet.
We think about going to the doctor
We wait some more.
You get taken to the Doctor.
We were poor. You can read about that elsewhere herein if you want. And this was waaaay back before there was insurance for such things. This was when if you availed yourself to a product or service you then paid for that product or service. So going to the doctor had to be considered whereas today we just get in the car and go. Because today we have insurance from our employer or the government or both. And there are folks whose job it is to fill out forms with codes on them. These codes allow the doctor’s to charge your insurance company for things like…
Use of tongue depressor $700
Looking into patients throat $800
Talking to guardians of minor patient $400
Consultation with nurse Anderson in the supply closet $400
Etc…
So when my brother Jody fell and hurt his arm a trip to the doctor was not automatic.. There was lots of discussion. There was one mandatory waiting. His arm didn’t get better. It was, to me, the oldest child in the family, obviously broken.
He was five or six years of age or in that range.
This episode was before the famous electric fence episode which also could have required medical consideration but he recovered on his own. (Maybe you thought this just a rural legend and have already heard about it). In this later episode he and I had been mushroom hunting which is something you do when you live in rural, middle America. In the springtime morel mushrooms sprout and farm people go look for them in the woods. They are a tasty treat to eat.
Jody and I were looking for mushrooms and when we started for home Jody had to “take a leak”. At the time we were walking along the pasture of a neighboring farm. That farmer had an electric fence and I guess Jody didn’t know what it was. I convinced him it was a good idea to point his stream onto the fence. The results were quite surprising to Jody and not as funny to me as I thought it would be because it was obvious something that it really hurt him. When we got home I was in big trouble.
Jody went on to get married later in life and have children. So there’s that.
Anyway, back to our current story.
They took Jody to the Hospital and they looked at his arm.
They said it was most likely broken, but they would have to do an x-ray to find out for sure. Of course X-rays are costly; but that was what had to be done.
They put Jody’s arm up on the X-ray table after they draped him in a lead coat. The machine made a whirling sound and a light scared his arms. At least that’s what I remember.
Jody was brave. He only whimpered a little.
After the machine stopped whirling and the scanning light went off, he said, “Yeah, that feels better”.
So that X-ray machine had fixed his arm and he left the hospital with a non-broken arm.
(Yes I know the picture has six fingers. I could have "photoshoped" one out, but I left it: "just for fun".)
©David L Arment