A Day in Tele

Today I was in Telemetry. Patients are continuously monitored on an ECG monitor, so these patients are mostly cardiology patients. But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is my patient. He was born in 1903. No, that wasn't a typo. He's 105 years old. And he has a twin who is alive still too. AND he has an older brother who is 108 who is still alive. AND he is one of 16 children, and every single one of them is still alive. AND he is African American, which is very significant because I have never seen in person an African American over the age of like 85 because they genetically have a high incidence of hypertension and prostate cancer. AND he has bright blue eyes. But he is supposedly full Black. Craziness people. Mr. J was so sweet too. So proper. Saying please and thank you every chance that he got. Smiling through the pain that I could tell he was experiencing. Mr. J was in WWII (obviously) and was in the China/Berma/India theater. I just learned about how they call them theaters today, I had never heard of this term. He was active in the military for 12 years. He got married for the first time when he was 15 years old, and has been married 7 times in all. I'm not sure if he just outlived a lot of them, or if he got bored of them. Who knows.

The thing that surprised me most of all was that he was a smoker and drinker until 1985, and quit when he joined the Church in that year. I wanted so badly to interview him and ask him what the Great Depression was like, what WWII was like, how it felt to see Martin Luther King Jr progress, the Civil Rights movement, and if he ever imagined having an African American president. How different it must be for him living as a Black young man in the early 1900s, to having a white male nurse and a young female student nurse bending over backwards for him in a hospital that is full of all these crazy medical machines and tools.

It was interesting to do my clinical paperwork on him because, of course, he has a lot of medical issues. Usually, theses Veterans patients have a comorbidity list of like 7-10 things. Mr. J had 31 problems. Colon cancer in 1990, hypertension, congestive heart failure, benign prostatic hypertrophy, coronary artery disease, etc. He most likely has prostate cancer currently, but he was here for pneumonia because he aspirated some corn. =( Sad. Poor guy.

It was also interesting to learn today that if you biopsied every guy in the Salt Lake Valley over the age of 80, about 85-90% of them would have prostate cancer. Pretty much, if a guy lives long enough, they will get prostate cancer. But because it's a slow growing cancer, almost everyone dies of some sort of heart or brain problem first.

Those are my interesting facts of the day. Goodnight all, and dream of living to 105+ one day.