A question I have asked more often than I like over the last couple weeks is, “What does this mean?” The main source of this query is my mother’s continued declining health. What does it mean when an 84 year old with advanced COPD and extreme limited mobility has a compression fracture in the spine and then what does it mean when a couple days later another shows up.
The issue is the source of truth on this are entities that don’t like to give answers. Neither doctors or the AI functions that are replacing them online want to commit to an answer. AI is so non-committal now thanks to “improved” guardrails it calls comparing McDonald’s to Five Guys class warfare and pushes back when you try to say a gig worker in the gig economy is working a gig and not someone looking for a full time commitment.
A world without a point of view is destined to lack meaning. Maybe I am the one being unreasonable, but someone has to have an answer to what a compression fracture cascade means in an 84 year old with a myriad of health issues. There has to be someone that can provide a straight answer.
And maybe the problem is me. I am asking for meaning and I don’t even know what I mean by that. Do I want a clear answer? A definitively timeline of you have x amount of months left with your mother. In some ways I do. In others maybe the uncertainty is better.
This isn’t the first health scare though, and all of them have been more scary than meaningful. This year alone we’ve had internal bleeding, multiple cases of pneumonia, UTIs, and the continued loss of mobility, and everything has felt like it could be the gateway to the next stage, but nothing changes.
I am confused by the doctors apparent nonchalance and lackadaisical attitude towards everything. I understand they are no longer during curative care and are focused on palliative, but I would have thought they would have looked for the source of the internal bleeding or have some opinion on what is now multiple spinal fractures means. Yet we’re still here where either this is just another thing or it could be the thing, and I just want to know how sad I should be about all this.
David Huzzard Writes 