ONLY A DOG?
THERE'S NO SUCH ANIMAL
Journal of Healing – Nov. 20, 2002
By Mary Koch

"A dog is the last thing this household needs."

Those were my famous last words six years ago. Dogs are a huge responsibility. I had enough responsibility with a stroke survivor husband who needed 24-hour care.

But living without dogs (and an occasional cat) is like cooking without herbs (and an occasional spice). Despite my doubts, our household became enriched by Sadie the People Dog and later RC, the Recluse Cat.

Readers often tell me, "I read your column every week, but I especially (big emphasis on 'especially') enjoy it when Sadie writes." Puts me in my place.

Years in the newspaper business taught me I could write a soul-wrenching story about human suffering and receive a moderately sympathetic response. But write about a mongrel who'd been done wrong, and the phones ring off the hook with offers of bed, board and charity.

We humans are at best open-hearted and at worst confused about the value and meaning of animals in our lives.

* * *

IT'S PART OF what writer Mark Jerome Walters calls a "profound paradox." Walters is a veterinarian, university professor and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

"Earth is in the midst of a spasm of extinction that the planet has not experienced in more than 25 million years," he writes. "But unlike the mass extinctions of the geological past, this one is all ours – we are causing it, and only we can stop it."

"When a man dies," he continues, "we come together, we weep, we bow our heads and pray. When a creature passes to extinction, we silently remove their name from the federal list of endangered species."

Opponents of the Endangered Species Act argue that we must consider the economic costs of preserving a particular species. Yet when Congress threatened to kill the ESA, evangelistic Christians fought to save it. Walters quotes their position: "To kill off a species, they argued, was to diminish the presence of God."

There's a new book out called "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy." It is especially critical of our factory-style treatment of animals destined for the grocery store – or fast-food restaurant. The author, Matthew Scully, is no tree-hugging animal rights activist. He is a political conservative and served as a speechwriter for the first President Bush.

"We are called to treat (animals) with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality," Scully writes, "but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us."

* * *

RECENTLY A friend called to tell me her dog had been killed that day. She couldn't believe the depth of her grief.

"He was only a dog!" she said between sobs, knowing full well that he was anything but. Like any beloved pet, he had provoked every emotion from laughter to irritation, he had made her life fuller, he had touched her soul.

My friend, the late Jeanne Hardy, knew this. Her great concern before she died was the fate of her dog Ben. When my husband heard that, even though he can't speak, John made it immediately clear that Ben would have a home with us.

So here Ben is, right at my feet, a very large golden retriever in mourning and sweetly dependent. Our home is disrupted: Sadie's nose is out of joint and the cat has gone into deep hiding.

WE INTERRUPT THIS OPERATION
FOR A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Journal of Healing – Nov. 13, 2002
By Mary Koch

Eureka! I have the solution.

I've been writing about problems in our health care system often enough: the most expensive health care in the world, largely inaccessible to over 40 million citizens who don't have insurance, and costs likely to keep rising at double-digit rates.

But anybody can write about problems. It's not so easy to offer solutions. And here the solution's been right under my nose all along: advertising. Actually, we're talking advertising combined with marketing: America's two-lane highway to the good life.

All across the country, school districts are making up for funding shortages by opening their classrooms and lunchrooms to advertisers. Students required to watch a specially-produced morning news show on TV also get a large dose of targeted commercials.

On the marketing end, Pepsi and Coke are duking it out for exclusive rights to vend their products in school lunchrooms with the time-honored tradition of kickbacks. The more of the sugar-laden, nutritionless product the kids buy, the more money the schools rake in.

Then I heard about a city that was offered free police cars if they'd accept advertising on the vehicles. Think of it: "This arrest brought to you by Dunkin' Donuts."

* * *

SO WHY STOP there? In the process of turning the whole world into one giant billboard, let's move into our clinics and hospitals. There's nothing really new about it. Check out your doctor's office and you'll find all kinds of subtle advertising: drug makers' names on calendars and endless office supplies.

But that's chicken feed. It's time for the health care industry to fulfill its potential as a marketing medium. Your next visit to the doctor could go something like this:

In the waiting room you find airport-style TV screens at each chair. Browsing through the menu you can choose from infomercials such as: "One Pill That Can Change Your Life;" "Painless Weight Loss Through Drugs;" "Get Ahead of Your Doctor: Diagnoses for Dummies;" "How YOU Can Benefit from a Full Body Scan."

You've just finished watching "Why Colonoscopy is the Choice for You," when you're ushered to the examining room. The nurse takes your pulse, reading aloud from the wristband of her watch:

"Your pulse today is measured by Timex — Remember, 'It's time for life!'"

Next comes your blood pressure, measured by an automatic device that does its own talking:

"This blood pressure reading is brought to you by Plavix. You need to speak with your doctor about bringing your numbers down to earth."

The nurse helps you into an examining gown with "Hanes" embroidered on the chest. You can buy a monogrammed version of the gown in the clinic gift shop, she says.

* * *

WHILE YOU wait for the doctor, you lie back on the examining table and notice a TV screen on the ceiling.

"Are you feeling your age?" a voice asks softly while the world's most beautiful 60-year-old woman jogs across the screen. "You don't have to," the voice continues as the woman sheds her jogging suit to reveal a bikini, a great body and a perfect swan dive into a cobalt blue swimming pool.

"Hormone replacement therapy could be your path to everlasting youth."

During the exam the doctor tells you who is sponsoring what: Maidenform is paying for the breast exam, Freedom panty liners for the pelvic, etc.

As you leave, you don't get a bill, but you do get a certificate for 10 percent off all items in the clinic gift shop.

Isn't it good to know that our health care problems are solvable?

(Mary Koch writes about health care issues and her experiences as a family caregiver. Her husband, retired newspaper publisher John E. Andrist, was severely disabled by a stroke in 1993. They welcome your letters at P.O. Box 3346, Omak WA 98841 or e-mail marykoch@marykoch.com.)

THIS IS JUST ONE PART
OF THE STORY
Journal of Healing – Nov. 6, 2002
By Mary Koch

"Every person's story is so important," my friend and fellow writer was saying to me. I nodded in agreement. We were quiet for a while, thinking of the years we've both spent, listening to and writing people's stories.

We each have also written our own stories, with all their unexpected twists and turns of plot. And now I was proposing to write a small part of her story.

How cheeky of me! Yet I plunged ahead.

"A lot of people know you," I said. "People whom you don't know. They care about you and they would want to know how it is with you."

"Do you think so?" she said with that light, feather of a giggle that punctuates all her conversations. I even heard that giggle the day she called to tell me she'd been diagnosed with a fast-moving, terminal cancer.

Now I was sitting in her Spokane hospital room, waiting for her to be discharged. Soon she would head back to her beloved home in the Methow Valley, where she is living happily if not ever after.

* * *

MANY PEOPLE know Jeanne Hardy from her years as a weekly newspaper columnist, humorist, teacher of writing, community icon, founder of the Spotted Chicken Society, and publisher of its newsletter as well as "Birdy's Circle," a newsletter for "crones."

She's always preached self-sufficiency and healthy living. She lived what she preached. Then her life took one of those twists. She became progressively, mysteriously ill. She finally learned she suffered from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Incredibly, she was allergic to the manufactured home she'd purchased with her life's savings.

Jeanne's fans and friends are legion and loyal. With her family, they raised the wherewithal to build her a new, tiny home — all with chemical-free materials. And that's no small order.

She moved into the house and began to get a little better. Then, again mysteriously, she got worse. A lot worse. On Oct. 17, she was flown by emergency helicopter to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, where she was checked into the cardiac unit.

"I knew there was nothing wrong with my heart," she said later.

I always knew that too.

Eventually the cancer was located in both lungs.

* * *

SOMETIMES THINGS get to be too much, even for Jeanne to giggle at. Those are the times when she lets out a booming guffaw. My husband loves to watch her laugh because, he once observed, she crinkles up her face until her eyes disappear.

As we sat in the hospital room, I asked her if she ever ponders the "why" questions.

"You mean like, why am I dying of cancer?"

"Yes."

"It's a mystery," she concluded. And even though she was too weak for a Jeanne Hardy guffaw, her eyes disappeared for a moment.

The day after Jeanne had told me about her diagnosis, I happened to read an interview with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stanley Kunitz, age 97.

"The great thing I know about experience," he said, "is that we are all living and dying at once."

Jeanne, you, and me — we are all living and dying at once. It's just that for Jeanne, there's a little bit less uncertainty about the dying part.

If you'd like to send a card to Jeanne Hardy, her address is 672 Twisp-Winthrop Eastside Road, Twisp, WA 98856. If you'd like to send a prayer, well, I expect you already have that address.

(Mary Koch writes about health care issues and her experiences as a family caregiver. Her husband, retired newspaper publisher John E. Andrist, was severely disabled by a stroke in 1993. They welcome your letters at P.O. Box 3346, Omak WA 98841 or e-mail marykoch@marykoch.com.)