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Sunday Shoot a Round # 170
I absolutely despise cigarettes. They kill 478, 000 Americans
per year, roughly the same number we were losing at the
height of the Covid pandemic.
“I can’t breathe, doc,” the man said. Dave is 56 years old and a lifelong smoker.
Vitals were pretty decent. No fever. I could smell it when I walked through the door. He is nicely dressed but smells like a stale campfire mixed with feet. He looks 25 years older than he is.
“Hey, bro, what can I do for you today?” I already knew the answer. This was not the first time we’ve had this conversation.
“I got the crud again. Happens to me this time every year. Coughing’s driving me crazy. Can’t sleep. That’s driving my wife crazy. She’s driving me crazy. Can’t get any work done. Nobody wants to buy a car from somebody who sounds like he has TB. I want a shot.”
He stares at me quietly now. The look in his eyes communicates that the fact that he is sick is somehow my fault.
“Any fevers?”
“Nope.”
“Coughing anything up?”
“Green crap. Looks like rotten peanut butter. Tastes like hell.”
“You don’t have any sugar problems, do you?”
“You never told me I did.”
“Any drug allergies?”
“I’m allergic to clams and ugly women. They both make me swell up like a toad.”
He smiles. He’s told me that before. I smile back just to keep him happy.
I put my stethoscope on his chest and ask him to hold his breath. His heartbeat is sinus, and I don’t hear any murmurs. I press my scope against his back in half a dozen places. His lungs sound like a harmonica factory — soft musical wheezes but no crackles. In the absence of fevers or more troublesome lung sounds, he likely doesn’t have pneumonia. I put my stethoscope around my neck and take a glance in his mouth. His tongue is brown. I study his hands. His fingertips are yellow.
“You know it’s coming, don’t you?” He slumps his shoulders and looks deflated but doesn’t say anything.
We invest ludicrous amounts of time and treasure on survival.
A fraction of that effort spent on healthy living would pay
much greater dividends.
“When you gonna to put ’em down, buddy? They’re killing you right before my eyes. I don’t think you have pneumonia today. Four months ago, you did. Remember that? Nearly killed you then. You spent what, four days in the hospital? Let me help you with this, brother. I got all sorts of tools that can help get you off those things.”
“C’mon, doc. Just give me my damn shot. I got a stressful job. If I don’t sell cars, I don’t eat. If I didn’t smoke, my wife would strangle me. That time two years ago, you talked me into quitting, she went out and bought me a pack three days into it just so I wouldn’t be so bad to be around. I just caught something.”
“Listen, stud, I tell people they are going to die from lung cancer about once every six weeks, and I deal with the stress of my job without cigarettes. You can, too. That’s an excuse. Be a man.”
He didn’t say anything, but he was clearly ready to move on.
“Help is a phone call away anytime, and you know it. Leave me a message, and I’ll call you in some medicine to help you put them down. For now, I’ll send you some antibiotics for 10 days and some of that nighttime cough medicine that helps you sleep to the pharmacy. I’ll get you a prescription for a puffer that will help open your chest up as well. My nurse will be here in a minute with a shot of steroids. You know how that’ll make you feel. Come back if you’re not better in four or five days, and we’ll do a chest X-ray. Go to the ER if it gets worse. You got any questions?”
He spunked up when he realized his sermon was over. Now, he was a salesman again.
“Nope. Thanks, doc. Tell your wife hi for me. You ever want to trade in that antique jeep you drive for a proper set of wheels, you come see me. I’ll make you a good deal.”
He meant that. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I genuinely like this man.
“You tell your bride hi for me, too, Dave. Holler at me if you don’t get better.”
I was in and out in seven minutes. It took me longer than that to write about what we had discussed, order his shot and send his prescriptions to the pharmacy electronically. Smokers are great for business. We ought to put a big bowl of Camels in the waiting room with a sign that says, “Free, Take One.”
& another bigger, better Outfit
Categories
History of Warfare | Belleau Wood
Categories
Sands of Iwo Jima (B&W)
America’s WWI Memorial — They answered the call.
The Woodsman’s War
News of the Great War in Europe had hardly reached the backwoods hills of western Kentucky. Folks thereabouts tended their own business and paid little attention to the doin’s of flatlanders and foreigners. But one day at a trading post an illiterate young hardscrabble farmer and woodsman asked the clerk to read him a page from the newspaper. The headline read “Your Country Calls You,” and he said it “struck him like a stone.”
His country was calling him? He dearly loved his country — the part and people he knew, anyway — and his country had “never before asked for a red cent nor a drop of sweat.” But now she called. That’s what he told his family, and announced he was “Goin’ for to be a soldier and fight the Hun.”
He walked and hitched over 100 miles to enlist in Black Jack Pershing’s Army. They made him a machinegunner and sent him to France. There, his unit replaced the decimated wraiths of a battered French regiment in the freezing, shell-blasted mud of the trenches. And there, on one side of the cratered moonscape of No-Man’s Land, he and his fellow “doughboys” lived and died and were sometimes buried alive in their collapsing bunkers.
The woodsman’s war consisted of keeping his machinegun running amid the muck, sometimes gunning down ghostly gray lines of patrolling Germans caught in flare-light, and once shooting down an enemy observation blimp which had broken its tethers and drifted west. Otherwise, he learned to burrow like a rat when the shells fell — and they did, constantly.
Unable to read or write, he occasionally got another Yank to pencil a brief letter for him. His family said he never complained other than to say “It’s hard here; hardest for the city boys and younguns.” Then the letters stopped.
The Last Fight
Envision a broad valley — No-Man’s Land — between rows of hills, with German trenches on the northeast and American trenches opposite. A reconstituted French force approached from the southwest, coming to relieve the Yanks — and the Germans knew it. They unleashed a hellstorm of artillery rounds on the Americans, blasting them with high explosives and the dreaded mustard gas. Then gas-masked infantry assaulted the Yank trenches, bayoneting survivors and then moving on, sweeping up the northeast-facing slope behind the Americans. Silence settled.
Unknown to the approaching French, the Germans held that high ground, in perfect position to cut them down like wheat as they marched up the treeless southwest slopes. But they had missed a few Yanks — one of them, the woodsman.
Almost blind, blasted full of shrapnel, badly burned both by fire and mustard gas, he crawled to his machinegun. It had been blown into the air and come down on the southwest side, facing the wrong direction — except now, it was the right direction. He opened up on the Germans’ backs. Without cover, they scattered — or fell.
Alerted by the angry stutter of a Yank machinegun and Germans fleeing over the crest, the French deployed and attacked.
For uncounted months the woodsman lay unidentified in a French hospital, unable to speak more than “croaking like a crow.” The Armistice came and went. The French gave him a Croix de Guerre, and finally, America gave him a voyage home.
The Woodsman Returns
Eighteen months after the homecoming parades, the woodsman limped into his family’s yard and up the porch, where he dropped into a rocking chair. Pelted with questions, he waved them away.
“That Kaiser Bill,” he croaked, “He was a rough ’un” — and he never spoke of the war again. Over decades, family members were able to fill in some details. He lived, raising corn, beans and two sons, who went back to fight the Hun again. The woodsman had his Croix de Guerre made into a watchfob. He died just after V-E Day, 1945, and his dying words were:
“Don’t get beat, ever, by anything; anyone. You might get killed, but never get beat. Don’t never, ever give up. If your country calls, you answer her! And never ask for nothing but God’s light to see by.”
On Veteran’s Day, November 11th, if you haven’t got anyone else to honor, remember the woodsman. I will.