My Statin Doll

Dear Children:

As a gimlet-eyed college student, I took employment at a funeral home. The charm of the job was that it came with an apartment. To be sure, there was also a roommate. He and I did whatever was beneath the dignity of the funeral director including sweeping up, driving the hearse and ushering at funerals.

Of course, the real reason for the upstairs apartment was answering ambulance calls in the middle of the night. Yup: This was a time before licensed EMTs, $900 trips to the hospital and lawsuits over every little thing. Two 19-year-olds would visit the scene of a car crash, cart off gunshot victims, lash down loonies destined for the psych ward, haul baleful women in their 38th week of pregnancy, wait outside domestic disturbance residences to see which spouse was the bloodiest and lots of other fun and pukey tricks of the trade.

In that town was also a thing we don’t see anymore, an elected coroner. Funeral directors took gentlemanly turns running unopposed for the office as parcel to their civic duty thereby achieving an equitable division of such labor and stiffs paid for by the county.

Coroners kept for their own purposes personal copies of the death certificates they were obliged to sign. There were resident such certificates that dated way, way back and included magisterial documents attested to by previous owners of the funeral home and, by extension, sometime coroners. It was the Cause of Death blank that interested me most. “Ran off road, hit tree” will tell you the quality of insight required at that time and place. There was no shortage of “natural causes”, “old age”, failure to thrive” and, my all-time favorite, “death by misadventure”.

Death by misadventure is a euphemism we should bring back. It simply means that the croakee was in that predicament as a consequence of his own actions. If he was found smeared along the railroad tracks and there was detected the smell of alcohol, it didn’t take much medical learning to know that the wretch had done this thing without benefit of counsel. His demise was a calamity that had befallen a fool who paid a fool’s price.

We heard a speaker just last Friday describe, in part, why statin drugs prescribed for high cholesterol is a 30 billion dollar business. The first 20% is legit. That’s $6 billion. There rest is humbug. An unholy fraction of users derive no benefit whatsoever both because cholesterol is not the bogeyman we thought and because the drug doesn’t lower cholesterol. Statins actually harm another significant fraction. But what to put on the death certificate? Try this: Notwithstanding our best efforts that included ample BS and liberal doses of expensive snake oil, the patient died anyway ... death by misadventure.

But get the not-so-subtle shift. This time the system killed him. Blame big tobacco, fast food, smog, the gun culture, soul-sucking ghetto life, availability of crack, TV trays, TV dinners, TV, broken homes, crumbling schools, pharmaceutical houses, too few jails, too many jails, sugary cereal, red meat, ersatz popcorn butter, corporate agriculture, organized religion, secularism, lenient courts, activist judges, you get the idea.

There are plenty of things that need fixing. Lets fix them, you and me. There is nothing so pathetic as a peace activist who has a peace garden in her back yard. That is a vain and hopeless enterprise. If you’re for peace, get in the way of the bullets. If you’re for release of the captives, give one a job. If you see a hungry person, you can be certain that a bagel will do better work than a platitude. Better yet, if all you have to offer is an empty gesture, own up to it now. You’ll feel better. It costs your life either way.

There is no such thing as a person who by virtue of his lack of virtue gets himself squashed by a train. There is also no such thing as a killer movie popcorn conglomerate. People get themselves into trouble. People make and buy things they oughtn’t. People make mistakes. People are also the lever by which wrongs are righted.

Come to think of it, of the precious few important things over which we have complete control, to act or not act is one.

Much Love,

Poppy