FIRST, THE GOOD COMPLIMENT

First the good compliment. A recent report of mine showing that benzodiazepines such as valium and ativan weren’t of much use in controlling disease-related delirium was well received. The editors said that it was “well written” and “well organized” and potentially important”. These complements came about because I had used sophisticated statistical software to analyze a number of medical studies on the subject so as to demonstrate that if you give a delirious patients enough dope to knock them out as if they had been hit over the head with a baseball bat, its not so good for their eventual recovery. This is not exactly a paradigm shift in medical understanding, but it’s nice to be appreciated.

Then the well meant but not so good compliment. A friend said to me: “It looks like the big one is coming up for you next year,” referring to my eightieth birthday. “What are you planning?” I actually hadn’t been planning anything, sort of along the lines of if you don’t plan for something, it won’t happen, but the question set off the usual firecracker string of fantasies.

Fantasy #1: Reassign the birthday to February 29. In this way, by counting in leap-years, as in “The Pirates of Penzance”, my eightieth birthday won’t come up until 2250.

Fantasy #2: My picture on the cover of Time over the caption “An Average Joe Turns 80” with a short bio listing early signs of promise. At age eleven, while attending St. Veronica’s school in Little Italy, I was chosen for the lead in “A Christmas Carol”—perhaps because all the other students had Italian accents. At fourteen, I was appointed president of my geometry class. There were also later realizations of my promise. At twenty five, I was the winner of an international shipboard table tennis tournament, for which I received a genuine plastic cigarette case. At fifty-five, I was named “Employee of the Month” at the Livermore VA Hospital, an honor I shared with the Lady who ran the hospital canteen and the guy who took out the garbage. And at age sixty-nine, I was the recipient of a handsome “Certificate of Excellence”, printed on heavy bond paper and suitable for framing, for my work as a telephone doctor in the Vallejo Kaiser Flu Cue program.

Fantasy #3: The Denver stadium Obama used for his acceptance speech is packed with my friends and relatives (well, not exactly packed; there are 79,990 empty seats) while Britney Spears sings “Happy Birthday” to me the way Marilyn sang it to Kennedy.

Fantasy #4: The mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial where, in an apt reference to Martin Luther King’s oratory, combined with a thrilling response to the challenge of old-age vertigo, I begin my speech with the words “I have a Dramamine.”

Enough of the fantasy life; we all have to get back to reality, don’t we?

Ted Lonerghan