WAY BACK IN 1974, I did a favor for a friend: he was managing a small restaurant on Wyoming Avenue in Forty Fort and needed the day off. One of his responsibilities as manager was to tend the bar, which is what I did that day. This was not a drinker’s bar—the majority of drinks were to accompany a lunch or dinner.
I was 23, still a kid. There was a young man not more than a few years older than me sitting at the end of the bar when I came in. He was wearing a medical outfit, and he looked like a nurse at a time when male nurses were a novelty.
Nursing a drink.
Despondent. That was immediately obvious.
After a while I walked over and asked him what was wrong.
“Hey, buddy,” asked the bartender, “you wanna talk about it?”
He looked at me and said, “Do you know what the rate of Caesarean sections is in the United States?”
“No.”
He looked at me and said, “It’s between 20 and 40% in a lot of American hospitals. You got that? Twenty thirty forty percent of the births in this country are C-sections! I just got back from working in a hospital in Sweden for a year. You wanna know what the rate of C-sections is there?”
“What?”
He looked at me and said, “Less than five percent!”
He was angry when he said it. 1
He took a sip of his drink, hook his head, and said, almost to himself, “One-tenth of ours!”
I was aware that ours was relatively high and rising compared to the rest of the industrialized world. But not like that!
He took a big sip of his drink.
His expression changed to resignation. “Now ask me what’s the number one cause of emergency C-sections in America.”
“What?”
He looked at me and said, “Because the surgeon is late for his tee-off on the golf course.”
I poured him another drink and one for myself . . .
FEATURED IMAGE: About the photo at the top of this pageL yeah, he’s not in nurse blues, and he’s got a beer instead of a bourbon, but if this guy was sitting at my bar, I’d watch him with that first drink. Then I’d walk over, buy him his second drink, and ask, “Hey buddy, wanna talk about it?”
For some reason this brings to mind a conversation I had with a teacher of mine in high school along about 1977. He was retired military. Survived WWII and had been to every country in the world except Russia and China (not easy countries for an American colonel to visit in those days!).
He was from the small southern town I had moved to just before high school. Black guy who had come back to the integrated south to make a difference (he gave up on the teaching part the following year, died a few years after that).
He once told me that the United States was doomed to fail in the next century or so. I asked him why and he said:
“The countries we’ll be competing with treat teachers like we treat doctors and treat doctors like we treat teachers.”
I haven’t seen much over the ensuing forty years to suggest he was wrong.
Funny I’ve been thinking about Mr. Broxton a lot lately. I think a few of our conversations might make for good posts...Maybe not today (I’m off) but soon. Thanks for the encouragement!