Broadband is needed in rural areas About three years back I had occasional hurts in my head. Pressure came and went. Doctors had no idea. Internet searches suggested symptoms were similar to meningitis. A CT scan done. Meninges were OK. Later, my right shoulder began to complain. It objected to reaching behind my back, and certain lifting movements hurt. Again, doctors had no idea except to say I had a rotator cuff injury. Baseball pitchers get this. It might go away in a year. One evening a year ago in Salt Lake City. (The day prior for insurance purposes, a doctor stopped a treadmill saying I had a possible heart problem). The next evening I did not feel good. Crappy is the word. Sitting on the back step I thought about instructions I had once read that indicated if you have a heart attack there is a procedure that might give a few more minutes by breathing in - then making a big "cough" to give pressure similar to CPR. Nah, not applicable. Why that feeling of doom? I later learned those, plus sweating, are typical of a pending heart attack. I had a fruit snack. Went to bed. Lying down, I had no energy to go the seven feet to a toilet and heaved up the food. Sweat. That's when I told Rita to get the car ready - we are going the two blocks to the ER. Walking in, I collapsed in a chair with wheels on it. The ER nurse took one look and dragged me across the room to his cubicle. The ladies at the admitting desk said, "He has to register first." Heart attack Nurse said, "That will be done later as I have a heart attack here!" I thought, "Gee, that's my problem." I got there in the nick of time because for a while they thought I was a goner. After stabilization, they rolled me what seemed like a long way to the cardiac lab. The on-call heart doc found nothing that a couple of stents could not fix. This the day before the prior treadmill alarm had me scheduled for a cardiac-cath, which would have caught the problem without all the excitement. Intensive care for a week. Home to recuperate. Meds to keep the body flushed. Don't get more than 30 minutes from a toilet! No exertion. No sex. The blame was put on bad cholesterol. I'd read the headlines about cholesterol but never read the stories. Seems over the years, two of my arteries got clogged like brush does in an irrigation ditch. A couple of arteries by the heart (the size of a pencil), had been obstructed to an opening the size of the lead in the pencil. The stent is like a mini door spring and is snaked up through the leg artery at the crotch and forced into the obstructed pipe. It is then allowed to spring open, which forces the fat clog out of the way. Blood then flows. These little guys are just over a half inch long and cost $2600 each. Add another zero - for installation. Afterward my so-called rotator cuff and other pains vanished. The docs say, "Interesting." The bad guy Truth is that were I overnight anywhere in the serving areas of my Beehive Telephone Co., I'd been DOA. Check your cholesterol. And get a treadmill heart analysis. If that indicates a problem, get a cardiac-cath, a procedure to "look" at your blood plumbing through obstructions many of us have - and don't know it. If the heart is overworked, it gets damaged and seldom will completely repair. That pump can be examined by an EKG, which shows visually how well it works. Insurance companies use this non-intrusive look-see, as an indicator of how to bet your life. At 71, they say I'm recovered and good to go - at least to end of this decade. Join me? Broadband Lack of understanding related to seniors health in rural areas seldom focus on enabling responsive medicine by DSL or fiber to the home. Yet more than any other group, senior citizens have the time and motivation to use broadband, and a major use would be direct access by rural health programs. Society deprives them this capability. So they move to the city. Studies show that it's far cheaper to keep them from moving as opposed to the greater burden on society by coming to town. That's another reason why I've asked RUS to finance rural fiber to the home. Can you hear me now?   Copyright 2002 by A. W. Brothers and Americas Network magazine. All rights reserved.   © Beehive Telephone Co.