Old Decathlon Olympics Journal

May 29th entered May 30th- My brother's heart is failing

Saturday, May 29th entered May 30th, 2004

I talked to my brother late Friday night, seems that he has had some very serious heart problems that he has not wanted to tell me about. He is 48. His heart is functioning at 10 percent. Regardless of what I know about heart conditions ten percent is not good. He told me that he is on his third heart doctor and the pacer thing won’t work. He needs a heart transplant.

My brother got accepted into medical school, which is a feat all by its self. He dropped out and we have never really discussed why beyond my thinking that he was making a big mistake. We were both young. I quit college the first time too. So who am I to tell him anything?

We are not really close, but we do talk. I don’t want my brother to die. As far as I am concerned I am the oldest, and after mom and dad it should be me. Actually I am a coward when it comes to people dieing. Maybe coward is not the right word, but death does not sit well with me. Other people seem to take it in stride and consider it a natural process, whereas I just get even crazier when someone I know and love dies, or talks about the possibility of their dieing.

I believe in God, but I still wonder if we are all just some kind of biological organism that crawled out of the seas millions of years ago and when we are done, we are just simply done.

Oh, I have had people argue with me and tell me that I cannot possibly believe in God and make the statement that I just made. Well, I know that I believe in God, but everything else, and I mean absolutely everything else is still a mystery to me. I read science journals, I read archeological journals, and so much more, but I am never more amazed than when I look at a time line of human civilization and realize how far man has come from when we were suppose to have crawled out of the sea or when Eve got Adam to bite the apple.

Does anyone realize how young air conditioning technology is when compared to the grand scheme of things? And there are so many other technologies that are even more recent. Now, think about all of that and then realize that even the most advanced futuristic movies depict mankind or alien kind as warring creatures, regardless of which piece of dirt their on hurling through space.

Now think about stem cells. What a marvelous scientific discovery. Then realize that George W. Bush is leading or following the extreme right and has limited the possible future discoveries that could come of stem cell technology, yet now he leads our country on a Nation building quest on foreign soil. Our sons and daughters are being put in harms way all around the globe. The Veterans Administration does not even have a computer system that can identify who is a veteran and who isn’t for medical purposes, but we got bombs, big bombs. We do not have stem cell research facilities that are government funded or a national computer system to track veterans in need of medical services due to the injuries that they received in service to their country – but we got bombs. If any of y’all reading this thinks that it is not connected or that I am ranting all I can say is that ignorance is bliss, isn’t it?

And I still am not ready for my brother to cross over, as they say.