May

2

Amos Bronson Alcott said, "To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant," and I believe this is the worst mistake a speculator can make, aside from asking the wrong questions and succumbing to promotion and churning.

Recently I wrote about the difficulty of steering between the Scylla of allowing pain and the Charybdis of reducing pain with the morphine drip, as you come out of the recovery room. The amazing thing about my experience with it was the 1000 systems in place to monitor and remedy. This was the one thing that the hospital was the most insistent I knew about and were in perfect operating order.

It reminds me of the advice that speculators are always given that they should constantly sell down to the sleeping point as prices go against them. It's guaranteed to give ease to the caretaker and guaranteed never to allow you to get back to using your own functions correctly. I have subsequently received some clinical backup for my views from my good friend Dr. V Hrehorovich. He is President of the Medical School of Antigua and previously ran several hospitals including Brooklyn Lutheran, which has 500,000 patient visits or so a year. He drew me diagrams to show how the pulmonary functions all even out when you use the morphine drip and it crowds out proper lung function.

I have not tested his assertion but his views based on 40 years of practice seem to me quite valuable, and a study of this subject would be very difficult with the double blindness, and all. In the writings on survival that my friend has written I see there is one thing that is totally wrong. What I didn't say was that with all the failings, with all the mistakes, all the indignities (I am reminded so much of the L'amour story, by Dr. Yak describing how I felt when I was thrust in a room with 100 other poor souls like myself, which I likened to the black hole of Calcutta), the system worked very well.

My friend was saved from a situation with a 25% risk of mortality. My doctors did a great job in getting me the right procedure at the right time, and there is opportunity to reflect on lessons rather than having a tribute to my friend at his grave.

My friend should have been much more gracious and appreciative in his writings and I will not be remiss in remedying this improper lack of appreciation in the future.


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