"Tricare"
This morning on Andante's site, Collective Sigh, the first weblog I go to these days, to see how she is dealing with her medical troubles -- and paying for the cures -- Left Leaning Lady threw in the term "Tricare." I had never heard of that.
I immediately thought to add a comment on the order of: I guess by not being as up on the present as I am on the past and (I like to think) on the future, I don't know what this "Tricare" thing that you guys are so casually throwing around, is. I'll just have to ask my old friend, Professor Google. Can't let you get too far ahead of me on the latest, though I suppose that's always inevitable.
But I thought better of posting that comment and instead I asked the Professor at once.
Tricare seems to be a three-pronged approach by which the Govt gives medical insurance coverage to military people.
Hey, I impulsively thought, maybe this means me!
But alas, as I quickly reminded myself, it has already been 52 years since I was in the military. Instead I am a "veteran" now, and of a conflict whose participants are starting to leave, to the point where I can't help wondering about certain things. Not long ago the ranks of American veterans of the First World War were reduced to just one guy, and I don't know if he is still around. And that war ended just 13 years before I was born!
It's striking how vivid everything about that military experience remains, as if I am still in it, so that Tricare should be current events. My two month stay in an Air Force hospital in 1953 recovering from something called regional enteritis is still fresh in my mind, so that my mind thinks it should know perfectly well what Tricare is, and that I should be eligible. I think that's because of questions about that hospital jaunt that have not answered themselves.
One involves wondering whether people still get regional enteritis, or ileits, or whether I was the lucky recipient of the rarest of diseases, right up there with the possibility of finding a diamond in my creek. In all these decades since, I've only heard of one other person, in the news or personally, that caught it, and that was none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. He contracted it at nearly the same time that I did, and his wife Mamie gave him a laxative. I don't remember if they threw him in the hospital, too. The more I think about it, the more I think that they did. After all, he was the President, just as I was ...well ...me.
My other questions have to do with feeling lucky that I was in the Air Force, to get that operation and all that care afterward and over such a long period. What would have happened if I hadn't been in the military? Or would I have contracted that inflammation of the intestines at all, if I hadn't been Government Issue.
These are all questions worthy of a lifetime's reflections.
I immediately thought to add a comment on the order of: I guess by not being as up on the present as I am on the past and (I like to think) on the future, I don't know what this "Tricare" thing that you guys are so casually throwing around, is. I'll just have to ask my old friend, Professor Google. Can't let you get too far ahead of me on the latest, though I suppose that's always inevitable.
But I thought better of posting that comment and instead I asked the Professor at once.
Tricare seems to be a three-pronged approach by which the Govt gives medical insurance coverage to military people.
Hey, I impulsively thought, maybe this means me!
But alas, as I quickly reminded myself, it has already been 52 years since I was in the military. Instead I am a "veteran" now, and of a conflict whose participants are starting to leave, to the point where I can't help wondering about certain things. Not long ago the ranks of American veterans of the First World War were reduced to just one guy, and I don't know if he is still around. And that war ended just 13 years before I was born!
It's striking how vivid everything about that military experience remains, as if I am still in it, so that Tricare should be current events. My two month stay in an Air Force hospital in 1953 recovering from something called regional enteritis is still fresh in my mind, so that my mind thinks it should know perfectly well what Tricare is, and that I should be eligible. I think that's because of questions about that hospital jaunt that have not answered themselves.
One involves wondering whether people still get regional enteritis, or ileits, or whether I was the lucky recipient of the rarest of diseases, right up there with the possibility of finding a diamond in my creek. In all these decades since, I've only heard of one other person, in the news or personally, that caught it, and that was none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. He contracted it at nearly the same time that I did, and his wife Mamie gave him a laxative. I don't remember if they threw him in the hospital, too. The more I think about it, the more I think that they did. After all, he was the President, just as I was ...well ...me.
My other questions have to do with feeling lucky that I was in the Air Force, to get that operation and all that care afterward and over such a long period. What would have happened if I hadn't been in the military? Or would I have contracted that inflammation of the intestines at all, if I hadn't been Government Issue.
These are all questions worthy of a lifetime's reflections.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 9:04 AM
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