Cath Lab Digest

  You think you’ve trained them right. You do everything you can to make them confidently independent yet cared for. You admonish them about the dangers of the world — that money should be discreetly handled, that they need to be wary of strangers. Then one night, you get a phone call in which you are exuberantly told how he got lost and a young man offered directions by getting in the car and showing him because it “was on his way anyway.” My husband has said it a million times: It’s not easy raising parents.

  As far as I can determine from our office library, Ostomy Management, the precursor to Ostomy Wound Management, debuted in the late 1970s to address only issues relevant to ostomy care. Early copies feature mostly black-and-white text and figures (the latter frequently drawings as opposed to photographs) — the use of color reserved for advertisements. Thirty-two pages or so were saddle-stitched (ie, stapled) together.

Dar Williams and I drove to work yesterday with the windows half-way down and the sun roof angled open to a crystal blue sky and comfortably cool early summer temperatures. Sixteen miles door-to-door was hardly enough — I could have driven for hours, far past the office to ... oh, maybe California (only 3,000 miles away). It was that kind of morning.

The current issue was almost complete but still needed the usual last-minute flurry of proofing. About 2 hours in, I answered the phone to hear a kind but obviously frustrated gentleman share intimate details of his recent problems with an 1