Liberated and/or Doomed

    Maybe a mixture of both.  That's the feeling you get when you cancel your doctors' appointments.  It's not that I don't believe in health care, but there is a time and a place for everything.
   Kids hardly ever seem to get sick anymore, except in the most terrible instances where the poor little tykes are diagnosed with cancer.  Back in the day, kids routinely got all the "childhood diseases," and we were no exception:  Chicken pox, which was usually considered a minor disease, when compared to the others; Mumps, which was so very uncomfortable;  Whooping Cough, which threatened Dorothy's life during her severe coughing and strangling spells; Measles, the "regular, red" sort, from which I got so sick I wanted to die;  German Measles, another mild, "You're only sick for about one week" ailment. Our old school Report Cards document our absences during these sieges, some for weeks at a time, and we loved to go to school, hated missing it.
   Even a generation later, my own children, 2 of them, were very sick with Chicken Pox, and its lasting effects of blisters and styes.  They were not yet able to be protected from Mumps, which caused them a lot of misery and pain, from which the youngest was saved due to the advent of the vaccine.
    For a time, there was, and maybe still is, a theory that there are so many more child cancer victims today because children are now spared from the childhood diseases which routinely took the lives of those kids with the weakest immune systems. I think environmental causes have pretty much displaced that theory, though it probably holds a grain of truth, if not more.
    The focus of modern medicine is, and rightfully so, on maintaining health and preventing diseases.  What can be done for treating acquired and chronic conditions can be undoubtedly helpful, some if not all the time.   After all, what doctors and health providers do is prolong your life, not save it.