Life is a frail moth flying
Caught in the web of the years that pass.
– Sara Teasdale
Definition of frail
adj.frail·er, frail·est
1. Physically weak or delicate: an invalid’s frail body; in frail health. See Synonyms at weak.
2. Easily broken or destroyed; fragile: a flower with a frail stem.
3. Not strong or substantial; slight: a frail voice; evidence too frail to stand up in court.
4. Easily led astray; morally weak.
The old man was confident, you can be easily led astray while NOT being morally weak. (According to whom?)
If it wasn’t for the nephrectomy on the left side and the hernia on the right side, he’d have a six-pack for sure. Doctors identified the hernia as “benign.” Which best he could figure meant it’s not in their bodies or the bodies of anybody they love.
Every six months at his semi-annual physical, the doctor would tap the protrusion like she was picking the best watermelon for the family picnic. Tap, Tap. Oh, that’s good. When it gets hard, that’s when we have to worry.
The old man thought the protrusion was getting larger. Mrs. TOM thought the same. Recall the dining room scene in the original Alien movie.
Like a nest of hot snakes roiling, that’s how his stomach could feel. More often. No way to live. But if you get a CT w/o contrast, suppose they find something. Suppose they have to operate.
Suppose they have to operate on you.
Struggles of frail patients
Elderly and frail are two things that don’t go well together. Such people may want to reconsider having even minor surgery done, according to a recent study.
Frail, older adults are more likely to die than other patients after supposedly minor procedures, according to research recently published in “JAMA Surgery.” Even when the surgery goes well and there are no complications, such patients are more likely to die.
“Our data indicate that there are no low-risk procedures among patients, who are frail,” Dr. Daniel Hall and his co-authors concluded in their study.
Routine, simple surgeries should be discussed by surgeons with the patient and their family to decide if the potential benefits warrant the increased risk, researchers said.
Frailty is an accumulation of problems that lead patients vulnerable to stressors, such as surgery, according to a New York Times story on the study. Even healthy patients can require a lot of reserve from their bodies to recover after surgery, and frail people may already be using whatever reserve they have to get through their daily lives.
After operations the frail can find it harder to regain strength and mobility, and to return to independent lives. Frailty is often measured by gait and grip strength, and unintended weight loss and exhaustion.
Dr. Hall and his colleagues developed a risk analysis index to calculate frailty based on illnesses, cognitive decline, ability to perform daily living activities, and other factors derived from medical records.
Surgeons consider operations high-risk if their 30-day mortality rate exceeds 1%. Even the lowest-risk procedures such as removing a cyst from the hand or wrist, repairing a hernia [!!!] or removing an appendix, had a 1.5% mortality rate within 30 days for frail patients. For the very frail, the figure was more than 10%.
The death rates rose over time. By 90 days, mortality for low-risk surgery climbed to 5% in the frail and about 23% in the very frail. After six months, about 9% of frail patients and 35-43% of the very frail died.
The old man didn’t feel frail.
Except for his stomach.