Gout

So I’m with my Dad in a couldn’t-be-sadder urine-scented nursing facility in Lackawanna, NY, home to an alleged terrorist cell  and non-stop walls of twelve foot high dirty snowbanks.  (Note to self: Wouldn’t Dirty Snowbank be a great name for shaved ice cocktail blended with Grey Goose and Kahlua. Let's garnish that with cocoa-dusted coffee beans  or maybe chocolate-covered raisins.)

The two of us are watching a Buffalo Bills pregame show on a circa 1988 television and reminiscing about other Bills games I don’t remember but pretend I do cause it gives us something to talk about. There is not a lot to talk about when the clock of your life is playing down in a urine-scented nursing facility with roach motels in the kitchen and a kick line of demented Medicaid patients in the hallways.

Anyway, Dad hasn’t been able to walk/get out of bed for a couple months now, the result of a a steroid administered too long in too high dosages. The buff action-figures-in-suits commentating on the game no doubt take steroids too; too bad TV isn’t interactive so they could watch their watcher. According to a story in the New York Times 18 of the top 20 most-watched telecasts this season were football games.  Football, the NYT article says, “has for decades been declared the ideal sport for television, because of its high quotient of action and natural breaks for commercials.”

A commercial that catches my imagination is for a gout drug named Uloric. In it, a worried-looking middle-aged man walks through the mall, hikes a mountains, rides a city bus, carrying with him a big beaker of green uric acid. After he takes Uloric, he smiles more and is able to do these things with only a much smaller beaker.  According to the commercial:

"A small number of heart attacks, strokes and heart-related deaths were seen in clinical studies. It is not certain that ULORIC caused these events."

It might not be certain, but the possibility worries me. Actually I didn't think people still suffered from gout. In my mind gout is associated with men in wigs and knickers, not golf shirts and khakis; Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, those guys.

What I am worried about is my dad whose muscles are atrophied from too many (legal) steroids and who may never again walk a mall or mountain. An aide comes into the room and opens a smudged curtain that until now has hid a grimy window overlooking a parking lot full of salt-stained working-class vehicles. The game starts and the Bill eventually lose to the Patriots.

A beaker of coffee liqueur, vodka and chocolate might be nice right now.