LYN’S LEDGER
Lyndon Thomas Insurance
MAY 2020
We Help You With Medicare.
AGE-OLD QUESTIONS
into 300 pounds of leaping wreckage and are very adept at performing the nasty trick of jumping in front of your car and doing a lot of damage. Collisions between deer and cars kill a certain number of humans in the U.S. every year. Usually solitary during the warm months, deer will congregate during the winter to look for food. A herd of deer can wipe out a cornfield in minutes or a hay storage lot in a few more minutes — with accompanying economic destruction for the farmer. During the heavy snowfall winter of 1968–69, a few miles from home, we saw a herd of deer numbering in the hundreds. We were glad they were not coming in our direction! The coronavirus event we are now in the middle of renews and elevates age-old questions with new complexity and intensity: How is a disease transmitted? How do we secure effective and affordable means of diagnosis? How do we determine acceptable costs that can mitigate and slow the spread? How do we care for those who are sick? We need help! If you pray, then pray for our leaders as we continue to flatten the curve. Pray for, thank, and encourage our medical providers any opportunity you have. Pray for our communities and support our neighbors as the economic destruction of the shutdown takes its toll on the health and well-being of far more people than will have ever caught the virus. Let’s wrap up on a more cheerful note! Medicare continues to provide coverage for those 65 and over in a magnificent fashion. While health care delivery has been disrupted during this time, Medicare coverage has not. That is a real blessing!
One of my earliest childhood memories is looking out of the kitchen window trying the find the chicken that gave me chicken pox! It made sense to me that if I had chicken pox, then I would have caught it from a chicken. Mom corrected my childhood error. Another early memory is watching out the same window as Dad took aim while he sidestepped a drooling, charging skunk. Any skunk initiating contact with humans, especially in daylight, is assumed to be rabid. Rabies is a deadly virus that transmits easily from animals to humans, and skunks are common hosts. I grew up on a farm in South Dakota. In rural areas, interaction with nature often has a sharper edge than in suburbia. When I was 15, Princess, our shepherd-collie got into it with a skunk that wandered into the yard. When it was all over, the skunk was dead, the dog and the yard smelled horrible, and Princess had a few nicks about her head. So the skunk’s head was sent to the state university lab to be tested for rabies, and Princess went into quarantine. Next to the barn, we built a 6-foot fence out of wire panels. Princess had never been shut inside of anything in her life. We fed her well, visited her often, and spoke lovingly to her, but two days of quarantine was all she could take. When she chose to leave, it was a sight to behold: She sailed over that 6-foot fence with ease. We didn’t put her back in quarantine, but I remember keeping a pretty close eye on her. A few days later the test for rabies in the skunk came back negative. We were pleased that Princess needed no veterinary treatment.
In the movie “Bambi,” the titular deer is cute and lovable. Real life Bambis of the “mule and white tail” variety grow
–Lyn Thomas
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