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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Bypass Surgery
Must Often be Repeated
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
In 1995 I underwent quadruple heart bypass
surgery. Now, 11 years later, an angiogram was
taken and I was told that the grafts are not
functioning well. A vein from my left leg was
used for the grafts. As a result, a second bypass
appears to be imminent. Is this a common
occurrence? -- I.C.
ANSWER: Heart
artery grafts are an amazing medical triumph.
They save lives. They prevent heart attacks. They
bring blood to a blood-starved heart. However,
they don’t cure the underlying processes
that clog blood vessels. Those processes are
atherosclerosis -- artery hardening -- and artery
blockage with cholesterol, fat and other
material.
Diet, exercise,
weight loss, and cholesterol and blood pressure
control are things over which people have control
and which can keep arteries free of obstructing
buildup. Genes, however, are something we cannot
control. And their influence on artery hardening
goes on. They also influence buildup in grafts.
In about 10 years
after bypass surgery, plaque -- the obstructing
buildup on artery walls -- greatly affects the
flow of blood through many grafts. The degree to
which it obstructs blood flow depends on how much
people have done on their own to prevent plaque
formation and how much influence their genes have
on plaque buildup. It also depends on the kind of
grafts used. Artery grafts resist plaque buildup
better than vein grafts, but they are not always
possible.
You are not
unique. Repeat bypass surgery is relatively
common.
LETTERS
from
a
SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his
SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First
published October, 1902
Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head
of the House of Graham & Company,
Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on
‘Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to
his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to his
intimates as "Piggy."
No.2
FROM John Graham,
at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
Mr. Pierrepont’s expense
account has just passed under his father’s
eye, and has furnished him with a text for some
plain particularities.
II
Chicago, May 4,
198_
Dear Pierrepont:
The cashier has just handed me your expense
account for the month, and it fairly makes a
fellow hump-shouldered to look it over. When I
told you that I wished you to get a liberal
education, I didn’t mean that I wanted to
buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won’t
break me, but they will break you unless you are
very, very careful.
I have noticed for
the last two years that your accounts have been
growing heavier every month, but I haven’t
seen any signs of your taking honors to justify
the increased operating expenses; and that is bad
business - a good deal like feeding his weight in
corn to a scalawag steer that won’t fat up.
I haven’t
said anything about this before, as I trusted a
good deal to your native common-sense to keep you
from making a fool of yourself in the way that
some of these young fellows who haven’t had
to work for it do. But because I have sat tight,
I don’t want you to get it into your head
that the old man’s rich, and that he can
stand it, because he won’t stand it after
you leave college. The sooner you adjust your
spending to what your earning capacity will be,
the easier they will find it to live together.
The only sure way
that a man can get rich quick is to have it given
to him or to inherit it. You are not going to get
rich that way - at least, not until after you
have proved your ability to hold a pretty
important position with the firm; and, of course,
there is just one place from which a man can
start for that position with Graham & Co. It
doesn’t make any difference whether he is
the son of the old man or of the cellar boss -
that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the
office end of this business is a seat at the
mailing-desk with eight dollars every Saturday
night.
I can’t hand
out any ready-made success to you. It would do
you no good, and it would do the house harm.
There is plenty of room at the top here, but
there is no elevator in the building. Starting,
as you do, with a good education, you should be
able to climb quicker than the fellow who
hasn’t got it; but there’s going to be
a time when you begin at the factory when you
won’t be able to lick stamps so fast as the
other boys at the desk. Yet the man who
hasn’t licked stamps isn’t fit to write
letters. Natural, that is the time when knowing
whether the pie comes before the ice-cream, and
how to run an automobile isn’t going to be
of any real use to you.
I simply mention
these things because I am afraid your ideas as to
the basis on which you are coming with the house
have swelled up a little in the East. I can give
you a start, but after that you will have to
dynamite your way to the front by yourself. It is
all with the man. I you gave some fellows a
talent wrapped in a napkin to start with in
business, they would swap the talent for a gold
brick and lose the napkin; and there are others
that you could start out with just a napkin, who
would set up with it in the dry-goods business in
a small way, and then coax the other
fellow’s talent into it.
I have pride
enough to believe that you have the right sort of
stuff in you, but I want to see some of it come
out. You will never make a good merchant of
yourself by reversing the order in which the Lord
decreed that we should proceed - learning the
spending before the earning end of business. Pay
day is always a month off for the spend-thrift,
and he is never able to realize more than sixty
cents on any dollar that comes to him. But a
dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a
good business man, and he never spends the
dollar. It’s the man who keeps saving up and
expenses down that buys an interest in the
concern. That is where you are going to find
yourself weak if your expense accounts don’t
lie; and they generally don’t lie in that
particular way, though Baron Munchausen was the
first traveling man, and my drummers’ bills
still show his influence.
I know that when a
lot of young men get off by themselves, some of
them think that recklessness with money brands
them as good fellows, and that carefulness is
meanness. That is the one end of a college
education which is pure cussedness; and that is
the one thing which makes nine business men out
of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school.
But on the other hand, that is the spot where a
young man has the chance to show that he is not a
lightweight. I know that a good many people say I
am a pretty close proposition; that I make every
hog which goes through my packing-house give up
more lard than the Lord gave him gross weight;
that I have improved on Nature to the extent of
getting four hams out of an animal which began
life with two; but you have lived with me long
enough to know that my hand is usually in my
pocket at the right time.
Now I want to say
right here that the meanest man alive is the one
who is generous with money that he has to had to
sweat for, and that the boy who is a good fellow
at some one else’s expense would not work up
into a first-class fertilizer. That same ambition
to be known as a good fellow has crowded my
office with second-rate clerks, and they always
will be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold
it down until you have worked for a year. Then,
if your ambition runs to hunching up all week
over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a
few rounds of drinks for the boys on Saturday
night, there is no objection to your gratifying
it; for I will know that the Lord didn’t
intend you to be your own boss.
You know how I
began - I was started off with a kick, but that
proved a kick up, and to the end every one since
has lifted me a little bit higher. I got two
dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and
you can bet I knew just how many pennies there
were in each of those dollars, and how hard the
floor was. That is what you have got to learn.
I remember when I
was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out
through the draw at Buffalo when I saw little
Bill Riggs, the butcher, standing up above me on
the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in
his basket. They were a little short in the
galley on that trip, so I called up to Bill and
he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how
much, and he yelled back, "about a
dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when
we struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I
thought I would like a little more of it. So I
went up to Bill’s shop and asked him for a
piece of the same. But this time he gave me a
little roast, not near so big as the other, and
it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked
him how much, he answered "about a
dollar." He simply didn’t have any
sense of values, and that’s the business
man’s sixth sense. Bill has always been a
big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is
very, very poor.
The Bills
ain’t all in the butcher business. I’ve
got some of them right now in my office, but they
will never climb over the railing that separates
the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would
put in half the time thinking for the house that
they give up to hatching out reasons why they
ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary
accounts, I couldn’t keep them out of our
private offices with a pole-ax, and I
wouldn’t want to; for they could double
their salaries and my profits in a year. But I
always lay it down as a safe proposition that the
fellow who has to break open the baby’s bank
toward the last of the week for car-fare
isn’t going to be any Russel Sage when it
comes to trading with the old man’s money.
He’d punch my bank account as full of holes
as a carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman
that they’d got in a corner.
Now I know
you’ll say that I don’t understand how
it is; that you’ve got to do as the other
fellows do; and that things have changed since I
was a boy. There’s nothing in it. Adam
invented all the different ways in which a young
man can make a fool of himself, and the college
yell at the end of them is just a frill that
doesn’t change essentials. The boy who does
anything just because the other fellows do it is
apt to scratch a poor man’s back all his
life. He’s the chap that’s buying wheat
at ninety-seven cents the day before the market
breaks. They call him ‘the country’ in
the market reports, but the city’s full of
him. It’s the fellow who has the spunk to
think and act for himself, and sells short when
prices hit the high C and the house is standing
on its hind legs yelling for more, that sits in
the directors’ meetings when he gets on
toward forty.
We’ve got an
old steer out at the packing-house that stands
around at the foot of the runway leading up to
the killing pens, looking for all the world like
one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker
box before the grocery - sort of sad-eyed, dreamy
old cuss - always has two or three straws from
his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
You never saw a steer that looked as if he took
less interest in things. But by and by the boys
drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows
maybe, if we’re canning, and then
you’ll see Old Abe move off up that runway,
sort of beckoning the bunch after him with that
wicked old stump of a tail of his, as if there
was something mighty interesting to steers at the
top, and something that every Texan and Colorado,
raw from the prairies, ought to have a look at to
put a metropolitan finish on him. Those steers
just naturally follow along on up that runway and
into the killing pens. But just as they get to
the top, Old Abe, someways, gets lost in the
crowd, and he isn’t among those present when
the gates are closed and the real trouble begins
for his new friends.
I never saw a
dozen boys together that there wasn’t an Old
Abe among them. If you find your crowd following
him, keep away from it. There are times when
it’s safest to be lonesome. Use a little
common-sense, caution and conscience. You can
stock a store with those three commodities, when
you get enough of them. But you’ve got to
begin getting them young. They ain’t
catching after you toughen up a bit.
You needn’t
write me if you feel yourself getting them. The
symptoms will show in your expense account.
Good-by; life’s too short to write letters
and New York’s calling me on the wire.
Your affectionate
father,
John Graham.
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