My first column about gargling hot salt water caused a stir in healing circles from Orangeburgh to Rowesville. I’m considered a generalist because I acquired all my knowledge from reading Dr. Gott’s columns every day.

You’ll be mildly interested to know that I’ve spent some hours in physicians’ waiting rooms in recent days, two of ’em. As Yogi Berra has been quoted, “You can learn a lot from observing.”

In each case I was there for my regular six-month checkups. In each I arrived early as is my wont. I have the silly notion that, if I arrive early, I’ll leave early. There were three doctors in one office and two in the other – all specialists. I saw one in each, old friends who know my ancient carcass well. They probed and listened, told me to keep on doing what I was and they’d see me in six months. I suppose at near 93 years old, I’ve achieved some stability.

On these occasions I always take something I have to read so I don’t get agitated like some others who don’t adjust well to long waits; that’s why they’re called waiting rooms. On those rare times when I’m alone and there’s a soap opera whanging on the TV, I turn it off.

But these rooms were jam-packed with people with walkers and crutches and two dollies with patients strapped onboard. Two young men walked in with handcuffs and guards. They were in and out in a jiffy. They looked pleasant enough but we weren’t sorry they kept moving. When names were called there were mini-traffic jams with me juggling my walker so you could get by with yours – sort of like a service on Easter Sunday in an old folks’ home. Four people were obese. There were vivid prints of barns and South Carolina marshes on the walls.

These accommodations will have to undergo rapid changes in future decades. Rooms must be larger. The patient mix will be steadily older and clinics will be specialized and speedy. There’ll be more nonagenarians, like me, and by that time I might be over a 100. In 60 years there’ll be 15,000-20,000 South Carolinian centenarians.

I’ll talk about me because I’m the only old person I see every day. I take two daily walks on a treadmill, not as fast or as far as I used to. I’ve learned two sets of crunch exercises I take every third day I’ve learned from two outpatient therapists.

The greatest danger for elderly people comes from falling. Every year, 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Forty percent of those end up in nursing homes and 20 percent never walk again. I’ve had some real doozy falls but, so far, broken nothing. These falls come about because of bad balance, weakness or taking more than four prescriptions. Those few doctors who specialize in the treatment of the aging sometime seem to be more interested in our mode of living, familial arrangements, in-home safety than in the geriatric diseases we suffer from and for which we take the prescriptions.

While we purport to admire some of the less-expensive medical systems in other civilized nations, we overlook the fact that, almost without exception, they have limits on medical procedures for the old or borderline hopeless. They practice euthanasia, as we’re beginning to do in Oregon.

So with my six-month check-ups thankfully behind me, I’m looking out at the rural world of South Carolina as someone drives me home. I’ll close with a wonderful quotation from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was wounded three times in the Civil War and was a high court judge for 48 years, speaking over the radio on his 90th birthday in 1931.

“The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter. There is a time to hear the kind words of friends and say to oneself: The work is done. But just as one says that, the answer comes: The race is over but the work is never done while the power to work remains. To live is to function.

And so I end with a line from a Latin poet more than 1,500 years ago. “Death plucks at my ear and says LIVE – I am coming.”

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

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