If your mother in anything like my mother, this will make perfect sense. Shortly after becoming a widow fourteen years ago, my now eighty-eight-year-old mother began to progressively increase her schedule of doctor visits. She lives alone in a large apartment in Philadelphia, while I, a physician and her oldest son, throughout my career have lived and worked several states away. Despite-or perhaps because of-this, in recent years the number of phone calls from my mother about her medical care began to increase, with requests to find her a doctor, call a doctor for her, get her an appointment, change her appointment, cancel her appointment, and reschedule her appointment, as well as questions about whether she should take certain medications or have specific tests.
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