Columnist and humorist Art Buchwald says he’s having ”the best time of my life” after deciding to refuse dialysis treatment and stay in a hospice.
”So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die,” Buchwald (80) wrote in a column published in newspapers on Tuesday. ”I don’t know if this is true or not, but I think some people, not many, are starting to wonder why I’m still around.”
”In fact, a few are sending me get-well cards. These are the hard ones to answer,” he wrote.
Buchwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, moved into a hospice in late January after kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate a leg just below the knee.
The syndicated humorist wrote that he refused lifelong dialysis treatment after deciding it would be too much to handle after losing his leg.
”I talked to my doctor, Mike Newman, and he said, ‘It’s your choice. You’re the only one who can decide what you want to do.’ Which was, I thought, a good answer.”
”When I got to the hospice I was under the impression it would be a two-or three-week stay,” Buchwald wrote.
”But here I still am, six weeks later, and I’ve gotten so well Medicare won’t pay for me anymore.”
He described a life of comfort at the hospice ”where I can have anything I want, and I can even send out to McDonald’s for milkshakes and hamburgers”.
”Everybody wants to please me,” Buchwald wrote. ”How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. … But in case you’re wondering, I’m having a swell time — the best time of my life.”
Buchwald built his career in Paris, where he wrote his first column in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1949. He returned to the United States in 1962 and began a long second career spoofing the Washington elite in his syndicated column. – Sapa-AP