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For Want of a Nail . . .

Medical science is advancing at the same time patient support is retreating.

It is as if we have built a Porsche that no one can maintain since no service appointments are available. Or the mechanic is too expensive to afford.

In either case, the fine Porsche hits the ditch for lack of maintenance. Similarly, patients that should be cured wither and die despite medical science since bureaucracy prevents their care.

My earache reevaluation is scheduled for April 16th. That will mark the two month anniversary of my earache developing. Two months. And we’re not even at the diagnosis stage, let alone treatment.

Letting an earache remain untreated for two months? Really?

That is not medicine.

Also this week, I had to cancel an appointment because I could not get through on the phone to an Intermountain contractor, a group called PrimeMed.

I wanted to know if my appointment was in Las Vegas or at their Pahrump location. There’s a difference.

I spent over an hour on hold the first time I called and then another hour the second time I called. I never got past being third in the queue on these two separate days.

It is not medicine when a patient cannot be treated because a low bid contractor won’t staff up so they can cut costs to make more money.

Let’s count this up:

My earache remains. My oral surgeon says it is not TMJ.

My sensitivity to sound reamins, my ENT doctor says it is unrelated to my earache.

My light sensitivity remains undiagnosed and untreated and the ophthalmologist says it will not be fixed with my cataract surgery. He can see nothing in my eyes to account for it.

My cataract surgery is yet to be done.

The numbness in my arms and the great pain in my right hand remains.

The ECT I require may not go forward since no hospital in the state apparently provides it at this time.

My nightmares and chronic insomnia remain after 33 years

This is what I want to tell all the unsympathetic nimrods who don’t answer the phone or don’t return calls or who only react when I post to social media.

Medicine is a noble profession.

The purpose of life is to advance and to do better.

Mediocrity is something abhorred and not embraced.

Pateients are patients first and then perhaps customers. Perhaps.

Anyone who is average and content with that should get out of medicine.

I expect great things from great people and great companies.

Medicine is for great people.

Work for yourself if you are happy with your miserably low expectations.

Work some weekends and nights and holidays like the rest of us.

Life does not get better if we expect less.

Read a book.

 

 

 

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I’m As Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take it Anymore!

Frustrating talk with my psychiatrist today. A phone consultation. She was reading off the form she had to complete to get me approved for ECT. I am paying the tens of thousands of dollars it will require since Humana and Intermountain (internal link) woould rather I die than pay for it.

Anyway, at one point she read to me a sentence which included “consumer preference.” I was shocked. Consumer preference!? I am a patient, damn it, not a consumer. A patient first, always. This is medicine.

I demanded to know who wrote that ugly and dangerous sentence but my doctor refused.

Whoever did write it is symptomatic of deiverying modern medical care. We are not buying aluminum siding or a new car, you can strike the word consumer from your dictionary now and foreverl

Everyone writing for the medical community or manning a phone should be required to spend some time in a hospital helping to treat patients. Learn duty of care means.

I’m too upset to write further.

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Poetry Uncategorized

The Sands o’Dee by Charles Kingsley

The Sands o’Dee

by Charles Kingsley (1819 -1875)
Illustrations by James Thurber as they appeared in The New Yorker
Read by Jean Aked

The Sands of Dee

“O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands of Dee!”
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o’er and o’er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see.
The rolling mist came down and hid the land–
And never home came she.

“Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair–
A tress of golden hair,
A drownèd maiden’s hair
Above the nets at sea?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes on Dee.”

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam,
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea;
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.

Written by Charles Kingsley

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It Is No Measure of Health to be Well Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society

It Is No Measure of Health to be Well Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society

Quote by Krishnamurti

This video guy talks too much but we all do.

He discusses this from the perspective of a person trying to fit into society.

I’d focus on blaming society and not the individual.

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Poetry Thoughts on writing video Writing by others

To the Ladies By Lady Mary Chudleigh

17th Century poet Mary Chudleigh fought the feminist battle three hundred years before most people thought that fight started. Read by the incomparable Ghizela Rowe.

To The Ladies

by Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656–1710)

Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
Which nothing, nothing can divide:
When she the word obey has said,
And man by law supreme has made,
Then all that’s kind is laid aside,
And nothing left but state and pride:
Fierce as an Eastern prince he grows,
And all his innate rigour shows:
Then but to look, to laugh, or speak,
Will the nuptial contract break.
Like mutes she signs alone must make,
And never any freedom take:
But still be governed by a nod,
And fear her husband as a God:
Him still must serve, him still obey,
And nothing act, and nothing say,
But what her haughty lord thinks fit,
Who with the power, has all the wit.
Then shun, oh! shun that wretched state,
And all the fawning flatt’rers hate:
Value your selves, and men despise,
You must be proud, if you’ll be wise.

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What Could Possibly Be Wrong?

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Snake by D.H. Lawrence

As a young teenager I practiced a great deal with a slingshot called a Wrist Rocket. They’re still sold today.

After some time I got quite accurate and one day a bird in a tree seemed a natural target.

I hit that bird square in the chest. It let out a painful cry and fluttered away with its injury.

I can still hear that cry and I never shot anything living again.

Lawrence battles against the practice of the time to kill snakes. He fought that urge well but eventually gave in a little. Enough to be disgusted with himself.

As I was with that bird.

Snake

by D. H. Lawrence né David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Read by Tom O’Bedlam

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When Will They Stop?

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Leopard-Skin Pill-Pox Hat by Bob Dylan

Dylan wrote a great song but didn’t put great music to it. Beck put great music to it.

Well I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby how your
Head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well you, look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime?
Yes, I just wanna see
If it’s really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head just like a
Mattress balances on a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well if you, wanna see the sun rise
Honey, I know where
We’ll go out and see it sometime
We’ll both just sit there and stare
Me with my belt wrapped around my head
And you just sittin’ there
In your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat.

Well, I see you got a new boyfriend
You know, I never seen him before
Well, I saw him
Makin’ love to you
You forgot to close the garage door
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It’s your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat.

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Today In The Tecopa Mines Region Part 4