All who know me have heard (too often) that I do not want to live with animals, human or otherwise. I was raised on a farm where animals live outside or in the barn. Today I spent the day dog-sitting for my granddaughter's new dog. She has a 3 year old Rottweiler/Bassett hound combo. We assumed there was not another of that combination anywhere, but were wrong. Apparently dog lightning does strike twice. Buddy Dog advertised a rescue dog from Puerto Rico who was that combination and had no choice but to give him to a couple that already has a twin.
Lexie (nee Genesis) is almost half Rocco's size and had just been spayed so, though he was knickered, he still ties to do what male dogs do to little girl dogs. Buddy Dog Humane Society staff said they would have to be kept apart for a few days until her tummy was closer to being healed. Judging from the way she dragged me around today at the other end of her leash, I think she is doing just fine at healing...much better than heeling, I would say.
As a rescued dog, she handles her having been abandoned by getting to the door before anyone headed in that direction can reach it. She bonded to me instantly (and to any of the many others who came into the house) and when we were alone, she stayed velcroed to my side or by my feet. I gave up trying to accomplish anything for the day, realizing how useless an attempt would be, and learned how lonely people can learn to love their dogs. I felt like hard-hearted Hannah because I knew I would not have her for long...but, then again, I am not lonely. Though I will cheer when she is no longer in my house, I could never be cruel to such a loving little beast.
I did not relish the leap she made from my bedroom door into the middle of my bed at 6:40 AM! I still ache from being dragged back from our walk up a hill as she kept her nose to the ground, acting much like a vacuum cleaner for the entire walk. I'm assuming Nature provided her with a good nose filter.
Having been passed over at birth for the gene which would have allowed me to tolerate the smell of a dog , being licked and kissed by a dog, or having one that can't read the sign that says, "If you don't pay rent you can't live here." I am looking forward to the day when I no longer feel like a kennel operator and can revert to my efforts at just tolerating all humans who come my way.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC ERRORS
Reading an article titled The Startling Truth About Doctors and Diagnostic Errors, I realized that more have happened to me that I had really thought about. Having often told patients that they have to keep their own records because doctors die, their office staff makes errors, records can get burned, flooded out or otherwise lost, a patient should also keep a very clear record of which drugs they have taken and what the reaction to them has been. Without that, a new doctor could prescribe the same drug with the same negative effects.
It is not encouraging to a patient who has met a doctor who agreed to take them on as primary care physician to walk into the office with your record in hand and introduce themselves as though they have never seen you before. When that happened to me I tried not to embarrass the doctor too much by explaining that I knew she could not remember all her patients but that we had met a few months before. She was clearly embarrassed (as well she should have been since she obviously had not glanced at the chart). Now this doctor has a small laptop that she carried with her and plugs into the system when she enters the examining room. It is easy to see that she has not looked at my file before entering the room because she does the usual checklist. "Do you still have an inhaler?" I answer, "Yes." "How often do you use it?" I reply, "I have not used it for 8 years." Nothing seems to be changed or noted on the laptop as we breeze onto the next question.
"I see you don't seem to have had your yearly mammogram." I answer, "That's right and I never plan to have another since I was called back last year though my test showed negative, because they had found something in an old record and felt they should check it out. Half or more of the room full of patients were call backs and the mammography unit had just been redone with new equipment. It was bad enough that I was disrespected about the importance of my own time and that my insurance would be billed unnecessarily, I was expected to suck up that reasoning. Actually my old record somehow had erroneously shown that I had a cyst removed. No protestations on my part that I had never had surgery, nor that I showed no scar, were adequate to expunge that from my record.
My thoughts had been triggered by an article I had just read. On an ACE inhibitor which was bringing my blood pressure down too far as I lost some weight, I developed dizziness to the point that I felt at risk driving and suffered when I moved my head up, down, or sideways. I told the doctor that I was dizzy. She corrected me and said I had vertigo. I told her, "Whatever, my gyro is off." She examined my ear; no accumulated wax, no redness, no sign of infection. So she prescribed an industrial strength anti-histamine. From a report from a neighbor who had been on the same medication, I check everybody's brain, Google, and found that vertigo was a side effect of the medicine I had been taking. I stopped taking my low dose of ACE med and the vertigo left me. A few months later when I told my doctor that I had stopped the medication and was feeling fine and checking my blood pressure daily, she insisted she had to see me. Recognizing that she might have felt it necessary as a CYA procedure for herself, I went to see her. Since my insurance does not cover the entire bill, I was annoyed that I had to pay money to her to confirm what I already had proved to myself.
The more I thought of my doctor's office appointments, the more I realized that doctors are body mechanics who often don't take the time (or are given it by their employers) to adequately find the source of a problem accurately.
It is not encouraging to a patient who has met a doctor who agreed to take them on as primary care physician to walk into the office with your record in hand and introduce themselves as though they have never seen you before. When that happened to me I tried not to embarrass the doctor too much by explaining that I knew she could not remember all her patients but that we had met a few months before. She was clearly embarrassed (as well she should have been since she obviously had not glanced at the chart). Now this doctor has a small laptop that she carried with her and plugs into the system when she enters the examining room. It is easy to see that she has not looked at my file before entering the room because she does the usual checklist. "Do you still have an inhaler?" I answer, "Yes." "How often do you use it?" I reply, "I have not used it for 8 years." Nothing seems to be changed or noted on the laptop as we breeze onto the next question.
"I see you don't seem to have had your yearly mammogram." I answer, "That's right and I never plan to have another since I was called back last year though my test showed negative, because they had found something in an old record and felt they should check it out. Half or more of the room full of patients were call backs and the mammography unit had just been redone with new equipment. It was bad enough that I was disrespected about the importance of my own time and that my insurance would be billed unnecessarily, I was expected to suck up that reasoning. Actually my old record somehow had erroneously shown that I had a cyst removed. No protestations on my part that I had never had surgery, nor that I showed no scar, were adequate to expunge that from my record.
My thoughts had been triggered by an article I had just read. On an ACE inhibitor which was bringing my blood pressure down too far as I lost some weight, I developed dizziness to the point that I felt at risk driving and suffered when I moved my head up, down, or sideways. I told the doctor that I was dizzy. She corrected me and said I had vertigo. I told her, "Whatever, my gyro is off." She examined my ear; no accumulated wax, no redness, no sign of infection. So she prescribed an industrial strength anti-histamine. From a report from a neighbor who had been on the same medication, I check everybody's brain, Google, and found that vertigo was a side effect of the medicine I had been taking. I stopped taking my low dose of ACE med and the vertigo left me. A few months later when I told my doctor that I had stopped the medication and was feeling fine and checking my blood pressure daily, she insisted she had to see me. Recognizing that she might have felt it necessary as a CYA procedure for herself, I went to see her. Since my insurance does not cover the entire bill, I was annoyed that I had to pay money to her to confirm what I already had proved to myself.
The more I thought of my doctor's office appointments, the more I realized that doctors are body mechanics who often don't take the time (or are given it by their employers) to adequately find the source of a problem accurately.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
MEANDERING THOUGHTS
My friends, to my thinking, used to live X number of minutes or hours away. Now I measure the distance in gallons of gas. One friend I visited is a gallon away, another a third of a gallon!
Forty years ago, a bag of groceries, which included meat and the usual food cross section, was $5 a bag. Today I can’t imagine being able to fill any grocery bag with anything that would add to no more than $5.
It amuses me to get an email that totals ounces of many products, sold in much smaller quantity, to the gallon price and then tries to make the point that gas is cheap! That rationalization is worthy of Rove-Cheney-Bush …., but then again, the commonality of their being liquids make them one and the same, does it not????
Logic (or lack of it) of this administration...career CIA agents, if female, are dispensable if their husbands are ready to point out our lies; lawyers appointed to Federal service can be replaced by lawyers who will seek outcomes only as we want to them; Iraqi translators who are gay should be fired, even if we have no heterosexual translators with which to replace them; people we don't like can be tortured or detained at our will.
My thoughts have meandered to a depressing place. I think I should hibernate until November so that I can cast my ballot for 'change'!Wednesday, June 18, 2008
HUNDREDS OF GAY COUPLES WED IN CALIFORNIA
As a Massachusetts resident, I have lived in this state since it became legal for gay couples to marry. And, marry they have...happily, lovingly, quietly (with the exception of the media voyeurs) and with great relief to be able to live like other committed couples with the same rights other married couples have enjoyed for some time. It has not always been a world of fairness or equality. It still isn't, as women are mere chattel in much of the Middle East and elsewhere. Couples have now gained hospital visitation rights, the possibility of getting health insurance on a family plan, the right to file joint tax returns to the IRS, the right to transfer property. They can automatically inherit shared assets and make medical decisions for their spouse. Amazing, since so many have been denied these rights for so long because some in society have blindly decided they alone know what God wants!
There has been no observation of gay couples (being given the right to marry) having any significant impact on heterosexual marriage. Same sex marriage in Massachusetts four years later: While there have been over 10,000 couples married here, there have been 48 divorces recorded. This may be because many of those married quickly have been waiting for a very long time and have proven the stability of their relationship. Statistics on divorce for everyone are hard to get for our current time. However, since most schoolrooms show more than half the children in class have had their parents divorce, it is striking.
Many of the couples married in the first rush of marriages in California seem to be similar to those of Massachusetts. Many, such as the 83 and 87 year old Lesbian couple in CA today who married after well more than fifty years together. These relationships have been tried and retired by every self-appointed judge around them. I see equal love and consideration shown in my gay friends unions as I do (if not more, actually) in my heterosexual acquaintances or my own heterosexual marriages.
Not all blondes, dark-eyed people, women or men, may have similarities beyond those elements of common description. They can not, as a group, claim to be without significant differences from one another. Being a heterosexual, my view of life is definitely through a different lens than were I gay. While I have not had to fight the prejudices, closed minds, and ridicule from anti-gay figures, I am pleased that our country is getting fairer by the day. It should make us all happy to see people who are hurting no one being, finally, happy about being able to care for one another openly and not be pushed apart by relatives on death and told the deceased wishes will be ignored. They greedily take an inheritance not earned and care not about the grieving partner, pleased only with their material inheritance...those who often wanted nothing to do with this relative whom society (and they) shunned for so long. They are ignorant of their 'theft', though legal, but are not ashamed of their cruel actions. Two states out of fifty is a start!
There has been no observation of gay couples (being given the right to marry) having any significant impact on heterosexual marriage. Same sex marriage in Massachusetts four years later: While there have been over 10,000 couples married here, there have been 48 divorces recorded. This may be because many of those married quickly have been waiting for a very long time and have proven the stability of their relationship. Statistics on divorce for everyone are hard to get for our current time. However, since most schoolrooms show more than half the children in class have had their parents divorce, it is striking.
Many of the couples married in the first rush of marriages in California seem to be similar to those of Massachusetts. Many, such as the 83 and 87 year old Lesbian couple in CA today who married after well more than fifty years together. These relationships have been tried and retired by every self-appointed judge around them. I see equal love and consideration shown in my gay friends unions as I do (if not more, actually) in my heterosexual acquaintances or my own heterosexual marriages.
Not all blondes, dark-eyed people, women or men, may have similarities beyond those elements of common description. They can not, as a group, claim to be without significant differences from one another. Being a heterosexual, my view of life is definitely through a different lens than were I gay. While I have not had to fight the prejudices, closed minds, and ridicule from anti-gay figures, I am pleased that our country is getting fairer by the day. It should make us all happy to see people who are hurting no one being, finally, happy about being able to care for one another openly and not be pushed apart by relatives on death and told the deceased wishes will be ignored. They greedily take an inheritance not earned and care not about the grieving partner, pleased only with their material inheritance...those who often wanted nothing to do with this relative whom society (and they) shunned for so long. They are ignorant of their 'theft', though legal, but are not ashamed of their cruel actions. Two states out of fifty is a start!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
POTATOES
Potatoes have about 620 mg of potassium-that's more than a banana. Potassium is essential to the body because of its role in attaining optimal muscle performance and improving the nerves' response to stimulation. Iron, essential in helping the body convert food to energy as well as resist infection, is also present. Potatoes were first cultivated on the Altiplano of modern-day
For convenience, potatoes are dried, flaked, cubed and otherwise made easy to reconstitute into mashed or hash browned. The are cut very thinly and fried to make potato chips, or for those who do not want the extra fat of the oil, they are blended with other ingredients and baked. The lowly potato is elevated in a Cosmopolitan way when cut and fried it is called a French Fry. Due to the propensity for baked potatoes to hold their heat due their moisture content, mankind invented the hot potato...so called for anyone or anything which is hard to hold in one's hand. There are games about potatoes played with fists piling on one another and starting to count, "One potato, two potato" We speak of immaturity as 'half-baked' and those among us who are lively, clever and witty as 'hot potatoes'.
One variety, the sweet potato (somewhat like a yam) gave birth to a series of a form of musical flute called a 'sweet potato' due its configuration.
No one wants the description of 'couch potato' though inactivity and too much sports watching on the TV will earn the label. Mr. Potato Head was NOT, as currenlty believed, named for our sitting President but, rather, refers to a game. However, he wears a double distinction as he is also often called a 'rotten potato'. Russert potatoes were not named for the illustrious, recently lost journalist,
Monday, June 16, 2008
RIDING THE BUBBLE
When people were riding the housing bubble, it was as difficult to deal with the reality that it would burst as it is to think of death when you are in the pink of health. Homeowners, speculators and dealmakers loved the easy money and did not see the crippling consequences in the future.
Currently, a new bubble is in environmental control, greening our lifestyle, but especially greening businesses. It is said that the media sees the greening of business as an 'overnight success story' that has been twenty years in the making.
Ian Peter wrote about the Dotcom bubble: The dotcom bubble started without the world wide web, and indeed in the beginning it didn't even recognize the Internet as important. Once Al Gore began talking about the "information superhighway" in the early 1990s, however, the "big end of town" - Hollywood, Silicon Valley, telecommunications carriers, cable companies, and media conglomerates, all began investing.
Between April 1992 and July 1993 all of the major US business magazines had published major features on new communications and the "Information Superhighway". It's worth analyzing what these magazines and feature articles talked about. The first thing I noticed - not one of the feature articles I picked up mentioned the Internet. It wasn't on the business horizon of this brave new converged world of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They were more interested in interactive television. The Internet didn't catalyse the dotcom bubble. It was merely latched on to as a vehicle when other avenues for investment did not appear to be going anywhere. The bubble was the second California Gold Rush and digital convergence before it became dotcom. The Dotcom mania was really about something that didn't happen and didn't have a dot anyway. Because many of the original dreams didn't look like happening, the arrival of the World Wide Web and an attractive Internet caused all of the above parties to shift gear. "
In March of 2007, Heather Haverstein wrote about the new dotcom bubble in the making, referred by many was Web 2.0 The problem is that everyone wants to buy into, and become a recipient of the largess a bubble offers....for a time. More recently we have had the housing bubble. US foreclosings surged 48% this year. Patrick Killelea writes that it is cheaper to rent than to own in the current market. Inflation is now the gorilla in the room for investors writes Craig Stephen. Inflation is a menace threatening Asia's decoupling story. The question is asked whether the U.S. Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts have blown open the decoupling scenario.
When the light-hearted song, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, was sung, no one thought of bubbles as the economically dangerous risk they posed to our economy. Any child knows the danger of playing with bubbles. They quickly learn bubbles do not last. Investors ought to exert the same reticence to touch them but few can resist the siren call of the Gold Rush.
Currently, a new bubble is in environmental control, greening our lifestyle, but especially greening businesses. It is said that the media sees the greening of business as an 'overnight success story' that has been twenty years in the making.
Ian Peter wrote about the Dotcom bubble: The dotcom bubble started without the world wide web, and indeed in the beginning it didn't even recognize the Internet as important. Once Al Gore began talking about the "information superhighway" in the early 1990s, however, the "big end of town" - Hollywood, Silicon Valley, telecommunications carriers, cable companies, and media conglomerates, all began investing.
Between April 1992 and July 1993 all of the major US business magazines had published major features on new communications and the "Information Superhighway". It's worth analyzing what these magazines and feature articles talked about. The first thing I noticed - not one of the feature articles I picked up mentioned the Internet. It wasn't on the business horizon of this brave new converged world of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They were more interested in interactive television. The Internet didn't catalyse the dotcom bubble. It was merely latched on to as a vehicle when other avenues for investment did not appear to be going anywhere. The bubble was the second California Gold Rush and digital convergence before it became dotcom. The Dotcom mania was really about something that didn't happen and didn't have a dot anyway. Because many of the original dreams didn't look like happening, the arrival of the World Wide Web and an attractive Internet caused all of the above parties to shift gear. "
In March of 2007, Heather Haverstein wrote about the new dotcom bubble in the making, referred by many was Web 2.0 The problem is that everyone wants to buy into, and become a recipient of the largess a bubble offers....for a time. More recently we have had the housing bubble. US foreclosings surged 48% this year. Patrick Killelea writes that it is cheaper to rent than to own in the current market. Inflation is now the gorilla in the room for investors writes Craig Stephen. Inflation is a menace threatening Asia's decoupling story. The question is asked whether the U.S. Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts have blown open the decoupling scenario.
When the light-hearted song, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, was sung, no one thought of bubbles as the economically dangerous risk they posed to our economy. Any child knows the danger of playing with bubbles. They quickly learn bubbles do not last. Investors ought to exert the same reticence to touch them but few can resist the siren call of the Gold Rush.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
THE MEDIA HAS TOTALLY FAILED US
The media should report the news. It has failed to find out the truth about the news, having relied on what the Administration chooses to report rather than to do good, investigative reports on their own. Most of the pundits I have observed on the major news channels are opinion makers, not investigators who do any mount of work to ferret out problems. Rather, they regurgitate what they have been told. You only have to do a bit of channel surfing to hear the exact same interpretation on each channel when something happens that the public is permitted to learn anything about.
It is important that we get better coverage on news channels of things that happen in the Congress and Senate. Committees should be better synthesized as to results rather than the limited amount of time people can spend covering C-SPANs by themselves. A most interesting bit has been provided in this video clip. We suspect these things go on but our suspicions cannot go very far without facts to which the average person has no access.
Yesterday, I was unable to get any major news other than the death of Tim Russert. While Mr. Russert deserves the highest praise, his death is not the most critical event while so many others are dying due to lack of funds for medicines and care, poor treatment to wounded veterans, the hardships of poverty for so many of our citizens who have lost homes, jobs, life savings, family bread winners in the war. The media moguls and producers need to look quickly into their mirrors. Comedians and YouTube are surpassing them in viewings because they are learning more from those sources than the main stream media provides.
It is important that we get better coverage on news channels of things that happen in the Congress and Senate. Committees should be better synthesized as to results rather than the limited amount of time people can spend covering C-SPANs by themselves. A most interesting bit has been provided in this video clip. We suspect these things go on but our suspicions cannot go very far without facts to which the average person has no access.
Yesterday, I was unable to get any major news other than the death of Tim Russert. While Mr. Russert deserves the highest praise, his death is not the most critical event while so many others are dying due to lack of funds for medicines and care, poor treatment to wounded veterans, the hardships of poverty for so many of our citizens who have lost homes, jobs, life savings, family bread winners in the war. The media moguls and producers need to look quickly into their mirrors. Comedians and YouTube are surpassing them in viewings because they are learning more from those sources than the main stream media provides.
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