I have been crazy busy with work. I am not complaining, especially since I haven’t gone out of my way looking for extra work. It just keeps rolling in and I’m barely keeping up. I used to do this when I worked as a nurse. When it was busy, I would work double shifts, day and night, get all that overtime and double time pay, etc. And then, when things slowed down in the unit, I didn’t worry about getting canceled or losing shifts.

Same with writing. I figure why not take the work while its being offered, especially since its been from clients I have worked with before. So its pretty much been non-stop since I got back from South Africa, plus my garden has taken up a lot of time. Because it was so rainy and cold, I couldn’t move a lot of the seedlings outside and so, had to transplant them to larger pots. Some were transplanted more than once.

Well, I’m going to make an effort to get back to blogging, although I am probably going to concentrate more on certain topics.

So I’ll be getting back into the swing of blogging, tweeting, and more blogging again. And oh, it was my birthday on Friday.

I’ve been wanting to go to South Africa for years, and I can’t believe that I finally made it there. That I was in Capetown, at the tip of the continent, and sailed on the Zambezi River, same place as David Livingstone.

Oh yes, and the selection of an obese surgeon general at a time when obesity is fast becoming the number one health issue in this country (what were you thinking, Barack????).

I don’t have any predictions for this year, other than I hope that the healthcare reform bill is miraculously transformed into something that resembles reform and not a sweetheart deal for the insurance industry. It is difficult to say what this year will bring for nurses, but regardless, nurses need to stand up for themselves and make an effort not to take abuse and to demand respect.

Really, I hate to call names, but I have to wonder about the mental stability of those who are occupying Senate seats and trying to reform the nation’s healthcare.

One of the wunderkind had a brilliant idea of taxing people undergoing cosmetic surgery and procedures in order to “pay” for healthcare reform. Not that these people are already paying for these services out of pocket, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. But I suppose it was the idea that only rich folks get their faces tightened and tweaked, so why not milk them a little more.

Well that didn’t go over well with the plastic surgeons, derms, and others who make money from this. And healthcare reform needs the support of the medical community, so they dropped the “Botax.” Next victim–tanning salons.

Now, we have elected officials, who supposedly have some degree of intelligence, who believe that they are going to solve the money problem by taxing tanning salons. And here’s where the eyes roll round and round and round.

If the bill is passed in its current form, a 10-percent tax would be placed on individuals buying tanning services. Who are paying for these services out of pocket already. But they think that taxing tanning salons are going to raise $2.7 billion over 10 years. Are they totally daft? First, why should someone using a tanning salon, paying out of pocket, be taxed for it?

Second, unlike cosmetic surgery, which can be quite expensive, tanning salons are quite cheap. A session in a tanning bed cost about $10 or $20 dollars. Unless someone is a really heavy duty user, it isn’t gong to add up to much. And with the tax, people may just use it less often. But really, getting a dollar or two here and there is just not going to raise a lot of money.

So here’s a brain twister for them. If they want to raise money and improve health at the same time, slap a tax on McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Coke, Pepsi, candy bars, sugary breakfast cereals, pesticides, and all foods that you need an organic chemistry textbook to decipher the ingredients with. Tax commercial agriculture, tax the commercial beef/chicken industry (put a hefty tax on the hormones and antibiotics that they feed to the animals), etc.

Tax all the unhealthy stuff. This way, people can pay in advance for their future diabetes and heart disease care! Or their future cancer.

But these are powerful industries, so they get treated with gentle loving care. Preventing disease in the first place is the single most important thing that real reform needs to look at, but unfortunately, politicians will be politicians.

Anyway, I am so fed up with this. What we need is real reform of the insurance industry, and then real measures to lower healthcare costs. But that would mean stepping on a lot of toes, so no one wants to go there.

This message is from Daily Word, December 24:

In a transforming moment, thoughtfulness becomes my practice in life and generosity becomes my expression of love. As I give birth to new ways of thinking, feeling and being in the world, the love and life within are renewed and revealed, in large acts of generosity and love or in simple acts of kindness. These are the sacred experiences that bring life and love to my family, community and humanity.

The spirit of Christmas….

Well, today Dr. Jollywood is going to visit something similar that was employed in a book. Yes, a novel that was meant to be “real world” as opposed to sci-fi or fantasy. Although, reading this book, you have to wonder what reality the author was living in.

I feel a little bad about criticizing the book because the author is deceased, and died before any of the 3 novels of his trilogy were published. I’m talking about Steig Larsson, the wunderkind Swedish journalist and editor, who wrote three books and started a 4th before he finally sent them to a publisher.

He died suddenly of a heart attack, or so its said. There is a bit of controversy about his death, as he was a bit of a socialist militant, undoubtedly made many enemies, and his death was rather sudden.

At any rate, it was because of his obvious intellect, intelligence, education, and ability to do research that I was so astoundingly horrified by his second books, The Girl Who Played With Fire. No, I am not going to put in the link to Amazon–I refuse to perpetuate awful books that somehow make it to bestseller lists.

As a caveat, I enjoyed the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and was thrilled that he had written 2 more books before he died. But Fire was as if a different person had written, one who was too ignorant even to figure out that during flood conditions, people do not go and hide in basements (yes, there is a mind numbing chapter, the first, of a hurricane scenario on a tropical island–I should have stopped reading then).

The book plodded along at a frightening slow pace, filled with cartoonish one sided characters, shopping lists of what characters purchased at the local 7-11 (Billy’s Pan Pizza is a favorite), a dull plot, and one of the most moronic endings in the history of publishing. Can you tell how much I enjoyed this?

But it is obvious that the author got so caught up in his own agenda, that he neglected the idea of doing the simplest bit of research, or using basic common sense or his own life experiences (Steig, ever got an injection? More on that). The ignorance is most apparent in his rendition of human physiology and healthcare settings, police investigations, and weather.

Even though I’m starting to get carried away, I will climb down from the soap box and concentrate on what Dr. Jollywood does best–pointing out the faux pas and idiocies in the media, as it relates to health and medicine.

The Girl Ignored

The first medical idiocy is Larsson’s rendition of life in a psychiatric hospital. The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is a violent, non-communicative, and maladapted girl of 12. Now, do you think that this person is a candidate for oral medicine? Well, Larsson thinks so. In this story, they try to force pills into Lisbeth, undoubtedly to treat her psychotic and dangerous behavior (she just set a person on fire). Lisbeth makes herself throw up. The old hand down the throat and gag routine.

Next, the profoundly stupid doctors tie down her hands when they force pills down her, but Lisbeth outsmarts them and learns to make herself throw up without physically gagging herself. Of course, Larsson doesn’t explain what happened in the interim–between the time that they were forcing pills down her and when she learned to do insta-puke without her hands. I mean, surely the drugs would have kicked in and subdued her?

But at any rate, since Lisbeth has become so adept at throwing up her drugs, they just decide to stop giving them to her. Now I wanted to puke after reading this. Um, I guess that Larsson has never heard of injections? I realize that the man was no longer alive when the book was making its way through the publishing mill, but couldn’t a good editor intervene and redo this section?

Crazy psychos are given injections. Especially crazy psychos who set people on fire. Even if they did try to put her on oral meds, one attempt at gagging, and she’d be back to shots. Plain and simple. The stupidity of this scenario should offend anyone working in healthcare, but let’s move on.

In the psych hospital, Lisbeth refuses to talk to any of the doctors, who are of course, all male. She does however, speak to the nurses and everyone else. But in Larsson’s reality, nurses do not speak to doctors either, so no one really knows what’s bugging Lisbeth and thus, they can’t give her treatment.

I suppose that it never occurred to Larsson, who seems to harbor a hatred towards straight white men even though he was one himself, that nurses do confer with physicians and discuss patients. And that a trained psychiatric nurse could conduct therapy with Lisbeth, although I guess Larsson assumes that nurses only fluff pillows and wipe boo-boos. Also, a female doctor? Did that ever occur to him?

The whole segment of Lisbeth’s hospitalization was so pathetic, so poorly written, and so bogus and unbelievable (other plot lines fit into this that were ridiculous), I just fast forwarded out of there and moved on. And you will see, if you happen to have the misfortune of picking up this book, that you can skip multitudes of pages at a time, and not miss a thing.

Return from the Dead

Now, if the psych hospital scenario was bad, wait until you read about Lisbeth’s encounter with bullets. Yes, she is truly Wonder Woman, a superhero about to reveal herself….

At the end of the book, Lisbeth is shot 3 times. Unfortunately, you know that she can’t be dead because she reappears in the third book. But she is shot in the shoulder, the hip and the head. By the author’s own admission, the bullet penetrates the brain and causes “massive trauma.” I guess that was something he saw in a book or heard on TV, because he is obviously unaware of what massive brain trauma is, or what happens when a person is shot in the head. And apparently, way too lazy to spend 10 minutes on the Internet looking it up.

Lisbeth’s assailants assume that she is dead, as most people would be after 3 bullets and one to the brain. But being stupid white straight men, they don’t bother to check for a pulse, and bury her alive. Now, theoretically she should suffocate quickly, being comatose and suffering from blood loss.

But wait, Lisbeth is awake. And coherent. And isn’t losing any blood at all from wounds. Amazing! If a bullet to the head doesn’t kill you outright, you’re generally in a coma or at the very least, extremely non-responsive. But not Lisbeth. She begins to dig her way out, using one arm because of her gunshot to the other side. I supposed that Larsson meant for us to get up and cheer.

Then, after miraculously digging her way out, she gets to her feet and begins to walk. With a gunshot to the hip, she is able to walk a very long distance back to the house where her assailants are. Her thoughts are crystal clear, she is completely coherent, and just complains of a “pain in her head.”

And then, Lisbeth not only arrives back at the house, but takes on her 2 assailants–both grown and skilled men–and wins! She is only 4 foot 11 inches, weighs 90 pounds, but no sweat. No blood loss, no trouble walking, no trouble fighting. All this with a bullet in the hip and shoulder, and massive trauma to the brain. And then, Lisbeth realizing that she needs help in getting back to the city, whips out her cell phone and calls for help—to a straight white man that she hates for psychotic reasons all her own, even though he has only been kind and respectful to her. But Lisbeth allows him to have the honor of coming to fetch her.

Now I expect that in book 3, Lisbeth will don a cape and be able to fly faster than a locomotive, catch bullets in her teeth and bounce them off her skin….

Anyway, this book will set a new precedence in the annals of neurosurgery. And it must make the list of the 10 worst endings of all time.

If it passes, it would be among the longest pieces of House legislation ever, congressional historians say.

So my question is why? Obesity is a major problem in this country, and that does not only for people but for bloated bills circling through Congress.

Why is the healthcare bill so long and verbose? I bet I could write one up that would take up about 5 pages, maybe up to 10 if I wanted to get wordy.

Is anyone really going to sit and read this thing? Does anyone know what it says? Could this be why there is so much chatter and pouting about getting it passed–because no one knows exactly what’s in it, and refuse to spend the better part of their life reading it?

They’re supposed to vote tomorrow. The whole idea of healthcare reform has changed from a golden opportunity to a 3 ring circus. Send in the clowns–wait, they’re already here.

They’re not completely recession proof, but the healthcare industry is still going strong, even in “today’s economy.” (Oh how I hate that expression) And even with all the commotion over healthcare reform, and dire warnings from Republicans and health insurance companies about how improving access and care will be the undoing of our nation, healthcare is still running strong.

So its a good place to look for a job. Still. I know, there have been complaints from nurses about layoffs, inability to find jobs, and so on, that is reminiscent of the early 1990s–when the industry created an artificial nursing surplus in order to cut costs. And it backfired major league. As it will do now.

But nursing isn’t the only job in town. In fact, there are a lot of careers that pay better, have better hours, are less messy, are as rewarding, require as much skill or more, garner you more respect, and have a rosy future. The American Medical Association has a really good website devoted to healthcare careers, other than physician. I came across it when I was doing research for an article and I was really impressed. At first glance it doesn’t look like much, but that whole list is “clickable.”

On Saturday, 24 October 2009, between 9 -10 AM Pacific time (12 – 1 PM East Coast time)
Send the following tweet to @BarackObama:

USA MUST formally adopt the 350ppm CO2 target at Copenhagen 09 – the ONLY WAY to prevent runaway climate change NO EXCUSES!

If you want to know more about 350.org, here’s a little video which condenses it in a nutshell: