I am trying to use my left arm/hand more, but I am a righty, so this does really rain on my parade. In my yoga class, I am trying to figure out how to modify some of the poses, so I don’t put too much pressure on my arm. It has felt better the past two days…so hopefully this will pass.

But sitting by the computer and typing if I don’t have to be is really not the best thing for it. Maybe I’ll try some short posts, and see how that goes while it heals.

Dana Jennings, an editor at the New York Times and a former prostate cancer patient, has written a nice opinion piece called “In Praise of Nurses.” In it, he recounts his experiences as a patient, beginning from when he was a child all the way up to his bout of prostate cancer. Unfortunately, he has had a few health problems which necessitated hospital admissions and care. Fortunately, he was cared for by competent and professional nurses.

It is nice to see this sort of article, in that he offers praise to the nurses who provided his care, without the usual idiotic sugar coated rhetoric. It’s not sentimental, but simply shows the vital role that nurses played in his care.

He appreciated it. He remembers them even if he doesn’t recall their names.

Thank you, Dana! Happy New Year!

The first day of a new year is always filled with such hope and promise. A brand new, fresh baby year–just bursting over with so many possibilities.  But as far as healthcare in the US goes, these past 2 years were filled to the brim with wasted opportunities.  The situation is worsening, as far as I’m concerned. After dealing with my mother, as I mentioned in November, I could see first hand at just how broken this system is.

The nursing home/rehab where my mother was kept her longer than usual because after talking to me, I think they smelled lawsuit. So instead of throwing her out the door and leaving her in the parking lot of her condo building, they waited until we had finalized placement in assisted living.

The assisted living where we placed her is very nice, but also expensive. Aside from her social security, we are counting on two other sources of funding, which will cover the costs. If it doesn’t come through, and she is still unable to live her own, then she will have to go to a cheaper facility. Not so nice, but then, equality is not what this country is about when it comes to healthcare.

But getting back to the more general issues, Obama had a golden opportunity to do something and failed badly at it. The bill that was finally pushed through is anemic, and while it does put some brakes on an insurance industry gone out of control, it does absolutely nothing to curtail spending. And maybe that’s intentional–afterall, healthcare is for the most part a profit making machine.  Healthy people, streamlining the system, and smart choices don’t make money.

For example, while Michele Obama is talking about child obesity and going through all the motions, her husband is busy promoting fat. Yes, that’s right. Not him personally, but he is the president, and supposedly should know what’s going on.

Dairy Management, a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture, is heavily involved in getting people to eat more high fat cheese. Yes, the US government telling people to lose weight but at the same time spending millions in taxpayer money to support and increase the consumption of high fat cheese. Cute.

From the NY Times:

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

When Michelle Obama implored restaurateurs in September to help fight obesity, she cited the proliferation of cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese. “I want to challenge every restaurant to offer healthy menu options,” she told the National Restaurant Association’s annual meeting.

But in a series of confidential agreements approved by agriculture secretaries in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Dairy Management has worked with restaurants to expand their menus with cheese-laden products.

Consider the Taco Bell steak quesadilla, with cheddar, pepper jack, mozzarella and a creamy sauce. “The item used an average of eight times more cheese than other items on their menu,” the Agriculture Department said in a report, extolling Dairy Management’s work — without mentioning that the quesadilla has more than three-quarters of the daily recommended level of saturated fat and sodium.

Dairy Management, whose annual budget approaches $140 million, is largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry. But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of its board members, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on its work.

Isn’t great to know how serious the Obama administration is about healthcare reform?

So on that note, happy new year, and stay healthy.

In my mind, its definitely a mixed bag. A very mixed bag.

Some good news is that the Center for Safety battled Monsanto (the evil empire) in the U.S. Supreme Court – and were victorious in maintaining the ban on the planting and sale of GMO alfalfa. They also won another major lawsuit against USDA, Monsanto, and a number of other biotech companies this August, which halted the sale of GMO sugar beets.

The bad news is that our healthcare system is still a mess. Nothing has changed for the better. It’s gotten more expensive, and care has not improved.

Oh, and our esteemed Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, has finally issued her first report. And guess what she wasted taxpayer money on–drum roll….the dangers of cigarette smoking. Like lady, don’t you know that the Surgeon General issued that same report 40 or 50 years ago. But to be fair, Dr. Regina took the opportunity to sensationalize it a bit, and publicly state that even smoking one cigarette can kill someone with underlying heart disease. Or was it one puff on one cigarette?

Is the woman so disengaged from life that she can’t find a public health issue to beat her drum to? Smoking is unhealthy, but we’ve been there, done that. It is an ongoing issue, and with so many other public health issues to choose from, it is incredulous that this woman will drag out a topic that has been studied to death (pardon the pun). She has taken the office of the Surgeon General to a new low and she is clearly not suited for the job.

What can we expect in 2011? I’ll be back with my predictions…

But you know, it is Christmas tomorrow and tonight is Christmas Eve. Santa is coming. It is not “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings.” it is Christmas.

Trying to be politically correct because of the perceived offense to those who don’t celebrate Christmas just adds the generification of holidays. It’s bad enough that we see Christmas supplies appearing in stores in September, mixed together with Halloween and Thanksgiving. The holidays aren’t even given a chance to breathe and stand on their own.

If you celebrate the Solstice, then say “happy Solstice.” If you celebrate Hannukah, the say “Happy Hannukah.” Ditto for Kwanzaa, or any other holiday that happens to fall around this time. I won’t be offended if someone wishes me a greeting for a holiday I don’t celebrate. I think it is very kind of them, and I will wish them the same.

So Merry Christmas! And I hope you’ve all been good boys and girls.

And special thanks to all of the nurses, doctors, and other healthcare personnel who are working on Christmas. I hated having to work on holidays, even though it was time and a half pay. But thank you for being there, for as all of us in healthcare know, its a 24/7 job that doesn’t take time out for holidays, weekends and birthdays.

Not sure how I missed this story considering that I used to work at this hospital.

D.C. hospital fires 11 nurses, 5 staffers for snowstorm absences

The Washington Hospital Center, which I believe is the largest facility in the area, fired several nurses because they were unable to show up at work during one of the worst–if not the worst–snowstorms in the city’s history. Strange how most of the nurses that were canned have seniority and have been there a while. What a nice way of getting rid of the best paid people and those that might come around begging for a pension sooner rather than later.

In a letter sent to the staff on Friday, hospital President Harry J. Rider sought to quell rumors that hundreds of people had been fired. He said he expects fewer than 20 people will be dismissed.

“Sadly, we did experience some issue with associates who did not show the same commitment as most of their co-workers to the community, our patients and their fellow associates. They are the few who turned away from their scheduled shifts and who tried — and are still trying — to turn the focus on themselves rather than the thousands of Washington Hospital Center workers who fulfilled their commitment to their patients and colleagues, and made it to work,” he wrote.

I wonder if Henry and his other peons managed to make it into work during the snowstorm, and show their “commitment” to the hospital. Did management make it in?

If they hospital was really committed to its staff and patients, they would have made an effort to help nurses get into work. Send out army humvees if need be, but get the nurses to work. Or offer to pay them to come in ahead of the snowstorm, and give them a place to stay. It works both ways, Henry. Nurses are committed to their jobs, but they are not about to kill themselves trying to make it to work, or abandon their children (I guess that Henry never thought of that either–that schools and daycare were closed, so what should nurses do with their kids–not that he’d think to offer daycare at the hospital’s expense).

On one forum, some nurses were saying that their hospitals expected them to come in ahead of time if a storm or something was anticipated. They didn’t get paid for their time, and they could stay in an empty patient room, or stay in a hotel at their own expense. And baah baah baah, most nurses just follow like sheep.

Well I hope all of these fired nurses suit the crap out of the WHC, and in another article, it says that the nurses have voted to become part of a larger union. Yay!

Nurses became a formal part of the military following the Spanish-American War, after about 1500 civilian nurses had been contracted to serve in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, as well as to the Hospital Ship Relief.

The Army Reorganization Act of 1920 gave nurses a little more status–and granted military nurses the status of officers with “relative rank” from second lieutenant to major (but not full rights and privileges). It wasn’t until after WW II that nurses were given permanent commissioned officer status.

Well, my favorite caseworker called me this am to tell me that my mother was being discharged from the hospital today and going to rehab. She was her usual abrupt pseudo-friendly self. I can’t tell if she’s just overworked/underpaid (the usual drill) or if she really just hates her job. Maybe a combination. She couldn’t answer any questions, of course.

I’m at least glad that they waited for her anesthesia to wear off before discharging her. On one hand, its good to get out of the hospital asap, so you don’t catch something there. And a somewhat debilitated old woman, who just had surgery, is a likely candidate for the infection of the day. But on the other, it doesn’t sound like she is ready to go out into the world yet. I would think they would keep her at least one more day, just to make sure she is eating and drinking, and everything stable.

But as the world turns…of course we don’t need healthcare reform. Everything is just so peachy cool as is.

Grrr….

Florida, and in particular South Florida on the Atlantic side, is probably not one of the best places to either be a patient or to be an employee.  The pay sucks, unions are almost non-existent, the work force transient (there’s always an enormous number of travel jobs available in Florida), and basically, it shows.

No, I haven’t done a survey or scientific study, but many of the hospital horror stories take place in Florida. Nurses on forums report the often pitiful wages paid to them, and the severe under staffing. And although I worked in Florida quite a long time ago, I felt like I had gone back in time 20 years.  I briefly worked on staff and then through the registry/per diem, and it was an overall nightmarish experience.

But now, I guess I am aiming on one facility in particular. My mother fell and broke her hip, and I have to deal with an assortment of people, ranging from nice and helpful to total incompetent morons. We can start with someone from the county sheriff dept, who didn’t know where Seattle was and thought that I could just get in my car and drive right over. He didn’t seem to understand the distance from California to Florida either. And this is someone who is an officer of the law?

Next, the hospital operator was a total moron, who kept transferring me to arbitrary voice mails and fax machines.  The floor nurses were okay, although they could have been more helpful. I realize that they are probably extremely short staffed, and don’t have time to chat with me, and probably wish that I would just come in and take care of my mother. When I spoke with my mother, before she had surgery, she was trying to get a nurse to come because she had to use the bathroom. And nobody had bothered at first to help her with her hearing aids. They assumed she was demented because she couldn’t hear them.

The ER nurse had asked for my permission to do surgery because my mother is “demented.” Granted, my mother has a lot of mental problems, and she can drive you up the wall, but demented she’s not. I told the ER nurse that I would give my permission, but that the women was dehydrated, had been traumatized, did not have her hearing aids–and that does not add up to dementia.

The best one was this moron nurse caseworker (yes, she is a moron) who called me from the hospital and was trying to talk in that silly “nurse talk” like I have an IQ of 10.  Uh, I don’t think so. She wanted to know if I was the one who would help my mother make a decision on where to go for rehab. I told her that she might first try by asking my mother if she has a preference, or maybe doing something really radical like asking her primary care physician?

We already established that I live 3,000 miles away, so why would she think that I would be familiar with rehab in their area? Or does she think that I spend my spare time reading up on rehab in Florida. She seemed a little surprised by my answer–like it never occurred to her to ask the patient, or doctor.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. My stepfather died in this hospital, and the ICU nurse that I spoke with right before he died was about as intelligent as the nurse case worker described above.  I’m not impressed with the place, and again, I imagine that the employees are overworked and poorly paid. The caseworker couldn’t wait to push me off the phone. Nice customer service.

Notice, orange and black, not pink. No breast cancer “awareness” month for me. No frilly pink idiocy, pink ribbons pinned on my shirt, and doling out money to pink items that I don’t need or want, or have no idea if even one cent is going to breast cancer causes. Or if it is, exactly what cause and what will it be spent on.

In honor of Pepto Bismol month, the New York Times has a review of two breast cancer related books. Very appropriately, the title of the review is called Breast Cancer Tales: The Inspirational vs. the Actual.

The inspirational is a sweet memoir by Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G Komen for the Cure, and really the person who is ultimately responsible for not only breast cancer awareness, but for turning breast cancer awareness into a combination circus and industry.

The other book, rips into the pinky sweet movement by “taking issue with the “she-ro” of the breast cancer movement — an idealized patient who is assertive and boundlessly optimistic, and remains feminine and sexy despite the depredations of disease and treatment. This paragon often uses a diagnosis of breast cancer as a catalyst for a personal transformation; she begins to “take time for me,” discovers “what’s important in life” and comes out of the experience a changed and better person.”

I have to give Brinker credit for bringing attention to a “women’s” issue at a time when women’s issues were pretty well ignored–other than the ever ongoing battle of abortion.  But I think Komen has evolved into a business, and the final straw was their partnership with Kentucky Fried Chicken–selling junk food in pink buckets. If you’re an advocate for breast cancer patients–then you have to draw the line somewhere. And that line is advocating food which can directly lead to a huge number of health problems and indirectly lead to cancer–including that of the breast.

At any rate, the only advocacy group that I really see working towards prevention is the Breast Cancer Action, and I mean real prevention, like taking on corporations, industry, regulatory bodies (like our friends at the FDA). They also have a fantastic “Think before you buy Pink” campaign which seeks to educate the consumer about pink buying and what you need to know.

So I continue to ignore pink. Instead, I am enjoying the reds, yellows, golds, of the fall season. And the orange and black of Halloween.