Being blind doesn’t mean you are helpless but this video is meaningful in its portrayal of redefining your capabilities:
Tag Archives: health
Does your government put a price on life?
Do sets of states of energy have an equivalent value in a labour/investment credit system?
This paragraph implies as much:
The Obama administration says insurers can provide birth control for free because contraception reduces costs for them overall by preventing expensive-to-cover pregnancies, as well as reducing the risk of ovarian cancer.
“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.” — H.L. Mencken
“The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.” — Robert Jackson
“The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.” — G.K. Chesterton
“The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizen to give to the other.” — Voltaire
“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” — Wilson Mizner
“I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.” — Dorothy Parker
A Confession To Make
I have a confession to make.
For several months now, my wife and I have been listening to the Harry Potter book series on audio CD while we’ve ridden together in my wife’s Toyota Camry.
Tonight, we finished the last CD of the last book, coincidentally in the first full week of release of a film starring Daniel Radcliffe.
No more ‘arry Potter voice impersonations by Jim Dale, a great reader and probably the best parent a kid could have read a book at bedtime.
Now I can get back to writing the life of seven billion without having a mental comparison of my writing against that of the children’s book author, J.K. Rowling.
Of course, my wife and I will ride in unusual silence when together in her car.
Time to return to the story where my contacts around the world feed me their autobiographical snippets that often involve us common folk and sometimes the lives of those who claim to be our leaders.
Together, we can tell it like it really is, no matter how messy, uninspiring or truly coincidental, and not how others would have us rewrite the narrative of our lives into so-called biographical/purposeful history.
All while leaving space for us to have hope and plan for a better future.
My job here’s not to be popular or well-liked.
In fact, it’s not a job at all.
It’s who I am.
Who I say I’m meant to be.
Just like the other seven billion of us, eh?
BTW, I went to the doctor’s office earlier this week to see about a viral infection called bronchitis and was prescribed an antibiotic. If nothing else, I guess I’m “curing” my GI tract.
Family health saga continues…
NOTE: This chapter to be rewritten at a later date…
Candle Wax
The issue then becomes one of explaining to the full range of age groups and belief subsets how every data point, although unique, is made of the same ingredients as the set in total.
“But if we are all the same, how are we all different?”
Well, you see, we are all connected.
“But my subculture is diametrically opposed to yours. We do not feel connected.”
Emotionally opposed, yes, and thus connected by emotions.
“We would never participate in any of your activities.”
And, therefore, we complement each other, one performing the tasks the other would not.
“It makes no sense.”
Observe the candle. The wick is not the same as the wax. However, both react to fire, one feeding off the other, giving light as a heat byproduct.
“Or heat as a light byproduct.”
Precisely. It is the observation point from which one finds one’s place of understanding. ‘Who am I?’ becomes ‘I am the collection of states of energy that detects heat and light.’
“Or hot wax.”
Or carbon with which to record symbols that represent your subculture. You are the stuff of stars.
“I don’t know… My elders say I am a gift from God.”
Stars. God. I am telling you they are the same.
“We do not practice pagan religions. Stars are not living beings. Only God can create people.”
Religion I do not know. I only know states of energy, atoms, molecules and the like. And their connectedness. The teachings of your elders are your guide to follow freely as you wish.
“So why am I sitting here with you?”
And I ask myself the same question. Why do two states of energy such as ourselves choose to interact using sound shaped by our vocal chords and other movements of our states of energy we call bodies? It is what it is. Questioning it prolongs the next moment of discovery between us, adding to the wonder of the universe that is us, our states of energy, in momentary synchronisation.
“Are you not wise, then, as they told me you are?”
I am wiser than the trees, they say, and yet I cannot sprout a single leaf. This hair upon my arm cannot convert sunlight into energy yet, like bark, it provides a modicum of warmth against a winter’s cold. Wisdom is application of one’s knowledge of one’s ignorance. What I do not know tells me more about what you and I will say next to each other more than what I know says about what we can say to each other.
“So you can’t tell me if I should eat this bowl of ice cream, Great Uncle?”
A container of frozen cow’s milk and other ingredients… Does it taste good to you?
“My tongue says it does.”
Your tongue is not a separate object. It is you as much as these words we have left behind. Including the rest of you, not just your tongue, does the ice cream taste good to you?
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
Precisely. Look at the object you call a bowl. Look at the object you call a spoon. Look at the object you call ice cream. They are connected, their function and form, their origin and destiny, all one. In reality, they are not separate objects. Imagine they and you are all part of the same universe, created, as you say, as a gift from God. Is the place where the cow came from, how it was raised, how it was milked, how its milk was sanitised and mixed with special ingredients to make ice cream, and how the spoon and bowl came into being also a gift from God?
“Of course.”
Then tell me without putting the ice cream in your mouth, does the ice cream taste good to you?
“Wow! Uh… that seems like a lot to think about just to decide if I should eat the ice cream.”
But don’t you already have an idea what the ice cream will taste like? Don’t you already think the ice cream tastes good?
“Yes.”
Then, in the space before you smell the ice cream with your ‘nose’ or place the ice cream on your ‘tongue,’ in that moment when you cannot stop the ice cream from hitting your ‘taste buds,’ I tell you the ice cream will taste like motor oil and burn like hot lava, can your thoughts switch to disliking the ice cream?
“Yes.”
Are you sure. This moment I describe takes place faster than the speed of light, an imperceptible split second before your thoughts can travel from one neuron to the next.
“Then I guess not.”
Your life is made up of all those imperceptible split seconds.
“Which means…”
Taste is a deception.
“Which means…’
All the imperceptible moments up to now have already determined whether you’re going to eat the ice cream within that bowl, which, by the way, has melted quite a bit since we first started talking.
“And I hate warm ice cream!”
There you go. You have your answer.
Images of my father
As we begin the adventure with my father in his quest for detailed diagnosis/treatment of health changes, I’ll post a few personal images of him and his family, with stories inserted along the road of life this blog represents in spacetime.
Life Changes
As of the 26th of December 2011, the life of the author of this blog changed…
He has discovered his father has Primary Progressive Aphasia.
Just a few weeks after his mother in-law died, the author makes time to be a caregiver again, as needed/wanted.
Life in 2012 goes on…
…more as it develops…
Warwalking
When you let go of stereotypes, question the assertions of those who claim authoritative positions, and accept yourself for who you are (no matter how much the “you” is uniquely unaligned with the subculture and cultural influences around you), what do you have?
If you are simply the intersection of waveforms, does a “you” exist?
I can say my skin is aging because, although I lose lots of skin cells every day, there is a consistency, a continuity, that goes with the concept of a substance that loses its flexibility and thickness with time, showing flaws, defects and indications of previous incidents that do not go away and, in fact, lead to a partial deterioration of this somewhat hairy divide between myself and the rest of the universe.
Have you ever walked through your neighbourhood and surreptitiously collected the source points of wireless computing signals by wearing a backpack which hides an electronic data collector inside?
Are locks, firewalls and passwords a warning or a challenge to you (and sometimes both)?
Other than gravity, entropy and other currently immutable laws, to what do you owe your existence? Social rules, both overt and implied?
Are we all just the result of previous beings successfully reproducing themselves?
Do you have a well-trained habit of saying “a group of things is” or the grammatical slip of “a group of things are” in your literary repertoire?
Do you know who Dale Earnhardt, Jr, is? How about Dr. Grigori Perelman?
Can you ignore all labels and let waveforms pass through you without using a sieve or filter to interpret them?
Have you ever tasted organic chai tea? Do you know if such a word as “chai” exists and, if so, how it is normally pronounced or correctly spelled/written in its native language?
Do you take (swallow, inject, rub on, drop in, etc.) any prescribed medication and, if so, the etymology of the words that describe what you take?
Daily, I ask myself what I’m doing here, listening to the echoes of the labels that bounce against me from the nearest [sub]culture, restricting myself to the use of a few thousand words, punctuation marks and writing rules to record my place in the universe even though I don’t exist.
We are all disrupters in the flow of time. Condensed waveform intersections.
I do not exist. The Book of the Future, which does not exist, either, is a device which reflects waveform intersections that are bound to happen.
A tree cannot see itself as a book, a table or a pencil.
We do not see what we will become, only what we know we can become: intersecting, reflecting waveforms.
Did my red hair, or people’s comment about what red hair means, contribute to my fits of uncontrolled rage when I was a kid? Is it just me or, when I’m aggressively happy, I, as a male, want to have sex, not romance, to quench my thirst for aggressiveness?
I, this list of labels, am an ordinary guy whose skin shows the scars of UV radiation and entropy.
I have achieved all my dreams and goals. I am happy to live and ready to die. This “I” has no need of time or social recognitions/obligations. “To be” is sufficient to describe me now and in the not-now.
Happiness is a condition of intersecting waveforms, not a goal, or a journey, or an object.
The laws of nature and social rules define the temporary restricted waveform intersections that look like me here.
Remove the labels of “laws of nature” and “social rules” and there is no me.
Time to not be me away from this social phenomenon called a blog.
The meditation session is over.
Make a decision and don’t look back…
…unless you want to analyse/refine future decisions.
Over the past several years, my mother in-law fell a few times.
Because she took a blood thinner, Coumadin, we worried that she’d fall, break open a major blood vessel and bleed to death before someone could get to her.
Thank goodness, in her falls, she merely scraped her skin or bumped her head.
However, when she bumped her head, blood vessels under the skin on her face burst and she built up a hematoma between the size of half a ping-pong ball and tennis ball.
Therefore, after she fell in April, we consulted with her doctor, who recommended that my wife’s mother stop taking a blood thinner, which would raise her risk of a stroke but, at her age, falling and bleeding to death was the greater risk.
Here I sit, two weeks after my mother in-law either a) had a stroke and fell, or b) fell and had a stroke in her bathroom. She was discovered sometime before the call we received at 5:51 a.m. requesting which hospital emergency department to send her to.
As the days pass, the minute details of the days that followed diminish.
I’m cataloging as much as I want to remember here today.
27th October – spent most of the day in emergency room A05. Pretty much nonresponsive. ED doctor’s assessment of stroke with possible paralysis on the left side.
28th October – still mostly nonresponsive (or simply just very tired and sleepy) but more movement on the right side. Slight movement on the left side. When awake, requested water, cold, ice water. Sponged water into her mouth until we decided to let her take sips of water.
29th October – When awake, she was alert, remembering, by answering yes/no question, everything up until time of stroke/fall. All extremities working but weaker on the left side. Drank more water.
30th October – Able to hold whole conversations and drink water/juice. Requested to sit on bedside commode, take a bath and have her hair combed – wanted to look like a proper lady. Extra exertion without a lot of food intake definitely weakened her.
31st October – More tired than yesterday. Given swallow test – able to hold ice in her mouth and swallow water/apple sauce. Expressed great feelings of pain during test. Requested not to be woken up for a while. Seemed to have suffered an event (possibly another stroke) a little later.
1st November – Generally nonresponsive. Water built up in lungs, causing her to choke. Didn’t want her to choke to death so family requested Lasix to help remove excess fluid from her lungs. Also given Demerol for pain because she moaned when moved.
2nd November – Some responsiveness – lifting of right arm, twitching of left hand, multiple facial expressions but cannot open eyelids. Very weak. Family wet her lips with sponge of cold, ice water. Weak attempts at swallowing. Overall weakness continued. Considered moving her to nursing home in case she woke up enough to request food and/or physical therapy and there was nothing left for the hospital to do. Given anti-anxiety medicine in anticipation of move. IV needles removed. Strength deteriorated throughout the day. Afibrillation worsened. Breathing got shallower. Family came to sit by her bedside (granddaughter, grandson, daughter in-law, son in-law, step-daughter). She stopped breathing twice but found will/strength to start again before her only living direct descendant, her daughter (my wife) arrived from work. Died minutes later (less than half an hour). Body gasped for breath a few times after heart stopped. Family began mourning process.
Other details surface but are outside of time – eating in the hospital cafeteria, visits from friends/church family, consultations with doctors (cardiologist, neurologist, hospitalist), the kindness of nurses/techs/housekeeping/food services, specific phrases spoken by my mother in-law, sitting by my mother in-law’s side, holding my hand against her face, wiping a cold cloth over her forehead, watching her chin quiver and tears roll down her face when she couldn’t move her extremities, knowing that she was probably still there in some subconscious form right up to the end, even if she could no longer talk.
That’s enough for today. Reliving the last dying days of the world’s best mother in-law are dredging up raw feelings.
Time to enjoy life, sweep the driveway and decks, and give back to the world what my mother in-law gave me. My mother in-law did not dwell on death. Despite tragedies in her life – the death of one of her twins a few days after birth, the loss of her husband 14 years ago, the untimely early death of her son at 51 (the other twin) – she found a way to live, she sighed, read her Bible and moved on, rarely complaining about much that she couldn’t find a way to fix herself, except the decline of the national/world economy, which fed her fear of worse days to come (which means you/me/us have to step up and fix it!).
Financial Medical Advice
When you go shopping, does your subculture encourage you to haggle over the price of the object you want to purchase?
Or do you walk into the market, see the price on display, and readily pay the posted amount without asking for a discount?
In my local subculture, I walk into a doctor’s office or hospital and see no posted prices for services to be rendered.
Instead, I hand the receptionist my medical insurance card(s) and after services are completed, I hand my credit card or cash to cover the cost of copay.
Days, weeks or months later, I receive a bill for the services.
The bill most often details the amount of money the doctor/hospital negotiated with the medical insurance company to cover the rendered services.
For instance, a recent surgery on my right wrist was listed as costing ~$9000 but the insurance company only paid about ~$900 and I owed a small copay ($250, if I remember correctly, that I paid before the surgery). [Followup office visits, usually $25 copay, were included for “free.”]
And now, I get to my mother in-law’s recent hospital stay that concluded in death.
Yesterday, a third-party payment company (which my wife jokingly calls an “ambulance chaser”) called to see if I planned to pursue payment from the nursing/assisted living home for the hospital bill.
Why would they do that?
Well, if my mother in-law’s insurance (Medicare plus supplemental) pays for the hospital bill, the negotiated amount will be substantially less than the hospital’s stated total (think “retail” (the hospital’s stated total) versus “wholesale” (the negotiated amount)).
However, if the third-party payment company (contracted by the hospital, if I understand their relationship to the medical community correctly, in this case) is giving given authorisation to pursue payment, they will try to extract the hospital’s stated total, taking for themselves, I’m sure, a flat fee or percentage, if successful in charging the nursing/assisted living company, where my mother in-law fell, for the full hospital bill.
In other words, should you find yourself having to pay for medical services, you will be charged the full amount. Therefore, be advised that you have plenty of room to negotiate a lower amount, easily down to the amount that insurance companies will pay; that is, if you have any haggling skills in you at all, unless you’re a retail shopper unaccustomed to bargaining for a deal.
In that case, ignore what you just read, and I’m going into the medical business, accepting only patients like you who are willing to pay retail.
By the way, this partially explains why doctors don’t perform as many free/pro bono services for the community as they used to, because it falsely gives medical insurance companies the right to claim that doctor services can be valued at zero.
More as it develops…
treetrunkdings 