Tag Archives: story

Sprinkles and Showers

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While MPs and other elected members of political entities take advantage of insider news to line their pockets with all that does and does not glitter like gold, a Supercommittee (super as in “constituting a more inclusive category than that specified”*, not as in “great”) contemplates a purpose neither divine nor supporting Divine’s cinematic roles.  More on that later today.

Meanwhile, a jazzlike rendition of Haydn’s Piano Trio XV:28 in E Major: Allegretto sets the tone, a la the style of Claude Bolling and Jean-Pierre Rampal.

 

 

What’s next in scandal-filled football news?

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So who’ll be the first investigative reporter(s) who claim(s) to have had the scoop on the scandal in Happy Valley/Second Mile years ago but the editor/producer/network executive(s) killed the story because it was detrimental to college football and the superconference goals of network broadcasting?

Inquiring readers want to know…

Federal whistleblower protection is an option.  Plus financial independence, if you’ve got it.

In other words, if we don’t flush out all the places/people who could’ve protected children, the U.S. looks like it puts commerce ahead of its children.

Put that into the supercomputer and see which entities/countries look better in the long run and thus will lead us into the 22nd Century.

Hmm…

Make a decision and don’t look back…

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…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!).

Unfolding the Past

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How many times in one’s lifetime must one spend time sorting through a collection of material that summed one’s recently deceased loved one?

Je ne sais pas.  Je souhaite que je connaissais.

To know.  To be.  To have been.  To do.

Enough musing.  While packing up my mother in-law’s things at her apartment in the assisted living community, we once again found her childhood diary.  Also a folded note on typewriter paper (almost as good as new), retyped below, including spelling/grammar mistakes:

Moss Point, Mississippi
February 16, 1942

Dear Jane:

I suppose you think I am pretty awful for not writing any sooner and thanking you for the pictures but it seems as if I never get around to all the things I want to do.  I surely would have loved to have seen that wedding, it must have been awfully pretty.  I had a letter from Bruce and Clara the other day and they really seem supremely happy.  Bruce said that she has to rum him off to work every morning and then he works like the devil to get back in the afternoon, and as a result the company thinks that he is getting efficient and are going to give him a raise.  He has been defered until July and then he doesn’t know what is going to happyen but, they don’t seem to be very much worried about the matter.

We (Y.M.B.C.) gave our annual Carnavil Ball Friday night.  It was really one of the best and prettiest that we have ever had, although, it was by far too crowded to dance.  Friday a week ago, the Cotillion Club had theirs. I was a Duke in that one and you should have seen me.  I have gained about thirty pounds and the Tux I had at school fit me just like I had been poured in it.  It fact it was sorta painful to sit down so I had to dance most of the time.  The whole affiar was rather funny.  Since we had rented a local night club for the affiar it was impossible to practice.  The king and Queen gave a cocktail party before-hand and by the time some of the court got out there they were pretty well lit, with the result that some walked in fast, some slow and some just sorta flowed in.  The High School is having theirs tonight.  I think I will go over as a spectator because they will have such a pretty floor show.

We went to Mobile yesterday afternoon to see a Nazi bomber that had been shot down over London last year.  It was really pretty interesting because a man told the history of it.

Had a letter from Bob the other day and he is back at Pennington teaching.  Since teachers are so hard to get they have asked for his deferment until school is out.  I know he didn’t mean it like it sounded, but he was telling all about Klenor and her family.  Said that they own a large dyeing place there and that she had loads of possibilities.  Anyway I hope that he didn’t mean it to be as mercenary as it sounded.  He said that when they went to Brumuda on their honeymoon they would stop by/ Frankly I don’t think the boy knows exactly where Mississippi is.

How is school?  I know you must be back in the old grind by now.  I m ce am sending this letter to Rogersville because I am not sure just what your address is.

Well I had better stop before I get fired.  Please excuse the typing I type so seldon it is pretty awful.

love,

“Missip”

Two data points

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Can you figure out how these two connect?:

  1. Carbon-based lifeforms using carbon – gee, who’d have thought of that?
  2. Is joblessness really the issue here?

Should Michael Bloomberg be cast in the remake of a movie that starred Paul Giamatti?

Do Italy and Greece matter when analysing the LHC test results?

When was the last time you paid attention to what’s going on in the Outback or Siberia?

Did you calculate the miniscule effect of YU55 on the orbits of Earth and the Moon?

Financial Medical Advice

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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…

Augur Sanctions

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I shall, I must, I will admit that it’s hard to believe in the dream of building a settlement for members of our species on another celestial body when our species, despite claims of higher brain functions — culture, religion, ethics, morals and other labels we bandy about like birds of paradise on display — contains serial rapists/murderers/financial exploiters/stalkers.

When while I sit here, quietly mourning, along with dozens of others who knew her, the loss of a dear, gentle person like my mother in-law, bloated egos point blame about the sad state of our species’ barter trade system of survival on this planet (a/k/a the economy) on each other like misbehaving schoolchildren in Bil Keane’s single pane comic, Family Circus, calling up the gremlins of “Ida Know” and “Not Me.”

Thank goodness the trees outside the window are stark evidence that the thoughts in my central nervous system are frivolous.

All supercellular existence like memes, including the label meme and the electronic means used to convey this message, seem meaningless right now.

Look, I don’t mind playing God with all your lives in a supercomputer simulation set.  If my colleagues sit with me in the Committee while reviewing the simulation results and decide to take action against you in godlike manner, exposing your secrets, eliminating the greedy, elevating the needy, I won’t stop them.

None of us is more important than all of us.

The whining of professional sports team owners and players are just so much background noise.

Amateur athletes who destroy their bodies for the sake of personal pride seem so misguided.

Office workers who deteriorate their health to stay within subcultural norms seem so unfortunate.

Military and police who abuse their authority for personal ego boosting seem such a waste.

My mother in-law never drank, never smoked, never directly criticised anyone (rather, she questioned the validity of a person’s behavioural intent) — to some, she might have led a smalltown life which would not appeal to them.

And, yet, she inspired everyone she met to be better than their negative surroundings.

There comes a moment in the clash of cultures when subculture leaders cannot inspire the populace as a whole due to historic teachings about the superiourity of one, each or every subculture over another.

Who can we believe is telling the truth?

Who is truly impartial?

Which fairy tale, which myth, and/or which legend is the most universal?

That’s why, when the Committee put me in charge of telling the story, the running commentary, the plots and subplots of our species from the perspective of the reluctant leader, I’ve tried to take my ego and personality out of the equation by taking your personal stories and mixing them into a supercomputer simulation, an electromechanical device that crunches numbers unfeelingly while processing the behavioural traits of feelings/emotions unique to our species and shared with the rest of the sets of states of energy around us in this part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Of course, a supercomputer can only do so much.

Its output is subject to interpretation.  Every character, word, space, sentence, formula and conclusion has separate meanings to those who read/view them.

Which means, I suppose, despite trying to create an impartial judge/oracle in the form of a supercomputer networked into our lives, we are still left, at the end of this blog entry, having to trust one another to put species first, subculture second and self last.

Where will this lead us?

In a culture where literacy is important, illiteracy in one’s early childhood school years is a key indicator of low employment capability and most likely high criminal activity tendency later on.  But these are culture-based measurements.

What about the innate concepts of right and wrong, regardless of specific cultural training?

How malleable are we?

What is “right” and what is “wrong” when all subcultural references are removed?

As our species superculture continues to take shape, will we define rules/laws and punish people for exploiting our trust in one another to put species first and self last while preserving individual freedoms/rights?

I am unimportant.  I can die today or tomorrow and won’t regret anything I have or haven’t done.

It is you, our species within the global ecosystem, that matters most.  What are we doing to protect the weakest and most trusting of us from the worst of our behavioural tendencies?

= = =

Thanks to Dr. Reed for calling and sharing his memories of my mother in-law during her medical office visits of the past; Billie Young; Mrs. Knowlton; Peggy Shuck; Pearl Manis; Brandi and her baby near Burem Road; Amis Mill Eatery; Stephanie and Sarah at Beauregard’s; Rave; Shirley Price; Sarah Evans; Barbara Malpas; Janet Netherland-Brown; Melinda Miller; Rogersville Presbyterian Church Business Women’s Circle; Rev. Rose; Sue Livesay; Oles Miller; Rev. White; Maurice Davis; Jim Forgey; David Miller; Jonathan Berry; Brian Givens; Tommy Logan; Broome Funeral Home; McKinney Cemetery; David Testerman; Sweet Tooth Cafe; Pal’s Sudden Service; Kingsport Times-News; Rogersville Review; WRGS; Mike at Rocky Top Markets.

What does paleobiology say about ants’ weather forecasting abilities?

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7-Nov-2011

Am I the only one to notice that hearing aids have become fashion accessory statements?

Seems like when I was a kid, people wore “flesh” coloured hearing aids to hide them, and later in-ear filtered amplifiers to protect a person’s vanity.

These days, bright, neon-coloured contraptions sit in or over the ear with “skins” that depict a person’s favourite football team, racecar driver, musician or religion.

I even saw one that had tiny light-emitting fiber art fronds displaying a changing rainbow of little dots waving in the air like ear hairs on fire.

Another person had rigged a miniature LCD screen that turned incoming sounds into an infographic soundwave frequency “music video” dangling like an earring attached to the hearing aid.

Leave it to the Baby Boomers to make their health failings a positive experience.

= = =

BTW, the supercomputer predicts one future where former religious opponents — Christian vs. Muslim, for instance — join forces to oppose the immoral/unethical wealthy elites.  Actually, the prediction keeps popping up over and over in different scenarios, including urban-vs.-rural wars, suburban skirmishes, etc.

I’m not one of those survivalist types but the latest supercomputer musings sure make me think about clearing a space in the subbasement network wire closet for canned food and a comfortable cot for two.

Time for a leisurely walk in the woods to see what my nontalkative neighbours have to say about global warming and human warring factions.