[links] Link salad wants to declare jihad on the antivax movement
Going Out of Print — The new generation of e-book reading gadgets will transform the troubled book, magazine, and newspaper industries. But it’s uncertain what that transformation will look like. Um, yeah.
DeluxeComfort.com Girlfriend Body Pillow — Umm. Umm. Umm. (Thanks, I think, to )
New York Times depicts life on Venus and Mars… in 1912 — Both cool and hilarious.
Airborne Fungus Expected to Spread in U.S. — About 10 People Have Reportedly Died in Northwestern U.S. After Infection With C. gatti. Another Pacific Northwest contribution to American culture.
Jenny McCarthy body count — Antivax is murder. Your opinions are not facts. Speaking as someone with an immunodeficient family member, your antivax fantasies about your child’s medical risks put my family at factual, serious medical risks. This isn’t even a debate. It’s like evolution denial, it’s emotional idiocy that’s somehow become privileged as a legitimate viewpoint. Teh stupid doesn’t just burn, it kills. (Thanks to .)
on the first Amendment and established religion — He really smokes the Right in this post. My personal favorite bit: A shared opposition to the rights of women — and to modernity as a whole — trumped any secondary disagreements, much the same way this shared antipathy toward women and modernity has set aside the longstanding feud between conservative Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists. Bonus points for introducing me to the noun phrase “hegemonic religion”, then effectively deconstructing it. He really smokes the Right in this post. My personal favorite bit: A shared opposition to the rights of women — and to modernity as a whole — trumped any secondary disagreements, much the same way this shared antipathy toward women and modernity has set aside the longstanding feud between conservative Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists. Bonus points for introducing me to the noun phrase “hegemonic religion”, then effectively deconstructing it.
Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks — I’ve worked for these guys, more than once.
The Lowden Plan — Nevada Republican senate candidate Sue Lowden says the solution to healthcare issues is to bargain with your doctor for chickens. This site informs me that my colon cancer treatment would cost 8,738 chickens. Uh, yeah. Your Republican Party — always looking out for the needs of the individual voter.
Have Conservatives Gone Mad? — Mark Ambinder on the politics of the right wing echo chamber.
Elton John’s letter to Ryan White, 20 years after his death from AIDS — Moving. And if you don’t remember the Ryan White story, go look it up. Very instructive about the conservative response to tragedies, and one of a myriad reasons I will never be a conservative.
The Conservative Family Feud — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intellectual collapse of the conservative movement.
Republicans push for Minnesota sovereignty — Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment Wednesday that would make Minnesota the first state to require a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature to approve federal laws affecting the state. Hmm. The last time I checked, the GOP was all about strict Constitutionalism. Which this most decidedly ain’t. Federalism is a settled issue, conservatives. We even had a little war about that 150 years ago, remember? You lost. The Constitution won.
?otD: Would you kill, or threaten to kill, for an insult to your religion or politics? Why?
4/24/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (family disruption)
Body movement: brief suburban walk later
Hours slept: 10.25 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (scale is out of batteries)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 7/10 (fatigue, on the pump)
Currently (re)reading:
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Tags:
Posted: 8:30 am Sat April 24 2010 | Comments(1) |
[personal] Medical follies, family edition
Sometimes they keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit.
a/k/a my mom is not having her angioplasty this morning. The hospital committee has ruled it doesn’t sufficiently address her symptoms. Mind you, this is a procedure she needs at some point in the not too distant future regardless, and right now it’s the only option the cardiologists have come up with for addressing her symptoms, but as they have said, they’re not certain.
This is closely akin to coming into the ER with a broken ankle because you have a bad hip, and the hospital refusing to treat your bad hip because it won’t help the broken ankle. It doesn’t make any freaking sense. And that after both patient and cardiologist have agreed upon it as the next step.
Her entire stay, both of them, at this hospital (part of a major West Coast provider that is both hospital operator and HMO) has been characterized by bizarre medical behavior that, while not rising to the level of malpractice, falls somewhere between incompetence and black comedy. This particular hospital system requires the hospitalist (ward doctor) be the single-point-of-contact and gatekeeper for all communications with specialists or other departments. This means the nurses, patients et cetera don’t get to ask questions or see the specialists unless the specialists happen to think to come to them.
Which might be okay, except so far the hospitalists on my mother’s case have been bizarrely incompetent. During her first admission, the hospitalist tried to send her home because she’d “had too much caffeine”, and there was nothing wrong with her. It was also utterly clear that the hospitalist was either reading someone else’s chart, or badly misreading my mother’s chart. Later one we had the other hospitalist carefully explain the results of the first angiogram quite erroneously, directly contradicting in detail what the cardiologist who’d performed the procedure had told me and immediately after the procedure was done. On investigation, it turned out we were right and the hospitalist was wrong.
It’s pretty clear that the nurses on the ward aren’t very happy with the hospitalists and their gatekeeping. It’s also pretty clear that the cardiology team is internally divided along some political fault line (I’ve never before heard a doctor badmouth another doctor in a professional setting). It’s pretty clear the hospital has serious medical communication issues.
Meanwhile, my mom is not being treated. The current “plan” is to send her home, and if the undiagnosed and untreated cardiac symptoms recur again, to re-admit her and perform the procedure they have denied her today.
Unfortunately, because her insurance is tied to this hospital chain, she can’t go anywhere else unless she goes out of pocket. Which isn’t financially possible for her or our family. So we’re stuck inside their web of lousy communication, incompetent hospitalists, and treatment denial.
Meanwhile, I am off to chemo and can influence none of this. Grr.
Tags: Cancer, family, health, healthcare
Posted: 7:36 am Fri April 23 2010 | Comments(4) |
[photos] Your Friday moment of zen
Your Friday moment of zen.
Portland flower. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: flowers, Photos, Portland, zen
Posted: 5:46 am Fri April 23 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad is lost in a forest of medical issues
Shared Worlds Presents…A Fantastic Bestiary — A whole bunch of writerfolk offer monsters to a summer writng school, including yours truly. Check it out. (Thansk to @mattstaggs.)
The Reject-o-Matic — There’s never been an easier way to reject a friend, an enemy, or a frenemy. (Via Andrew Wheeler.)
SDO: The Extreme Ultraviolet Sun — A pretty nifty image from APOD.
Commemorating CHM: The Jourdon Anderson Edition — Nineteenth Century Freedman snark at its finest. That’s the world the Republican Party celebrates and wants to return to &mdash the glorious days od States’ Rights and the South. They just like to pretend that slavery wasn’t really a big deal.
Road rage suspect reportedly found dead in home — Thank god for the NRA. Without their vigorous defense of untramelled Second Amendment rights (background checks at gun shows are for socialists!) this man might have been reduced to only throwing Gatorade bottles instead of actually shooting people.
Technical difficulties at the Supreme Court — This is spooky. Really odd how ill informed they are about basic modern life. (Thanks to David Goldman.)
?otD: How come angina doesn’t rhyme with vagina?
4/23/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (family disruption)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.75 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (scale is out of batteries)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 4/10 (fatigue)
Currently (re)reading:
TThe Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Culture, Funny, Links, Personal, Politics, Science, Tech, Writing
Posted: 5:44 am Fri April 23 2010 | Comments(3) |
[cancer|personal] Wind, the sucking thereof
Well, I have now successfully failed to write for almost a week. I wrote last Tuesday, wrapping “The Stars Do Not Lie” in first draft. I gave myself two days off to reset my brain into novel mode. Friday I worked on Endurance. Then my mom went into the hospital with chest pains. And my car got broken into. And I experienced a new low in lower GI control issues. Not to mention the usual daily travails of being on chemotherapy.
Guess what? When enough things go wrong, even I stop writing. Part of this is that I carry my stress in two places — lower GI (sound familiar) and through fatigue. Being very upset in a non-angry way often makes me sleepy. I believe this is a relic of my decade or so of clinical depression, as it’s essentially a retreat. In effect, stress makes me poop more and sleep more.
Give that my ground state these days is a level of fatigue comparable to a couple of sleepless nights in a row for someone in ordinary health, anything that adds to that sinks me to a degree of minimal focus and energy that’a very difficult to function at. All the motivation and psychotic persistence in the world doesn’t help if I can’t get it together enough to begin to write.
My writing fu has never been this defeated by circumstance, not in the ten years I’ve been working as a pro. I hesitate to call it writer’s block, in the sense that I’m not feeling the least bit blocked creatively. But the result is the same.
Just last night over dinner, I was telling that I wanted a week where nothing bad or stupid happens to me and the people around me. Then I got ‘s phone call that was back in the hospital. As it happens, today (April 22) is my mom’s birthday, and we were going to have a family party for her at Papa Haydn’s. Now I guess it’s Twinkies in the hospital ward. Second time we’ve had to cancel her party, too.
I know this isn’t about me. This is about my mother and her health. Just like Mother-of-the-Child’s recent hospitalization was about her health. (And that’s generated almost $30,000 worth of billing, roughly 10% of which has been assigned to my responsibility. Because, you know, my cash flow was getting too fat this year what with the cancer and all.) Just like ‘s foot injury was about her health. But I’m getting really tired of sitting in my own little crap hole watching crap rain down on the people who love and care about me.
Had a meltdown over this last night. took care of me, as a partner does. I am keenly aware of how much my calamitous life is stressing her, stressing , stressing , stressing everybody. Even, and especially me.
I write about this, as usual, to open a window inside the world of cancer. A lot of people never talk about it. And while chemo and its discontents are difficult and time-consuming, the lesson of late is another one: life goes on. People get in trouble, get back out of trouble. It’s not like my chemotherapy was some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card that enabled everyone around me to have six months of easy going, to spare me the stress of their misfortunes.
So me being upset and unhappy and crying for my mom cycling in and out of the cardiac ward is just as much a part of the cancer journey as the drug cocktails or the extreme fatigue or any of the other symptoms I discuss. This is a journey of the heart every bit as much as it is a journey of the body.
No one gets off this bus, except the hard way.
Tags: Calendula, Cancer, family, health, Personal, shellyrae, stories, Writing
Posted: 4:56 am Thu April 22 2010 | Comments(1) |
[personal] Another round of beatings has commenced; morale not yet improved
a/k/a my mom is back in the hospital with a recurrence of her prior cardiac symptoms. Today is also her birthday, so I believe we are cancelling the second attempt to have her birthday party. One again, she is not in a life threatening situation, but potentially serious medical issues continue to not be unraveled.
and I will visit her later today.
Tags: Calendula, family, health, Personal
Posted: 4:39 am Thu April 22 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Your Thursday moment of zen
Your Thursday moment of zen.
Portland Cadillac. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: cars, Photos, Portland, zen
Posted: 4:34 am Thu April 22 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad wishes it had the wherewithal to be a drunk
Mary Sues and literary fiction — With a few casual swipes at genre fiction on the way.
Blogging, Now and Then — Eighteenth century bloggers? Via Scrivener’s Error, who nicked it in turn from Making Light.
Fight Night: 1897 — Aboard the USS Oregon.
Over the Hedge with a novel take on zombies
How religion has let society down — Religion, morality and sex. This weird, obsessive-compulsive fixation on sex will have to end before any religious institution can really become the moral authority they all claim to be. (Thanks to .)
Tax Day Tea Party 2010 — Tea Partiers in their own words. The stupid, it burns. Twelve minutes of people angrily confusing their largely ill-informed opinions with facts. (For example, on the subject of the level of personal income taxation, and the tax cut embedded in the stimulus package.) A lot people, when asked factual questions by the interviewer said, “I don’t believe it.” That, in a nutshell is confusing your opinions with facts — a favorite conservative past time strongly encouraged by their political leadership and media dominance. My favorite was the guy near the end who said FOX wasn’t biased because it presented conservative viewpoints. (Via .)
Spouting off for the Tea Party — “He says some things that are definitely inflammatory, but I think the comments of one person are just that, and don’t reflect the feelings of the whole group,’: said Jennifer Nassour, chairwoman of the Massachusetts Republican party. Isn’t that what’s said about virtually every Tea Party member who speaks up or carry a sign? “Well, yes, that was a little crazy but it’s not what the group stands for.” How can entire movement be unrepresentative of itself? They want the emotional charge and media shock value of extremism, but they’re just as desperate to be seen as the voice of mainstream America. “Mainstream” being the 20% or so of Americans who are Palinites and dead-enders and nutbags, and who agree with them. Tea Party motto: Bring the me the blindly opinionated, the bigoted and the ill-formed, yearning to be angry.
They’re Already Being Fooled Again — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on the Tea Party. I don’t doubt that the objections of most Tea Partiers are genuine and many of them were and are principled opponents of the policies they now decry when they happened earlier during a Republican administration. It’s just that most of those principled opponents were probably never Republicans, or they ceased being Republicans because of their objections. Partisan identification explains a large part of the pro-Palin sentiment, but it still cannot excuse the foolish enthusiasm for yet another deeply flawed Republican politician. The problem with not letting facts influence your political views that you’re incapable of recognizing when you’re being fooled by someone who speaks to your emotions but doesn’t have the facts to back them up. The key to understanding the Tea Party isn’t listening to what they say about themselves, it’s listening what they say to themselves.
?otD: Coffee, tea or bathtub gin?
4/22/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (family disruption)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (scale is out of batteries)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 5/10 (fatigue, GI distress)
Currently (re)reading:
The Truth by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Links, Oregon, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Religion, sex, Writing
Posted: 4:30 am Thu April 22 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] Oops
SE 17th, looking southward from Holgate, photographed while out running errands this morning.
There were numerous police cars, several fire trucks and ambulances, and a whole passel of utility trucks. Wish I’d had the big camera with me.
Photo © 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: cars, Photos, Portland
Posted: 2:04 pm Wed April 21 2010 | Comments(0) |
[food] Facing off with the KFC Double Down
Here at this blog, we subject ourselves to heinous tortures and food crimes so you don’t have to.
Today’s edition of “Where’s Jay’s Cardiologist” is brought to you by the KFC Double Down. This is perhaps the most American of sandwiches, reinvented without any bread whatsoever! Yes, 540 calories of carb-free goodness…
The Double Down lurking in its lair, like a rabid weasel after a night huffing duct sealant with disbarred sorority sisters:
I bravely attack the vicious beast, throwing myself on the altar of the crunchy-fried-brown food group:
Wounded, the Double Down retreats into its crispy shell:
With God as my witness, I shall never eat another one of those damned things again, but it truth, it wasn’t that bad. About like eating a plate of chicken tenders with cheese sauce and bacon. Mmm…bacon. If you like crunchy, salty, fried things, this may be nirvana. If you like your arteries free-flowing, not so much with the Double Down.
A nutritional disaster? Sure. Still, quintessentially American to the point of wretched excess, and rather tasty to boot. My inner twelve-year old was all over it. I think the noise I heard as I bit into it was my cardiologist shrieking.
Photos © 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags:
Posted: 4:59 am Wed April 21 2010 | Comments(4) |
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