Day: October 21, 2005

Cage Match: The Vascular Surgeon vs. The Nursing Home, Round 1

I’ve mentioned my frustration with my grandmother’s vascular surgeon before — the man is by all accounts a fantastic surgeon, but the interaction I have with his office often leaves me exhausted. Today was one such day.

My grandmother had angioplasty and a stent replacement a couple weeks ago. After a week in the hospital she was transferred to a nursing home for physical therapy. Everything was going well as far as I was concerned, until today when I receive a call from the surgeon’s office wanting to discharge her from the nursing home early and have nurses and physical therapists come in to help her out.

That would be a disaster. Although she’s stopped having hallucinations — a problem that always occurs for her after surgery — she is still very confused and not cognitively up to snuff. I visited her today around 12:30 p.m., for example, and she thought it was the middle of the night. And then she tells me about how she just went to a funeral and two of her brothers — both who have been dead for years — got into an argument at the funeral. The surgeon’s office just dismisses this and says once she’s in familiar surroundings that will go away. Not delusions/hallucinations that severe. They will go away eventually, but it seems to take longer and longer after surgery.

Anyway, the real reason they want her to come home is that the surgeon’s office and the nursing home cannot get along about the best way to dress her wound! The surgeon wants them to use a wet-to-dry dressing method. The nursing home simply doesn’t use wet-to-dry dressing methods, arguing that they have higher risks of bacterial cross-contamination and have been supplanted by more recent innovations in wound dressing. The surgeon, however, insists that wet-to-dry is the best solution for avoiding infection — and my grandmother has previously had problems with infections in the areas where the incisions were made for surgery.

A bigger concern for me other than the hallucinations is the physical therapy. My grandmother is well into her 80s and has had multiple such surgeries over the past four years that have really taken a toll on her. She has little incentive or motivation to do the necessary physical therapy while in the nursing therapists will be dismissed in less than a week. Bring her back home and those nurses and physical therapists will be dismissed after a few days. Stay longer while not participating fully in the therapy at the nursing home, however, and she’s racking up incredibly large nursing home bills.

It ends up being just one more thing I resent my father for abandoning any sense of responsibility and leaving my brother and I to care for her at this stage in her life (and my brother doesn’t help for reasons that I understand even if I don’t agree with).

Stupidity, Thy Name Is Tom Barrett

So I open up the local rag, The Kalamazoo Gazette, today to the local section and there is a full-color photograph of some Western Michigan University students protesting outside the Kalamazoo Public Library. They’re part of a student group called Students for America, and in the photo they’re carrying signs that say things like, “Preserve American Culture,” “Stop Targeting Our Kids,” and “Promote the Gay Agenda on Your Own Time With Your Own Dime.”

It turns out they are protesting an appearance by author David Levithan who is the author of “Boy Meets Boy,” which, according to the newspaper, “portrays a town where a transgender character named ‘Infinite Darlene’ doubles as football team captain and homecoming queen and where GLBTQ teens — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning — don’t suffer the stigmas that arise in the real world.” Sure, whatever. My main question is how many more letters are they going to add to GLBT? Wait a few years and it will be GLBTQRSTUVWXYZ (for those are questioning their alphabetic orientation.)

Anyway, back to the main point. First, like most protests, the principal here is simply stupid. The author shows up to talk about how gays, etc. are marginalized, etc. and how do the local paleocons reply? They show up and protest that homosexuals are somehow undermining “American” culture. Way to go guys. You really helped make your opponents’ point.

Second, never ever show up to protest unless you’ve done some basic fact checking and understand what it is you’re going to be protesting against. Remember that sign urging people to promote the “gay agenda . . . on your own dime?” The leader of this collective of idiots elaborates on that point in the Gazette,

Tom Barrett, a founding member of the Western Michigan University group Students for America, a 15-member group that organized the protest, said the group wasn’t protesting the book itself, but was “promoting good, American values.”

“We think it’s wrong,” Barrett said. “We think they shouldn’t be pushing the homosexual agenda with taxpayer dollars. They should do it on their own time with their own dime.”

King said taxpayer dollars did not fund the event or the distribution of the free copies of “Boy Meets Boy” to interested teens.

“The Kalamazoo Community Foundation funded the donation of all the books we had given away beforehand and all the books we gave away tonight,” King said.

The author’s visit also was free, he said.

Damn. You’d think Barrett would have wanted to make sure taxpayer dollars were paying for this event before making that the theme of the protest. Or maybe he just thinks ignorance accompanies intolerance as a “good, American value.”

Source:

Gay-teen-romance author draws fans and protesters. Elizabeth Clark, Kalamazoo Gazette, October 21, 2005.