I'll let the Googles post this for me at my selected time, because if all goes per plan, I'm off to the regular Wednesday morning Mom meeting with a sizzling agenda.
It seems the retirement center never ordered replacement pads for that dreadfully uncomfortable neck-immobilizer collar, and when my sister got one of Mom's M.D's to write a prescription for them, she found the pharmacy needed cash -- because per Medicare and Mom's insurance, this was something that was supposed to have been handled through the nursing home.
They had not, and in initial contact expressed mild surprise at their own omission-- Yet this is something totally obvious on a patient who gets an at least three-times-a-week check for bedsores and similar issues. Once again, paint-by-numbers healthcare, performed by the cheapest supposedly-qualified help.
My sister is out a reasonable chunk of change, an amount that would have bought a couple of months of very nice lunches. My Mom's been putting up with yeechy padding on her neck stabilizer. My brother and I are seeing red.
And this is a place that gets good-to-excellent ratings from the State and the various consumer-reviewed websites. Imagine how bad the really bad ones must be.
I need to include the Hemlock Society in my personal retirement planning -- I haven't got three kids and a dozen grandkids to at least try to nursemaid the nurses and I'd just as soon not be tormented by incompetent dullards in my dotage. The way we treat the infirm elderly is a crime. When my time comes, play me out with Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 instead, please. Please.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
4 comments:
Yep, we are finding the same with MC's dad.
And I have been thinking of the same things as you re: my elderlyness
"Imagine how bad the really bad ones must be."
Yup, the only real reason to save for retirement.
Don't bother with the fancies for your 'Final Exit', a cylinder of Helium with a hose and a plastic bag will do the trick quickly.
And I hope you allow fellow RF Geeks to paw through your accumulated junk box at your Wake. Be a real shame to have those goodies piled up at the curb for the junkman...
If there's a cure the next day?
Wait for the next day? That is hope, but it may never come. And the guy they experimented on wasn't old. And 1 guy in an experiment means probably DECADES before it is available to the rest of us.
(Insurance doesn't pay for experiments, and they rarely want to pay for stuff that is early days even after the experiment.)
Some things are just not worth living through. (And what I think might be worth enduring is different from what you think...) More life is not automatically equal to better life. "The frightening thing is not dying. The frightening thing is not living."
Something I haven't thought of in a very long time - since I studied nuclear reactions at a government lab - was revisited by the media during Obama's recent Hiroshima visit. Namely, what are the effects on the human body from extreme radiation exposure. (The kind of exposure the people who survived the explosion only to die a few days later.) You can probably find some of the descriptions if you bother to look.
Here is a hint: If I ever discover that I have been exposed to extreme levels of radiation - like a dose well in excess of 1000 REMs, I will do everything in my power to shoot myself in the head before I let the medical profession get their hands on me.
Bodies putrefy BEFORE they die. Think about that for a minute. Your tong will become a piece of rotting meat. And you will still be around to endure that. And at that level there is NO hope.
Regardless of what your parents told you when you were 6 years old, there isn't always hope. The doctors can't always make things better. And in the meantime you're in the hands of a bunch of people who are overworked and underpaid.
Roberta, Sorry for co-opting the comments, but the insistence that I live by someone else's world-view (and it is usually a religious world-view) is one of the things that sets me off. Whether it be the Christians or the Muslims, or the Socialists/Communists, they all want to tell me how to live and what to think, and some of them are bent on destroying me if I disagree.
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