View 623 May 16-23, 2010 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The good news is that Sable is back from having her stitches taken out and free from the cone of shame. She's very happy. The bad news is that I have to sit downstairs with her to be sure she's not licking her incision, and it will be a while before I get today's essay up. The worst news news is that the column is very late due to my slow recovery -- not sure I am recovered -- from something like a mild but debilitating flu.
I'll work downstairs on the Mac Book Air.
Back when I can.
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1630: I had expected an iPad to arrive today, but it hasn't. I'm very much looking forward to it.
Sable was happy to be free of the cone of shame, but she aggressively was licking her incision, so I had to put a soft cone on her. It's less intrusive but it does seem to be effective, so she can't open that up again. I got some work done using the Mac Book Air down at the kitchen table and found once again that my network is all fouled up. The Windows 7 network works fine, and even sees the Mac Book Air; but neither Mac sees the other. That's goofy, and it needs fixing, and at some point I'll have to do it. Actually that's wrong. The iMac does see the Air, and I can access documents on it, but it doesn't work quite as I expected it to. I'll have to work on that. But at least I can anticipate that the iPad and the Macs will be connectable by my wireless net.
I have some ideas about the Air and the iPad working together. Don't know if they make sense.
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My old friend and colleague Norman Spinrad is in hospital: we have two reports,one in Sunday's Mail, and the other from this morning andin this morning's mail. He also sends these observations about hospitals. Norman has explicitly placed all this in public domain.
DOCTORS, HOSPITALS, CANCER, AND EXISTENTIAL REALITY
Norman Spinrad
I�ve been getting a lot of hospital horror stories since I barely alluded to mine, and been told any number of times that I was doing a public service. So, some balanced thought....
Sloan Kettering is acknowledged as the best cancer hospital in the US if not the world, and I can�t deny that on a scientific level, and it�s very well endowed because it�s the cancer hospital of choice for the world�s elite patients.
But it is also a huge establishment run, as most such operations are, according to rigid, often counterproductive rules and protocols which are cold, unfeeling, unspirited, and turn much of the lower staff levels into acting like inhuman robots--this is the schedule, this is my routine, and if you don�t like it, tough shit. So they wake you at 4 am to administer unimportant tests, depriving you of sleep, likewise with room cleaning, housekeeping, etc.
There is a so-called �Patient�s Representative,� who here in SK is really the bureaucracy's representative, an ice-cold, slick as goose-grease bitch whose really job is to stone-wall patients by quoting arbitrary rules to keep complainants from any administration pooh-bahs with the power to fix anything.
This is a national disgrace, it wouldn�t be that hard to fix if there was a will, a heart, and a public demand to do it. All it would really take is to rewrite hospital rules and protocols based on the prime directive, that the patient�s physical, health, emotional, and spiritual well being, or as much of it as can possibly be maintained, comes first, not the convenience or arbitrary rules of the administrative ass-covering bureaucracy.
That much being said, something both more positive and not so positive must be said about the doctors, nurses, and researchers working in the field of cancer treatment. The cold equations are that in terms of actually curing cancer, they succeed less than half the time. So in order to stay sane in careers where failure is really more prevalent than true success, they redefine �success� in terms of additional months of patient life.
I can see how they must do this, they really are heroic, but I can also see why tons of money have been wasted in the so-called �war on cancer� in terms of research and why there is so much mealy-mouthing and obfuscation when confronting human beings in dire straights.
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My observation is that it is the Iron Law in action. Sometimes there are ways around the Iron Law, but it is never easy. At least two of the late Frank Herbert's science fiction novels attempted to address this situation by positing a "Bureau of Sabotage" whose agents were explicitly directed to sabotage the smooth workings of other bureaus. Frank was semi-serious about this as a possible remedy to the Iron Law; we discussed it several times. In any event, Norman is in a position to observe the system in action, and remains lucid and insightful as always.
I will also add that my experiences at Kaiser's Sunset Treatment Center, and at my primary Kaiser facility in Panorama City, have been entirely different. I have yet to encounter anyone at Kaiser who is surly or unkindly. I have a couple of times been kept waiting an extra minute or so by a receptionist engaged in what was probably a personal telephone call, but it was not a matter of great importance and I wasn't treated as if I had interrupted her call. That's about the worst story I have. I am sure others have other stories, but that's mine.
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Apparently the mainstream press is finally becoming aware of a problem many of us have worried about for a long time:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/238078/page/1
I do wonder what happened to the notion of freedom?
