Puffs

I sometimes wonder if he really knows just what kind of damage he has done.

I’m talking about a recent ex-president who said, “We had to fundamentally remake America.”

I look around today and at times I think he is making progress (even if I think that’s not a good thing), but other times I look around and think maybe we’re doing OK in spite of what his desires were.

The times I think we’re in the middle of ‘remaking American’ come when I have a week or two, or four like I’ve just had. Nancy’s last surgery required a week in the hospital followed by additional time in a ‘rehab’ facility.

Well, as most of you know, if you’ve had any dealings with the medical community in the past few years, one of the first things you do is fill out a ton of paperwork. Among the many questions is one about who your ‘primary’ doctor is.

That makes sense when you see specialists or surgeons. They know who to send reports to and who to contact if they have questions. We have had times when that information was helpful.

However . . . there are times when that bit of information does absolutely no good.

When Nancy was moved to the ‘rehab’ facility the paperwork, of course, followed her. It wasn’t long after the move when her pain level reached the point where she asked for the pain medicine. Of course the facility personnel looked over the paperwork and they found her primary doctor was in Hastings. Their effort to contact him were not successful and the pain level was increasing by the hour.

We finally asked again when the medication would be coming and we were told they were having trouble getting through to the primary doctor in Hastings.

We asked why they were trying to contact that doctor there as he had nothing to do with the recent surgery and placement in the re-hab. We thought they would get medical orders from the surgeon who ordered the stay in their facility.

To make a long story short we did finally get the medicine to help alleviate the pain about 12 hours later than we wanted it, but it did come.

This small incident was a reminder to me of the slow slide we’re seeing in the U. S. into some sort of “socialized” medical system.

It is part of this “remaking of America” and I’m not sure I like it.

Another example of this slide into socialized medicine came when the hospital was about to make the move on Thursday, but they needed the permission of the ‘Infectious Disease Control Officer” for the hospital, to do so.

This person knew Nancy had an ‘open wound’ for some time and the Infectious Disease office obtained samples to try to grow ‘cultures’ in their lab to see just what kind of germs they might be dealing with.

As it happened, the cultures were not growing anything and the Infectious Disease control people were holding up the process until something grew.

Well, the doctors thought this was silly because they did the best they could in cleaning up the wound, getting rid of every germ they could and were happy no germs were growing.

We finally found out that the reason the Infectious Disease people were holding things up was because the ‘regulations’ dealing with this sort of thing defined the care for a wound of this type had to be treated as an infected wound and they were waiting to see just what kind of infection there was.

Finally, the doctors with a little common sense prevailed and the move was made.

This was just another example of how socialized medicine works. The person read the regulation and was trying to answer the problem by conforming the problem to fit the regulation, and that just was not working.

Socialized medicine would do the same thing, just on a larger scale.

There were other examples throughout our process, these two just seemed to stand out as examples of why I would not want socialized medicine to be the normal. I’m afraid we’ve already gone a long way towards it.

I said at the beginning there were also reasons to think that ‘remaking of America’ was not a total success, at least not yet.

The one major reason I think this was because that on November 1 (All Souls Day) I went to a Catholic Mass. The church was pretty full. A whole bunch of people were praying for our departed brothers and sisters and most likely many other reasons and that is something that has not changed.

Another things that has not changed for the most part was the care and concern so many in the medical community gives. Not everyone simply reads a regulation and tries to fit it to cover every situation they come across.

A O

Our ‘National Media’ news outlets do a pretty good job in reporting activities around the nation and around the world these days. However, to repeat what I’ve said before: they report what they want to report and that may, or may not be the complete story. There are plenty of times when the complete story is not reported because it just isn’t known. However, there are plenty of times when the major news outlets just don’t want to report the complete story.

These days many of the news stories involve terrible crimes such as ‘mass shootings,’ ‘abusive situations,’ and ‘other social crimes.’ It seems that if any of these crimes are done by people with certain backgrounds, that news is certainly reported. I mean: if a shooting is done by an ex-military person, we are told right away; if an abusive situation comes to light and the person committing the abuse is an ex-football player or ex-athlete of any kind, that news is certainly reported.

However, if the crime is committed by a person the national media wants to protect, we sometimes never hear of the background of that person.

I read a report over the weekend about a mass shooting that happened last Spring in a Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tenn. killing six people, three children and three adults. The shooting was done by a female . . .

That was about all we heard from the national media.

Just last week, Mr. Tyler O’Neil of the Daily Signal, reported the following: • the shooter was female but identified as a male; • the police discovered a ‘manifesto’ at the scene of the shooting but unlike in so many other mass shootings, authorities sought to keep her manifesto secret; • three pages of her manifesto were recently release and the police department suspended seven detectives in relation to the leak.

Seems someone in the police department’s leadership didn’t want that manifesto released (and the national media did little to seek that information). Research has given information that less than three percent of mass shooters are female and ‘heaven forbid’ any of those female shooters “identify” as male as this one did. Taking drugs in an effort to force their cross-gender identity is a common practice.

Some people (the national media) make the effort to report gender identify reporting as a good thing and normal among people. When one of these “gender” identifying as a male, female people do something as terrible as shooting six people . . . that little bit of news doesn’t make the national headlines.

A O

Yup . . . It’s been part of the Democratic Political Party’s national agenda for some time to “fundamentally remake America.” I agree there are some things that do need changing, but let’s not burn down the house in the effort. America has many great things it does that do not need thrown out.

A O