gag.judyanddan.com

A fellow in Germany has attached a camera to his cat’s collar. If you have ever wanted to see life from the a pet’s eye view check this out. Mr. Lee

I’m removing the comments options as in the past two days I’ve recieved over 908 “comments” advertising things that will help my penis grow (I don’t have one), drugs for hair loss (I have lots of hair–in the right places) and software I don’t need.

Ever go into work on a Monday, thinking you left everything in place, all was well and SURPRISE! Fires everywhere.

I think this visually sums up that sort of day MONDAY.

I recently watched a movie called What the bleep? that merged quantum physics and new discoveries such as the teleportation of molecules (Nature vol.443, 557″ Quantum teleportation between light and matter. ) with new age beliefs of consciousness. Eventually I bought a book which I am reading by Dean Radin called Entangled Minds.

I can’t make up my mind if quantum physics has unlocked door to new levels of existance and consciousness and explains the rare events of pre-cognition and other things we see or if it is all borderline cult hookum. But none-the-less through the book I found a site called got psi

I’ve been having lots of fun on it. Give it a try. Perhaps you’ll discover a hidden talent.

Cars 71 and 2071 A Tale of Joy and Woe

While looking for my Daytona Top Banana Charger, I had the pleasure to drive two cars-cars 71 and 2071. When I found Car 2071, it was hidden behind the dealership as a small piece of plastic had been dislodged upon its arrival. No one had yet taken it for a test drive. It only had a mile or two on it. It was shining and rumbled happily at me as I drove it, hugging the curves, sparkling in the sunlight. The salesman who loved cars, carefully advised me of the 2000 mile break-in period as I merrily did 85 on a local interstate so I didn’t quite bring it up to its highest gear. I was in love..this was my car. My husband insisted (quite reasonably) that we visit a couple of dealerships with Daytona Top Bananas.

We called another dealership in Westchester County, NY an hour or so before our arrival and made arrangements to drive their car. Car 71. Alas…poor car 71. As this dealership didn’t have much space, car 71 languished on the rooftop in the hot sun for months and was brought down for me to drive covered in birdshit and the end of summer kamikaze suicides of every species of mosquito and moth known to man. But beauty is only skin deep and I know many good deals have been made with the eye on the carwash in the very near future. I gingerly let myself into the car not allowing my clothing to touch any part of its exterior. The dealer tossed me the keys and said, ” Have fun!” I turned out onto the road and noticed, not that the car was near empty, but the gas tank red light was on with an estimated gas mileage of under a mile. The engine sounded labored. And the car handled oddly, as if it had quite a few very adventurous test drives. I brought the car back and one of the people working at the dealership managed to reach its highest gear and chirp the tires while driving three feet into a parking space. Poor car 71!

So today I happily picked up car 2071. It is a delight and a joy. Picture below! I only hope car 71 has as happy a fate!

Yes, its true. They break the happiness area of your brain. In a recent article by Daniel Gilbert of
Time (June 19, 2006) he states:

“Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in adolescence and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to gorw up and go away.”

That is just a teaser. For the rest of the article see TIME.

Some people think working in the civil service is a pretty cushy job. Perhaps it is … sometimes. A few of our English cousins may have taken things a bit too far, forgetting their office was being watched by official web cam. The one that catches my fancy is the naked civil servants playing superman by leaping off cabinets. < –hint click here.

The BBC adds breakdancing to the list of offenses.

Some of us in the culture of work today thought having our E-Mail read through by IT and websites visited catalogued was bad. Granted the English civil servants took things a bit too far, but I still find the idea of cameras watching your every move a bummer.

Just what did this agency do?

“The RPA was set up in 2001 and is responsible for paying subsidies to farmers under the European Union’s common agricultural policy. ”

What was the final disciplinary action taken with theses civil servants? One was fired. I am trying to figure out which one was the worst offender, the one that fought, the one that did break dancing, the ones that had sex , the naked ones or the ones that vomited in cups?

I happen to have information from an inside source that they have an excellent union. Hmmmmmmmm perhaps I ought to live it up a bit more, I am a union member.

One part of my job as a sanitarian, is to check walk in boxes. These are large, sometimes room-sized refrigeration units. This year while in Ireland I was touring a small garden outside Castle Lismore in County Waterford . There was the stone structure pictured below. It was the castle’s pre-electrical walk-in box. It had an igloo like opening on the other side, where you walked through a short tunnel. Then there was a large barred surface that sat over a pit. The pit was about 30 feet deep. During the winter the castle serfs and slaves would fill the pit with ice and snow. It would stay cool throughout the summer allowing fresh game and other goods to be stored above it. Oh for the good old days when there were serfs!

Have you ever swerved around one of those yellow trucks and cursed those people slowing you down? Well stop it please! Today I was out driving for my local health department and someone was putting larvicide in catch basins for our ungrateful public. People cut by the truck, almost ran us down and called us “cunt” and “bitch” in the process. I think the picture below taking at the DOT before we left says it all. The car was nearly sideswiped and the person on the street working nearly run down. I reported this to my supervisor who just sort of grins as if we are not macho enough.

I came across a blog by Sandmonkey. He pointed out the the terribly offensive cartoons of Mohammad were also published by an Egyptian Newspaper. Click here to see-Cartoons of Mohammad in a Muslim Newspaper.
The current protests are about showing the image of Mohammad. Period. So to show the image in an Egyptian newspaper should be just as sacreligious as to show in in an American or French one. But apparently, images of Mohammad become invisible in Muslim newspapers.

One of the acts that seemed to enrage the muslim activists even further was the fact that the cartoons were reprinted by a French newspaper. This was just in support of free speech..or was it?

Another blogger, The Arabist, reveals this interesting fact:
“I would have dropped the issue altogether were it not from this BBC report which reveals an amusing fact about France Soir, the French daily that republished the cartoons: it is owned by Rami Lakah, French-Egyptian runaway businessman and politician extraordinaire”

Other bloggers also report that many muslims are being incited by text and phone messages recieved over mobile phones.

Eccentric Star writes:

“It is also worth mentioning that mobile phone text messages (SMS) played an important part in inflaming public opinion throughout the Arab world and circulating rumors, such as the one claiming groups intended to burn the Quran in the center of Copenhagen.:”

More than one source among middle Eastern bloggers are now viewing this as a directed campaign rather than sporadic and spontaneous outbursts from the truely offended faithful. The salient question here is who is behind trying to accelarate the level of this madness. The phone service often mentioned is Vodaphone. I imagine that the source of such messages are quite traceable. I wonder if anyone has asked them?

I also recently discovered a cartoon called Jesus and Mo.

Now if we could only get the two of them together to draft a message to the faithful on both sides!

But speaking of cartoons, in response to this Iran is hosting its own cartoon contest to mock the holocast. But not to be outdone, the Israelis are holding their own cartoon contest, because they think they can do a better job. Probably.
The results of this creative genius will be shown on Boomka.

I think this has been just about a perfect weekend. When my husband wanted to get a hot tub, I thought we’d get it and it would be one of those things that would make him happy, but not do much for me. I did change my mind quickly. Sunday morning, it was a brisk 45 degrees, the temperature of the inside of a properly chilled refrigerator. We dashed out onto the deck and jumped into the hot tub. The contrast of the chill of the air and the silken heated bubbles of the hot tub was simply delicious.

Our delightful doggie decided to snooze on the deck when hark an evil cat crept into the yard. The cat was intent on catching one of the birds munching on the food from one of the two bird feeders and two suet holders. Naturally there were quite a number of them and the cat licked his whiskers.

Pssssst doggie, pssssssssst doggie my husband prompted. The dog opened one eye and looked up at the crazy humans in all that WET STUFF. Finally I prompted, hey Vee -Cat! And he was off the deck in a flash! The cat forgot how he found his way into the yard and raced a circuit about the yard. Vee, in his gentlemanly fashion, loped just quickly enough to keep the cat moving quickly but not too fast. The cat found his way out and Vee loped proudly back around the yard, having protected his fine feathered friends.

Hot tubs are fine places to watch the world from.

It seems that the state of medical errors in this country has not changed much and in fact the US is leading the entire world in death by medical errors.

USA leads world in medical errors

The article states: ” Based on a comparison of health care systems in six nations, the 2005 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey found that America led the rest in inefficient care and medical errors.”

And continued with ” Based on a comparison of health care systems in six nations, the 2005 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey found that America led the rest in inefficient care and medical errors.

Improper Treatment 34 Percent of the Time

Researchers interviewed patients who had a serious condition that required intense medical treatment or had been admitted to a hospital for a condition other than a routine pregnancy.

Patients in this country received the wrong medication, inaccurate or delayed test results, and improper treatment 34 percent of the time.
A third of the patients polled reported higher rates of disorganized care in their physician’s offices.
Americans also spent more on medical expenses than those in the other countries, with more than half unable to see a doctor or take prescribed medicines.

The spread between the United States and countries with lower error rates was fairly wide, with a 12 percent difference between Britain, which had the lowest rate of errors, and the United States. The American rate was driven up by fairly frequent test and medication errors”

The above paragraphs are excepts of a subject treated more thorougly on those sites. In previous years our rate of death by medical error has exceeded the number of people killed by car accidents as I mentioned in a previous post.

Scarily, when doctors have gone on strike the death rate has actually
decreased. http://www.mercola.com/2004/may/26/doctors_death.htm

You would think that errors must occur when medical professionals are hard at work by themselves without an extra pair of hands or eyes to notice things are not as they should be. But even when someone is there and sees the wrong, they seldom say anything.

The following link demonstrates that when co-workers have observed medical errors in their co-workers they are reluctant to talk about them.
http://www.mercola.com/2005/feb/9/health_care_mistakes.htm

The article mentions:

“Some actions observed in the above study that co-workers and
supervisors did not address were:
Some instances health workers were reluctant to talk to their
colleagues about included matters concerning:

Competence
Broken rules
Mistakes
Teamwork
Lack of support
Disrespect and micromanagement from doctors or supervisors”

May states have put caps on malpractice awards that may be given and
those states see an influx of medical doctors.
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/tortcaps/tortcaps.htm

In some cases the only way to effect change is to legally slap the entity with a fine. But we are not going to be able to do that as often or as hard no matter how bad the situtation.

Medical errors cost the country 37 billion a year
http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/errback.htm

Complete with the rise in medical errors, this current administration
is proposing caps and cutting lawsuits against doctors for their
errors.

“The President is also proposing medical liability reforms. The costs
of medical liability insurance are driving doctors out of practice, or
are being passed on to patients and their employers in higher
insurance rates. In addition, the pressure of medical liability
lawsuits is causing more doctors to practice medicine defensively and
order more lab tests or exams than is necessary, which is driving up
health care costs even further. By enacting national medical liability
reform we will be able to address the problem of junk lawsuits against
doctors, clear our court system of unnecessary litigation, and help to
control health care inflation.”

So unless your problem is neat and observable, expect a less
compreshensive diagnosis and no recourse should your doctor kill or
maime you during his practice.

You might think that this really doesn’t matter. But let me interject with my story. Here is a list of over about the past ten years things that happend to my mother in hospitals and the various hospitals they happened in.

1995ish Westchester Medical Center Valhalla, New York. The roof is leaking. I walk in to find my mother’s bed in a pool of water, the controls for the bed and TV clipped to her nightgown, and lying in the pool of water, the power cords, plugged into the wall.

1995ish Westchester Medical Center Valhalla, New York
Nurse takes my diabetic mother’s blood sugar and tells her she does not need to take any insulin. Diabetics need insulin before a meal to keep their blood level stable.

November 2004 Westchester Medical Center
My mother entered the Westchester Medical Center in New York State for a simple test. One that used an iodine dye. She had previously known dye sensitivities. My mother had the angiogram at Westchester Medical Center and soon developed a fever and rashes on her skin. The rashes turned to blisters and daily her doctor, Dr. Cohen of the cardiac cath lab, would come in, look at the worsening skin and go “OH that looks better”. She asked for a dermatologist and the nurse told her she didn’t need one. Let’s remember she had previously known iodine dye sensitivities. Finally one came and took a skin sample which was never processed. She had an IV by this point and a friend who was also an RN noticed it was compromised and it took 24 hours to get it changed. She ended up crashing, painfully, the blisters on her legs breaking open, her kidney’s failing and was put in the burn unit where she then from the compromised IV developed septicemia.

2004 Westchester Medical Center Burn Center
They are amazed my mother is alive, so much of her skin has peeled off her body. In fact they have to take her to a shower table and peel the dead skin off her raw flesh. The table is shower table is motorized and the motor is broken so it is higher than my mother’s gurney. Two nurses cannot lift her that high and in trying slam her raw open skinnless flesh onto the higher table multiple times. I go to her room and find her bruised and crying in great pain.

2004 Westchester Medical Center Valhalla, New York
It’s Christmas Eve. Everyone is snuggled in their beds. Except my mother. This is post the peeling of the skin, multiple drug-resistant bacterial infections, etc detailed earlier. They sat her up in a chair. She cannot walk by herself and is a heavy woman with back problems and in a few hours is groaning in pain. She cannot get back to bed. Finally one nurse tries to get her into bed by herself and drops her on the floor. She can’t lift her up by herself so my mother lies on the floor for about an hour while she finds an orderly to help her.

2005 Westchester Medical Center-yes she is still here. Screaming in pain as she now has Clostridium dificile in her gut. I fight daily to get the pain management team to come in and address her pain or sedate her so she does not know she has it. They are afraid it will affect her breathing, do a minimal amount, and daily my mother begs me to kill her so she won’t feel anymore pain.

2005 Columbia Preysbaterian Post Quadrple bypass. My mother is told to get out of bed by the X ray tech and stand against the wall. She says she can’t. He gets her out of bed, pushes her against the wall for a standing X-ray, and as she told him she would, falls on the fall, on top of her surgical wound (which was reopend and re-sewn shut after the initial surgery. This causes great pain for a long period of time. The wound is disturbed during the pulling of her up from the floor. The bones no longer meet properly. The hospital files this under..shit happens. Later in her attempts at recovery, she develops a major infection of the wound and chest. This requires a second surgery. It is after this surgery that she developes chronic care myopathy and never comes off the venilator, is on dialysis and has a feeding tube permantly installed in her stomach surgically. I wonder if her wound had initally not been disturbed with this fall if she might not have gotten this infection.

Later in the year, back again at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Newburgh, New York, mother is transported from her nursing home, still on a ventilator, with a fever and infection. She is given an antibiotic to which she has an allergy. On her wrist she wears a medic alert bracelet that lists it as an allergy. She was also in that hospital two weeks previously and her charts also listed this as something that she is allergic to and that when she has an allergic reaction, it is extremely severe. I really think she might have had a chance at survival if they hadn’t made error after error after error to further insult her already weak body.

And I simply do not have the energy to list all the other little things that happend. For instance she was in a nursing home in August, it was over 85 degrees in her room. They took away her fan because they claimed it was a safety issue. In order to recieve medicare and medicaid coverage the highest temperature a room can be in the summer is 80 degrees.

Go to the others posts on Death, and Death and Dying and you will see more gory details.

But the undercurrent behind this, is, if this is what happened to one person, all of this, what is happening overall? I wanted to prevent someone else from goign through this.

So I complained to the New York State Department of Health. I gave them all the details. Even though the hospital investigation bureau is only one floor beneath me, and I work for a county health department, they would not meet with me face to face but only talk via the telephone or fax. I had faith that they would do something to prevent this from happening again. SIX MONTHS after filing my initial complaint they wrote to me to say they could find nothing was done wrong at all and that they could not even tell me the details of the investigations because of HIPPA rulings. I was my mother’s health care proxy and had her power of attorney and yet they would tell me nothing.

OK so I decide to go to a lawyer. I need my mothers medical records. It takes me three months to get them calling the hospital every single day. Here is the catch. A municipal hospital, such as Westchester Medical Center must be sued within three months of the patients release. It took me three months alone to get my records! And I do wonder about the political ramifications of Westchester Medical Center being government affiliated and the New York Department of State’s failure to find any wrong doing here, and the length of time it took them to get back to me.

But OK I get to a lawyer. The first lawyer Greg Bagen, who thought I had a case against Westchester Medical Center, if the filing date had not past, declined to take the case for that reason. I could still sue the medical doctor involved, The slimy sarcastic Dr. Cohen of the Cardiac Cath lab, who by the way, joked the entire way though my mother’s procedure making sarcastic comments on to his staff on how they would be doing twice the work and twice the patients with half the staff due to Medical Center Budget cuts…

So I go to the second lawyer. First I go back to Greg Bagen’s office to get my mother’s records. They give me a box that seems light and assure me it is everything I gave them. It turns out in the several months they were reviewing the records a second important filing date had passed and if we filed we might be able to make some sort of appeal to still get a case in…but I really had a better case against the first lawyer for letting these dates past. The second lawyer also thought the records were incomplete. OK…so I decide I can’t sue. I don’t want to sue because I want money, I want the hospital to straighten up and fly right.

Last week (this is months and months after I went to the second lawyer who partially based on the medical records didn’t take the case) I get a letter from Greg Bagen that is he declining the case but he still has my mother’s medical records. I call them up and told them of my previous visit and that they told me I had all the records then…..
The secretary refused to deal with it and said she would take a message and yes there was a big box of my mother’s medical records there….

I never got a call back or an explaination.

One of the reasons the second lawyer didn’t take the case was explained to me by the fact that it cost him $30,000 to prepare and file for a case. If the case could not promise a $300,000 return, because of the tight regulation on medical malpractice lawyers, he could not take the case. In fact it pretty much had to be an almost guarenteed case for him, otherwise he couldn’t stay in practice. And additionally to that many states are putting caps on the amount of awards that can be given.

So am I mad? Yes I am. Very. And I haven’t quit yet. I want to know who regulates the regulators, who let’s Westchester Medical Center take 3 months to get medical records to you when that is your filing deadline, I want to know why the New York State Department of Health takes 6 months to find NOTHING. I want to know if the reason they found nothing was because Westchester Medical Center was a government enterprise and they are a government entity. Can a regulator regulate itself? I want to know why hospital administrators only try to make things go away and not try to effect change. I want to know why St. Luke’s Hospital, when my mother was recieving medical treatment and her medical doctor stated it was necessary that she remain in a hospital was able to cancel her medicare payments and put her on private pay at three times the rate when I would not let her go to a subactute ventilator/dialysis facility so far away the family could not be with her and one that would also be detrimental to her health and treatment. All of these things seem to be at best unethical and I cannot imagine do not violate laws of fraud and more.

Hospitals are money making enterprises. The almightly dollar is first and avoiding liability is second. They love boutique enterprizes like joint surgery clinics that are cash cows and hate having do things that actually serve the community and are dependent on medicare payments.

The lowest degree of error and death by medical malpractice is in Great Britain at the moment. A country with socialized medicine. Perhaps its time to kill the medical cash cow.

Kid Break Your Brain was not recieved neutrally. It was loved. It was hated. People laughed belly laughs and people rolled their eyes.

So as a public service www.kidsbreakyourbrain.com was launched.

Visit us soon for an important public service announcement and items to help spread the word that KIDS BREAK YOUR BRAIN!!!!

Our new Supreme Court Nominee, Harriet Miers, apparently has her own blog. Read all about her in her own words. http://harrietmiers.blogspot.com/

Signing off

Tongue in Cheek

OK. I’m back. If you want to read some comments about her appointment, one blog is http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19125/ Protein wisdom. This blogger does bring up a few rather relevant issues, such as the fact the Miers has no experience as a judge and is a close friend (and hero worshipper) of Bush.

I swear I’m a republican, I really am. But anymore….

Last night I was talking to a friend that just got home 8:30 at night. And she told me both her boss and one other person were still at work. Why? Was it urgent? No, but they both have kids. Our first anniversary came recently, and most of our close friends sent sweet cards. Except my husband’s best man. But he has kids. There is only one conclusion about all these people, forgetting to live and have friends. Kids break your brain. One of my co-workers was chatting with a visiting friend who used to work where I work. She came by with her baby to visit. (WHY-this woman must have no life and no friends?) The baby cooed cried and caused general disruption. My other co-worker babbled on about not letting young babies eat honey and how long did the baby sleep for about 2 HOURS. This used to be a smart man. There is only one answer. Kids break your brain. The CDC should issue an urgent alert on this problem.

Our House was well spooky for Halloween, take a look at this pic

The spookiest house in the County!

Google

Google is a great search engine…

Waiting for Judy!