I’ve heard that women going through menopause experience changes in their hormone levels that cause mood swings. Since I’m a recent inductee to this club I can say from my own personal experience that this is rubbish. It isn’t the hormone levels that cause us to be crabby, we’re just pissed off because  we dressed and undressed all night long…on the hour, every hour and we don’t have any new clothes to show for it.

***I’ve nixed the automatic link that appeared below my post… skip going to the doctor, skip the prescription for hormones instead try increasing your soy intake. Asian women don’t experience hot-flashes and the reason is thought to be dietary. For other natural cures visit my favorite online resource at www.earthclinic.com

Ten years ago I developed a strange cough and thought I had pneumonia. After doing a weeks worth of laundry and finding it increasing difficult to breath I went across the street to the hospital emergency room and I waited my turn to be seen. After explaining my difficulty breathing I was sent to the waiting area by the triage nurse where I waited for nearly 2 hours before seeing a physician.

The attending physician initially thought it was a virus too but stopped short of letting me leave. He said earlier in the week he almost skipped having a patient’s lung X-ray but when he did he discovered that the patient’s lung was partially collapsed. Still rattled by how close he was to sending that guy home, he elected to have me sent to X-ray before he’d release me. Like the patient he saw earlier that week, my lung was partially collapsed. The attending physician told me that surgery would be preformed in E.R. as soon as the surgeon arrived in the building.

I had three kids at home and a job to go to in the morning, I was expecting a prescription not emergency surgery. I called my mother who drove 2 hours to get to my kids and within minutes of my phone call the surgeon arrived. Without anything to dull the pain, the surgeon sliced a hole between my ribs and punched a tube through the hole and into my lung. The pain was so blinding that I have no conscious recollection of several minutes.  The tube was hooked to an atrium… a box that was hooked to oxygen that re inflated my lung.

I remained in the hospital and after about a week a nurse came into my room and asked if she could show a group of student nurses the equipment used to keep my lung from collapsing and I agreed. After she came in with the class and explained things to them she turned to me and said, “I’m just going to shut this off for a minute.” I was well aware of the doctor’s orders and I knew that my lung was to remain ventilated at all times. The nurse was so insistent on shutting my lung down that the whole experience seemed more like a scene from Saturday Night Live. I was waiting to be filled with helium and float to the ceiling.  I said, “you can’t shut that off, my lung will collapse,” and she replied, “but it will only be for a little while.”  I refused.

It was my very first indicator that I should pay careful attention or I might just end up dead.

Days later the tube was removed in  hopes that the hole in my lung had resealed itself. When the tube was pulled back out I felt the air from my lung vent out the hole in my side, like a whale with a blowhole.  A second emergency surgery had to be preformed and a second cut was made so another tube could be punched into my lung.

It was apparent that my lung wasn’t going to re-seal itself as everyone had hoped. After an MRI my surgeon said that my lungs were covered in blisters and that it would have to be surgically re-sectioned. As I counted down the days to having my entire chest cavity pried opened with a rib spreader, I was given a medication that my chart said I was allergic to. It left me almost unconscious and it took awhile for me to tell staff that I wasn’t sleeping,  but rather, nearly unconscious from an allergic reaction.  Shortly thereafter, a minister came and read me my last rights because they would be operating so close to my heart that it was standard procedure. I heard the minister but couldn’t wake up. At that point,  I thought I was going to die and they were going to kill me because they were stupid.

On  the day of my lung surgery I was awake and alert because the nurses straightened out my meds but only after I told them to. My mother and younger sister waited with me in the hospital room  as surgery loomed. The doctor had given the nurses strict orders that I was not to be off of oxygen before surgery.

When they took me off of the oxygen in my room they were supposed to transfer me onto a portable oxygen tank for the trip to surgery, right away. The nurses shut down the oxygen to my lung, moved me to the gurney and then realized that they had no idea how to operate the oxygen tank. I sat on the edge of the gurney as nurses ran up and down the halls searching for someone who knew or had instructions. One nurse flipped open a cell phone and started calling around, expanding her search to those on other floors,  frantically searching for anyone who could offer instructions.

During this 20 to 30 minute ordeal I sat without oxygen and I was overdue for surgery. What was so appalling was that maintaining good standing as a nurse took precedent over my health and safety. The nurses could have hooked me back up to the oxygen in my room, but we were already late for surgery. They could have rushed me to surgery without oxygen and faced the consequences of their incompetence, and at least gotten me to surgery and into the hands of someone who could re-inflate my lung. This could have been accomplished in minutes but instead I sat for nearly a half hour without oxygen.

Since I had taken a couple of walks during my month-long hospital stay I had watched as someone operated the tank  but wasn’t confident I knew how. Given the obscene amount of time that had already passed, my guess seemed slightly more educated than anything they were coming up with, and at least I knew that my health was my priority when it clearly wasn’t theirs.

I pointed to the tank and said, I think you do XY and Z . I was afraid I was wrong and some blast of air would explode my lung or the room would blow up but no such thing happened. My lung re-inflated and the nurses rushed me to the operating room and never mentioned the length of time I spent without oxygen. What was shocking to me was that in a group of 5 to 6 trained nurses not one of them placed my safety ahead of their performance records. It didn’t even dawn on them that their priorities were not only wrong but that they were risking my life to protect themselves from well-earned disciplinary action.

In 1999, during that same year,  the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 98,000 people die every year in American hospitals from medical errors. That number is staggering, yet right now, Congress is weighing whether or not to strip patients of their right to hold negligent medical practitioners accountable.   I happened to be one of the lucky ones who is still here to say:

Congress should  focus on improving patient safety; saving lives saves money…and there is nothing frivolous about stupidity that leaves your children to grow up without you.

Sign the petition:  http://action.citizen.org/t/6693/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27870

Vaccine injury has been so prevalent that U.S Dept of Health and Human Services established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program which as of October 1, 1988, also includes the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.

According to statistics some 4,000 people fell ill after taking the swine flu vaccine in 1976; 500 contracted a paralyzing nerve disorder and more than 30 people died. Some military personnel and first responders who took the smallpox vaccine in 2003 suffered heart attacks, increased risk of heart inflammation and neurological disorders.

Ordinarily, when our government grants liability exemptions to pharmaceutical companies, it provides some form of relief for consumers who are injured by vaccines. For example, the 1976 Swine Flu Act allowed those who had bad reactions to that vaccine to sue the government under an expanded version of the Federal Tort Claims Act. In 2003, the government set up a compensation plan for people injured by the smallpox vaccine after people refused to get vaccinated without it. And then as mentioned earlier, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has been available for children suffering bad reactions to childhood vaccines.

Unfortunately, if you or your child is injured from getting a swine flu shot, you are on your own. Congress has shielded the vaccine manufacturers and any person giving swine flu shots from lawsuits and there is no funded government vaccine injury compensation program for swine flu vaccine.

http://www.hrsa.gov/Vaccinecompensation/statistics_report.htm http://www.hrsa.gov/Vaccinecompensation/table.htm

I’ve stolen the following lines from the character, A. J. MacInerney in the movie The American President because they apply to our President on health care reform.

A. J. MacInerney to the President:
Oh, you only fight the fights you can win? You fight the fights that need fighting!

Put Single Payer back on the table

Author Claire Cook considers herself a late-bloomer having published her first novel in her mid-forties. I knew of Claire’s work because I read the second book she wrote, Must Love Dogs and then picked up a copy of every book that followed.

Years later I met Claire online on the Goodread.com website. Our conversation started after Claire visited my online journal and read some of my writing. At the time I had just written “I Forgot that Sunflower’s Die,” which was just a few lines that touched upon the death of my daughter’s father. Claire had also lost a parent as a child and she shared her story which had recently been published in Good Housekeeping magazine.

Since then Claire’s periodically sends a note cheering on my writing, and with each book she writes I’m reminded that it’s never to late to follow your heart.

Whether you find yourself writing at a child’s swim practice or in the humid, hum of a bustling laundry mat, remember to love what you have and to bloom where your planted.

Here is Claire Cook’s interview on the Today Show…well done, girl:)

well

I was dumbstruck by some of the news headlines today:

Wife seeks divorce after husband poops in cooking pots

Kansas couple’s trash bin tryst takes wrong turn

Police in Papua New Guinea are hunting the leader of a sex cult who promised villagers a bumper banana harvest if they had sex in public.

Maybe the Kansas couple should take up residence in Papua New Guinea.

After over a month of harvesting and roasting  Roma tomatoes for Marinara sauce, I have turned back to my own German ethnicity. After chopping and salting red and green cabbage I have started the fermentation process to make homemade sauerkraut using crocks like my Grandmother used to.

I’ve embedded the follow Youtube clip to illustrate how easy it is to make:

Today was my first day  without a Match.com account, as of yesterday I officially let my 30 day membership expire. Instead of investing time into flirting with complete strangers I woke up, made a To-Do List for the next month, texted a flirt from my phone, returned a pair of shoes to a department store then purchased 2 more…damn!

Gnocchi with roasted tomato sauce anyone?

(Italian food in honor of the Italian inspired Volkswagen Karmann Ghia I saw today…for sale on the side of the road…sigh. Cheers to the styling concept created for Ghia by Luigi Segre. Karmann Ghia…meow!)