Just as I may get this service…
I may lose access to my doctors, as HCBS waiver participants (Getting medical care @ home as opposed to an institution)
They are moving dual eligibles to a managed care system…
http://healthtransformation.ohio.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=8bjGIWI2V2w%3D&tabid=40
Ask the President a question.
Like him hate him, hate his policies, neutral or anywhere else on the spectrum he’s having a virtual town hall.
Ask at this link. video not required
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/27/deadline-saturday-submit-your-questions-president-obama
Disrespected Presidents
A break from my own drama for a moment.
OMG Jan Brewer. OMFG Jan Brewer. Who do you think you are, besides the unfortunately elected governor of Arizona?
I want to fly to Arizona and finger wag at *you*!
Finger wagging at the President whilst meeting him at the airport.
Now, in her book she spins that her cell phone was “confiscated” when she visited the White House and that she felt disrespected. While the latter is clearly subjective and therefore possible, it is, per a two second Google search, and a June 4 2011 article, standard operating procedure not to allow any guests to use cell phones at the White House.
Even Jan Brewer.
Which leads my wandering head into a discussion that I’ve had with a Republican. A kind of “can you top this” examination of which President, Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush, has been disrespected more.
Now, if we are going with quantity instead of breaking it down by type, or egregiousness…I have to admit President Bush got slammed more.
More protests, more cable pundit hammering, more written and spoken words against him. The top three categories? Process that was seen by his opponents as dictatorial abuse of power, his creation and prosecution of the war in Iraq, and his um “handling” of Katrina.
I think the scariest criticism for President Bush was the decision that if he traveled to certain foreign nations he’d be tried for war crimes. Would’ve scared *me* out of making certain travel plans.
The personal one that I held onto, and frankly disturbed a lot of my Republican and independent friends with this, was my continued contention that President Bush was never actually elected to his first term and had no right to call himself president. I was called out for disrespecting the office, and that I needed to start calling him President after 2004. I disagreed with them, but I eventually changed my language, because I do agree that the office itself has to be given a certain minimal level of respect.
But IMO, and I’m trying to take my own leftward bias out of here as much as possible: When we get to the *level* and *type* of disrespect…
I’ve just finished watching all of Mr. Bush’s state of the Unions.
No Supreme Court justice talked back to him during the address, in front of the American people, as they did to President Obama last year.
No Congressperson also called him a liar right in the middle of the State of the Union as Joe Wilson did to President Obama last year.
They protested President Bush in the street, and the media and almost *never* from his own party.
They disrespect President Obama to his face.
He does share a category with President Bush, which I will copy and paste from above.
Process that was seen by his opponents as dictatorial abuse of power, (sic) I’m leaving it grammatically inconsistent to prove the copy/paste.)
He gets it from the right *and* left. There’s plenty on the far left both here and abroad who take to the streets against him, who don’t see President Obama as any different that the previous administration, call him “O-bomber,” in derision over his continuation of the military policy of the previous administration, or his corporate-friendly compromises, and the non-closure of Gitmo.
(I’ll never be a perfect lefty, since my outrage isn’t ratcheted up over most of that.)
From the far right there’s the racism, the pictures of the watermelon field on the White House lawn, the monkey/ape editorial cartoons, the legislator who declined to attend the State of the Union after previously saying that negotiating with President Obama was like touching a “tar baby.”
And it’s funny. Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich’s journey to repentance, to being a ‘better’ person, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, is never questioned, and his outrage about being called out over past sins won him South Carolina. Newt’s allowed to be outraged, and also have been in favor of impeachment of a President over just such shenanigans, but whatever.
President Obama cannot be a true Christian though. His journey through that faith is dismissed and discounted, because of a Youtube of Jeremiah Wright.
Cool, collected Barack Obama couldn’t be a more different person than Wright.
Wright oogied me out, still does, but that doesn’t mean our President’s faith is not genuine.
I’ve sat in a pew many a time, listening to a sermon or homily of my longtime pastor and thought
“Sigh, not really dude, no. My radio for listening to God is telling me something quite different.”
In addition President Obama’s birth status, controversy long disproven by his long form birth certificate is *still* being called into question as his version of “he is not legally allowed to be president,” Oh, yes. Mr. Obama’s mother and grandparents participated in this grand conspiracy the moment they discovered she had committed the cardinal sin of procreation.
“See, in a really improbable election year, my son will end up President, so I have to make sure to wear a t-shirt for the rest of my life that states that Hawaii became a state in 1959, so no one can question his legitimacy. And I’ll jump in our time machine right now, and have him meet with a former radical, Bill Ayers, when he’s an adult, so he can never be accused of being a fully formed sixties revolutionary as a child. (Meeting Bill Ayers) Won’t that be great?”
But the worst form of disrespect?
Assassination threats have gone up more than 30 percent since the beginning of the Obama *campaign* in 2007.
The number and volume of these completely surpasses any previous president.
So, in the level of egregiousness, the ultimate disrespect of the person of the President and the office itself.
President Obama has had to put up with much more troubling opposition.
Well, I really am knotted into a pretzel now.
Regarding my lymphadema treatment.
Here are the various options available to me. There may be a time down the line ( about a month) when something called a lymphadema pump can be placed on my legs by a home health aide in the am, and removed when they leave, and done at home here in my house (Yay) However that assumes that Medicaid waiver will come through for me.
1. Require a family member to get trained on doing these wraps and make them drive out here at least every other day to do them. In the winter, not a possibility, and even in the summer a damned inconvenience. It would soak up four hours a day and none of my relations has that sort of time, or driving stamina.
2. Move temporarily to my mother’s house and train someone there to do it, thus having to continue to pay for my house for that duration even though I’m not living in it. There are positives inherent in that but there are also huge issues inherent in that. I haven’t asked yet and I want to go through some other iterations before I do this.
3. I am ineligible to go back to rehab, but warehousing me temporarily in a skilled nursing facility is also ok by Medicare. All my funds would immediately divert to the nursing home, so a cell phone cannot be paid for and I literally lose my house.
4. Go without direct lymph-edema treatment, but receive physical and occupational therapy in my home, with occasional home health aide visits, for three weeks which aftercare will cover, stay in my house
Physical Rehab, Reinvent, Retrench: Stupid Rules
Early going at rehab was all about the rules. There was the bladder scanning every night for three days. WTF? There were the usual annoyances about drawing blood at 5:00 am. (“It could take six to nine tries.” “No, I can do it.” )resulting in giant bruises (two days later), blown veins and irritation. My vein walls were weakened by part of the chemo regimen all those years ago, and that means a simple blood draw can evolve into a painful circus.
The late husband who was in and out of hospitals for most of his life, patented the Brian Richard Flynn Guidelines for Bypassing Hospital Stupid Rules, and I learned most of them, and proudly execute them when able.
(thankfully this rehab place didn’t care about the two rules below anyway, but you get the idea):
For example: Wear part or all of your own clothing rather than gowns or in addition to gowns. The staff will freak out and tell you to stop. Continue. They will then freak out and tell your doctor. If your doc is cool, they will say… “Let them wear the stuff. In their particular case the benefit outweighs risks.” If not, then you got through three or four days of wearing clothes.
Ignore visiting hours. Act as though you belong there. Make sure you and the patient both show the benefit to mood, comfort, and even better vital sign results as the result of you staying. Be polite, but firm. Say you’re staying. Nobody wants to call security on a devoted family member who is quiet and making no disruptions (but very well might start disrupting if not left alone)
But the thing about the bed…
I couldn’t get into it unassisted.
There are what I consider to be good rules in the hospital. Listen and discuss and suggest with the docs and nurses. This is a good rule.
Generally, attempt to do what they tell you to do as far as treatment. It makes the atmosphere less charged, and wonder of wonders makes it likely that you will have some success with the issue that brought you. Not to mention that they are ostensibly the medical experts. Unless you’ve gone to medical school yourself, they should know more than you do.
There’s a Stupid Rule. Patients deemed at risk of falling *must* hit the damn call button for an assist every time they have to get out of bed or transfer one place to another. After three days, they eased up on the daytime transfers, but never at night. Even though it was clear to everyone that getting out of bed was no problem for me.
(I do understand that all of these rules technically serve a medical or litigation avoidance purpose. I just think they’re dumb. Ignoring them contributed to my sanity.)
I hate hitting the call button. I respect the work good, competent nurses do, and if I can do something myself, I know there are patients in worse shape that they should best be spending their time on.
So I blew part of that rule off. It’s a Stupid Rule. I would get up out of the bed on my own at night, use the restroom whatever, and *then* hit the call button because of the damn bed.
I’m short, and heavyset and on top of that my legs are shorter than they should be. so the bed was too high. They had to deflate it, and even then I could not raise my legs high enough to swing over…so they had to grab and at the right moment, put my legs back in the bed, and then re inflate it under me like some undersized waterbed.
There was some mild freaking out about this, but it did subside.
If you have a hospitalization, asses the sanity of the support staff and then after the first 24 to 48 hours categorize the rules into: 1. Agreeable 2. Don’t like ’em, but I will follow them, recognize their value. and 3. Stupid and inapplicable in my case, and should be circumvented for my mental health if possible.
You’ll feel better. Even if the staff doesn’t. They’ll get over it. It’s why they get paid the big bucks.
Midlife And Treachery 
