Monthly Archives: June 2012

Hospitalization, Changing One’s Ways and How People Still Can’t Communicate

Education, Healthcare, , , , , , ,

I’ve been debating about writing this topic for a few days now, but I guess enough time has finally passed that it’s possible to at least try to deal with it.

I’m in the hospital today. It’s my fifth day, and the doctors still can’t make a decision on when I might get out. My life kind of hangs on the balance of some numbers on a blood test that gets drawn three times a day, and while it appears to be getting better, it’s not “out of the woods” yet, so no one will even conjecture at the possibilities of me ever leaving this place.

Some explanation is probably necessary. I am a diabetic. I have been one most of my adult life. Normally, I’ve maintained it by diet, exercise, a combination of pills and sacrifices to the Goddess Shania Twain. Over the years, my diet has wavered (not always for the best), exercising became easy to chalk up to “probably tomorrow…” and then “probably next week….”, although The Shania has never had a lack of constant attention and appropriate worship.

One of the drugs introduced into my regiment for dealing with this condition turned out to be a lot more toxic to me than it should have been (or so their theory is…can’t really nail the specialists down on what happened, or is happening, but that’s kind of the premise of the voices that are coming down from their mountain), and it managed to inflame my pancreas and turn off my kidney (or something like that). My first realization of something being wrong was waking up in the middle of the night and finding myself completely disoriented in my own room, unable to figure out how to get into the kitchen (where instinctively I realized I needed something to eat). For two hours, I was stuck in my bedroom because I could neither stand up and would come crashing down very fast every time I tried, nor could I turn the door handle of my bedroom door because in my state it was completely beyond me. After two hours, and breaking down my closet door by accident, thinking it was my bedroom door, I managed to open the door and then spent another fifteen minutes trying to crawl across the floor of my living room to my kitchen. Then I found myself completely unable to open the refrigerator (you know those super-security refrigerators that consist of a door that requires you to just tug on it softly to open it? Yeah, one of those). After awhile, I was able to grab a car of apple juice by flinging my hands at it and throwing it to the ground. Then I drank it down in little guilty sips. 15 minutes later, I started to return to normal again.

Apparently, that kind of alerted the medical community that Duane needed some assistance, and here I am at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One thing I was always adamant about was that if I ever reached a point where I was forced to have to start taking insulin (instead of pills), most people who know me should expect to read of my untimely demise not soon after. I’ve watched too many people get devastated by this disease, and I always swore that I wouldn’t go down that road. Strange. Now, I’m on it. But that’s a subject for later, obviously.

The thing that’s kind of bugging me right now is this medical establishment behavior of always expecting the patient is going to just buy into the ethical commication “care” response system because they live in it every day. Let me give you an example. One thing I abhor more than anything is pricking my fingers with these little needle devices to check blood sugar. It doesn’t hurt that much. It’s not even that messy. But it’s MY FINGERS. I’m a writer who HATES to do anything to my fingers in this way, and even as I write this blog right now, I am reminded with each and every letter I type that something other than my creative thinking is driving my thought process right now. And it continues to hurt a long time. My whole right hand right now has been pricked so many freaking times that I lost count several days ago. By the time I finish this post, someone will come in demanding that either they prick me, or I do the “brave” thing and prick myself.

Which is the other side of that issue that I wanted to discuss (by the way, someone just came in to prick my finger and has now moved on his way). The main nurse who has been working with me since I’ve been here has adopted a communication schema that has been driving me nuts. For those wondering what I’m talking about, a communication schema is a shortcut set of comments and statements that someone uses to deal with specific situations because a previous encounter using those same schema resulted in positive results. Think of it as a lion hunter who continues to run away from the lion until he picks up a chair and waves it at the lion, causing the lion to back off. Suddenly, he has a tool he can use to make sure that the lion doesn’t eat him. Okay, stupid example, but you probably get the idea.

This nurse, in order to get me to want to prick my fingers, keeps using the same schema of “It’s a horrible disease. It doesn’t care who you are. It’s unfeeling.” And if that doesn’t work, he ramps it up to:  “If not treated, you’ll end up having to come back here under the following circumstances: (fill in gruesome details).”

The problem with schema is that it has to pertain to the individual who it is being used on. If I was some young kid who thought that I could just continue living my life in a wild fashion, and I just wasn’t thinking about the ramifications of such things, his schema works really well. It would make me think. However, that’s not me. Consider what I said earlier. I said that if I ever ended up in this situation, there’s a pretty good chance I’d not be alive much longer. This means that I’m not thinking Bad Outcome From Disease vs. Not Doing Anything but my mathematics of a cost benefit analysis wavers the premise of Not Being Alive vs. Having to Deal With all the Shit. In that context, a reconstituted schema that pertains to the wrong emotions is probably not the one to be focused upon.

I understand the need to preach caring about certain things to people, but you have to at least appeal to the same contextual algorithms that drive each individual’s needs.

The truly sad thing is: I’ve been stuck in the hospital for about five days so I’ve been unable to do anything I enjoy doing. Hopefully, this will end soon and we can see where things go from here.

Virgin Mobile’s Iphone Offering Could be a Game Changer

Business, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , ,

Virgin Mobile announced that it is now going to selling an Iphone with a monthly plan that costs $30. Of course, the buy-in price is $549 for the 8GB Iphone. If you bought a Iphone from AT&T or Verizon, it would cost you only about $99-$199 but you’d have to opt in for a 2 year activation contract. With this contract from Virgin, you only have to stay as long as you want to stay because you already gave them the cost of the Iphone upfront.

The plan gives you unlimited data and text plus 300 minutes of calls for only $30. For someone like me who rarely makes a phone call, this is probably the phone for me. My Iphone package from AT&T has historically been a major rip-off, and I’ve always known that, but I wanted the convenience of that really good phone, so I stuck with it.

The really only down side to this is that Virgin Mobile is on the Sprint network, and if you’re in a location like Grand Rapids, their service is atrociously bad. I had Sprint for two months at one point, thinking I was moving up to something new, and man I was never so pissed at a phone network before. I had dropped calls constantly, and when you have very few phone calls as it is, that’s just wrong. When I finally gave up the phone, they tried to turn the blame on me and charge me some outrageous deactivation fee, which I argued with them on the phone until they dropped half of the price. I mentioned at the end of that conversation that they have become very successful at burning bridges with former customers. They didn’t seem to care.

The other downside to this plan is that you don’t that Virgin Mobile isn’t going to pull the rug from under you at any time. While the contract is month to month, that works both ways. They may pull an AT&T and then decide you no longer get unlimited data because they are the owners of the service and you can either accept their new terms, or you can pay a disconnect fee for being a bad customer. In this case, there won’t be a disconnect fee, but because you paid up front, they might just say the game is over and leave. And you’ll be holding a nice little piece of metal that doesn’t do anything any longer. That would really suck.

But on the other hand, I was with Virgin Mobile years ago when I was living in San Francisco and didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for a cell phone. It was a month to month thing, and it really worked well for me. So, they’ve proven they can actually do it. Back then, I had what was called the “Party Animal” phone, which I wrote about long ago, convinced that Virgin Mobile would discover I was not, in fact, a party animal and take away my phone. But they never caught onto me, so I was able to use it until the Iphone came along. And we all the know the rest of that story.

When did softdrink bottlers begin smuggling out CIA messages to its agents?

Bizarre, Business, , , , , , ,

This afternoon, I opened up a nice, cool, refreshing bottle of diet Dr Pepper and was about to drink it down when I noticed that there were printed alphanumeric characters under the cap. The actual characters were YR6P4E 7HH4E6. I know that in the olden days, they used to have contests and you would try to get the lucky bottle cap, but this is something different.

Something sinister.

As I ran the alphanumeric characters through my Bat decoder ring, I suspected there was something seriously wrong here. These were in fact code symbols that are probably used by the CIA to communicate with secret agents working in super secret locations. I figure the only way they know how to keep in contact is by transmitting these numbers through diet Dr Pepper bottles.

So, this got me thinking that perhaps I accidentally bought a soda that was originally intended for a super secret spy who is now desperate to find out super secret information that can only be decoded from this particular bottle of soda. So, if anyone comes across a wayward super secret CIA spy hanging out at the local Quickie Mart on Main Street (right next door to the strip joint where that black-haired girl works…you know the one that called the cops on me and went all psycho with the restraining order?), then please let that secret agent know that the instructions YR6P4E 7HH4E6 have been successfully relayed to him as intended.

And thank him for keeping America safe. And drinking diet Dr Pepper as well.

Presidential requirements (my new proposal)

Politics, , , , , ,

Recently, Mitt Romney announced he felt a requirement for anyone running for president is that they should have to serve in business for three years before running for the office. Regardless of the self-serving nature of this, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since hearing that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and after awhile I realized what would truly make a solid difference. We’ve been going about this all wrong. On one side, we have people saying we need businessmen to be president, because businesses create jobs (not always a given as most businesses in this country are one man operations), and other sides saying we should have prior government service to lead to higher leadership positions (which I’ve always found to be self-serving more than anything else).

 What I propose is a conclusion of my analysis of what fields actually provide true jobs. The largest employer in the United States is known to be Wal-Mart, and who is the first person a job seeker sees when they go into a Wal-Mart? The CEO? Nope. They never see the CEO, so they aren’t really getting a job from that guy. No, they see the greeter at the door, because ALWAYS they ask that old guy where they can find the employment office. And believe it or not, the second largest consistent employer happens to be the adult film business, in that all of its female employees are guaranteed to make MANY movies over their illustrious careers.

 So, what I propose is that all future presidents (and maybe even all politicians) should have to either be a Wal-Mart greeter for 3 years or a producer of porn movies. These are truly the job creators of America, and if we want America to be strong, these are the people who need to be in power.

Author’s Guild gains class action status vs. Google but do they really represent all authors?

Books, Business, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , ,

There’s an interesting case that’s making headlines right now about how Google was attempting to push the Author’s Guild out of the suit to sue Google for its Google Books initiative (where they would be the end all source for practically everyone’s book material with their all-inclusive Google Library). Yesterday, a judge determined that Google can’t push the Author’s Guild out of the picture. On the surface, this isn’t all that big a deal, but there are a couple of things that are probably important to point out.

First off, most of the critics have already addressed the fact that not every author really wants to be part of this lawsuit, as quite a few independent authors have zero problem with what Google is doing. However, unless they personally choose to opt out of the action, the Author’s Guild is going to go forward pretending it has a lot more power and influence than in really does. And most people tend to ignore these sorts of things, so they’re now going to be “included” in this action even if they’re not really interested in what’s happening. This is one of those things that always bothers me with class action lawsuits because in cases like those against Apple and their antenna for the 4G debacle, a lot of us who owned Apple iPhone 4s didn’t really care that much for taking action against Apple. We were kind of happy with our products. Yet, a class action lawsuit moves forward as if it is representing a lot of people who may never actually be a part of the settlement. There’s a lot of presumptuousness that takes place with class action lawsuits, but that’s a completely different story.

A more important issue to me is the one that isn’t getting any attention yet, and that’s the fact that the Author’s Guild, a writer’s advocacy group, is an extremely exclusive club that lets very few actual authors into its ranks. According to their guidelines for eligibility, if you want to be a member of the Author’s Guild, don’t even think about it unless you have been published by an established American publisher, and I mean VERY established. Using a subsidy publisher, Amazon Kindle direct services and such, or anything along those lines, and you’re guaranteed to be turned down by the Author’s Guild that keeps a tight hold on its allowance for membership. While their elitism has dwindled a bit over the last year (Matt Paust, who regularly publishes to Open Salon, updated us with an article on April 27, 2012, in which he pointed out that their new requirements indicate that you can gain membership if you’ve received at least $500 from publishing in the last year, although their web site is still heavily leaning towards pointing out its old archaic standards of exclusivity).

As a writer myself, I’ve been on the fence about the whole Google books thing. I sell books through Amazon Kindle as well as Barnes & Noble’s Nook, so I haven’t been all that focused on Google, as most things Google does tends to be overly complicated and often unusable (like their advertising service that I finally gave up trying to figure out one day after I ended up getting charged $5.00 to make a listing that could never be approved and then left me unable to even remove the ad that wouldn’t ever run). So, I’ll be interested to see what happens with this, as I’m sure a lot of others will as well.