One of the most bizarrely cool people I’ve ever met was an oral surgeon who treated me after a ridiculous accident (that’s another story), Dr. Z.
Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.
That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”
I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?
(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)
But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.
When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”
Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.
I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.
He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.
I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.
“Fencing?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)
“Which weapon?”
“Uh. Foil.”
“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.
Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)
So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.
All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.
As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.
I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.
👏Repeat👏 after 👏me 👏
💀There is NO safe way to do breath play. 💀
💀Cutting off blood flow to the brain instead of oxygen is NOT a safe alternative 💀
💀You are risking death every single time you cut off oxygen and/or blood flow to the brain 💀
Cutting off blood flow is just as dangerous, if not more so than breath play. Please, for the love of God, STOP PUSHING THIS MYTH. So many newbies might see some variation of that post and go “I’ll just stop your blood flow instead :’D” without doing any more research.
Cutting off blood to your brain means you’re risking a stroke happening. Both complete oxygen deprivation from your brain and lack of blood lead to serious, potentially life altering consequences. You might also BURST A BLOOD VESSEL IN HOUR HEAD, which has a minimum of a 50% chance of killing you.
So, from someone who has EMT training, please, please, please, I fucking beg of you, stop pushing this myth.
Yall this really needs to go viral. Save people from dying because of this infamous myth that I see keep popping up on my feed
Some 28 million people
in the United States do not have health insurance, and for the dying
and their families, lack of insurance is devastating. Though the care
needs that arise with terminal illness are simple, they are often
prohibitively difficult to meet without insurance. The uninsured and
their families are left to navigate public and charity end-of-life care
options that vary widely across the country, if they are available at
all. There are no data on how or where the uninsured access this care,
and the scope of unmet need is virtually unknown. What is known is that,
at the end of their lives, many uninsured people quite literally cannot
afford to die with dignity.
This is an old article (June 2016), but important.
My mother got turned down yet again for Medicaid when she had terminal cancer, and applying with the help of a hospice social worker. She did thankfully have access to hospice care as good as anyone else in the area, and any complaints I had about how she was treated had nothing to do with ability to pay. It’s appalling to know this isn’t everyone’s experience.
But–and this is a pretty big but–a hospice program was the only real treatment option available to her, in order to get pain relief or anything else. Much less possibly life-extending treatment when that might have still helped. When lack of access to decent care was the main reason she literally started collapsing before anybody bothered to figure out what had been wrong for years by that point.
That option was certainly much better than the main alternative of dying in appalling pain with little or no medical help. Palliative care should certainly be available to everyone, and I am still very glad that hospice program was there. But it should never be the only vaguely humane option.
The entire situation is just so fucked up, on so many levels. So much totally unnecessary suffering.
Maybe the worst part, though, is realizing how many people are apparently fine with this state of affairs, if they bother to consider it at all. When you’re that much more concerned about the idea of The Undeserving maybe costing you three cents in taxes than any of the human cost of the system as it currently works, there’s something bad wrong. How do you even counter depraved indifference? Damned if I know.
[The Raw Story headline: “A new website will ship your ashes to the GOP Rep. of your choice is Trumpcare kills you”]
This reminds me of that picture I saw of someone at an AIDS protest in the 80s that had a jacket that said, “When I die leave me on the capitol steps” or something like that
Also yes fuck those bastards make them have to face the human sacrifice they’re signing to line their fucking pockets.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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