Tag Archives: health care

Beer for the dying

At the beginning of Victoria's memorial service, George, her husband, gave a welcome speech. The first memory he told us about was of the last few weeks or months of her life, when every morning she would wake up and they would share a beer. Even on her last day, he wet her lips with [...]
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The Spare Room

This book is about aspects of taking care of a dying person that I mostly didn't do with Bonnie. The main character (Helen) lives near Melbourne, and has a close friend (Nicola) with cancer who lives in Sidney but has found a "clinic" in Melbourne that she believes will cure her cancer. So she moves [...]
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Crutches

I got a phone call at 8 AM Friday morning. I was nervous when I realized who it was -- it was the partner of one of the people I was playing the concert with yesterday. The last time I got a call from someone like that the day before the concert, it was the [...]
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A good story about the health care system

The health care system gets a lot of bad publicity these days, including some on this blog. Most of it is deservered, but I have a short story to tell about the system actually working the way it's supposed to. Over the weekend while I was in Fall River, I started waking up at night [...]
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Christmas Shopping Status

It's a busy day (the afternoon at the Pub Carol Sing and the morning turning an old client site into a the new wordpress-based site). So I'll just tell you how the Christmas shopping is going. I don't do all of it online, but I have a firm rule that I never go into any [...]
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Asthma-Free Naturally

I mentioned having been intrigued by this article a couple of weeks ago. I decided that buying this book by Patrick McKeown would make sense if I were really serious about doing breathing exercises. Like a lot of these self-help books, the "science" is probably completely bogus, but the anecdotal evidence that the advice helps [...]
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Steroid inhalers and voice range

Like many people with asthma, I use a steroid inhaler regularly. But the cold I had in early October led to a very bad flare-up of the asthma, and I've been taking the maximum number of puffs a day ever since, which is quite a lot longer than I've ever taken that much before. I [...]
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Plans for the month

I have the major pieces of what I've been meaning to do on the websites done, although I'd still like to have better searching for pieces on SerpentPublications.org and better graphic design both places. But the big thing that happens in the near future is a lot of more "formal" entertaining than I do the [...]
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I’m back, and what’s next

I seem to have returned to the land of the living -- I woke up this morning wanting to get out of bed and walk the dog. I then did a reasonable imitation of my usual morning routine, and still don't feel like it's quite time to go back to bed. As far as what [...]
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What I wanted to yell at the President

I watched the address to the joint session of Congress a couple of weeks ago with a friend. In general, I really like watching Obama speak, because it's such a relief to have a President who isn't embarrassing me with every sentence out of his mouth. But there was one point when I was talking [...]
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