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#Post#: 1302--------------------------------------------------
US is COVID-19 🏴☠️ DEATH CHAMPION
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: September 12, 2023, 12:12 pm
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Life and Limb
September 12, 2023 by EDWIN LEAP
[center]Everyone Needs an Advocate[/center]
[center]And there's nothing like an adult daughter...[/center]
My father-in-law, Len Mahon, contracted COVID several years ago.
Already in his 80s, he had spent a career working in and around
West Virginia coal mines. Like so many, he had ‘Coal Worker’s
Pneumonconiosis,’ popularly known as ‘black lung.’
My wife and I found him one afternoon with cold symptoms and a
fever, napping in the middle of the day…an unusual thing for a
man who had always been a non-stop force of nature. (His wife
Carma, my wife’s mother, had also been so afflicted but not to
the same degree.)
The illness then made Len cough more forcefully and left him
increasingly short of breath. We knew, before testing him, that
he had COVID. It was in the time of the pandemic, and the
infection was raging. It was also in the days when the vaccine
was just being rolled out.
When we took him to the local emergency department we found that
his oxygen levels were already dropping. He was admitted and was
subsequently intubated (a tube placed into his trachea to
support his airway) and placed on a ventilator.
It was a dicey affair for the next two weeks. He seemed to
improve and was taken off of the ventilator but was unable to
maintain his oxygenation. He was then put back on the ventilator
once more.
The hospital staff, nurses, physicians and respiratory staff
were magnificent. Many were former co-workers of mine at Oconee
Memorial Hospital, Seneca, SC. They were ever kind to Len and
the entire family as we waited, trusting God, professionals and
science to do their best.
Two weeks into his illness he managed to come off of the
ventilator. But weak didn’t fully describe his condition. He
could barely speak, couldn’t swallow and couldn’t stand.
The assessment by physicians and therapists alike was not
hopeful. My wife was told that her father would likely never
walk again and might not ever be able to eat solid foods. Quite
a kick in the gut for a long-time meat and potatoes guy.
A stubborn Irish-Appalachian, like her greater Mahon clan, Jan
did not take this well. That would not do for her daddy.
A trip from the hospital to rehab, however, was not much more
encouraging. The family was advised to expect very little and to
get used to wheelchairs, ramps and boards to slide in and out of
the car.
Finally Jan had had enough. She was his advocate from the
beginning but she kicked it into overdrive.
She insisted on home speech therapy which worked wonders. He
could speak, eat and drink. No more of the agony of ‘thickened
coffee,’ a tool of torture to be sure.
And she began her own form therapy. Now, Jan is a counselor by
training. This matters because she knows how to push back
against despair; how to keep a person from spiraling into their
own hopelessness.
But she is long-time believer in weight training who knows,
personally, the value of fitness. About thirteen years ago she
navigated a nasty cancer, followed by a life-threatening
pulmonary embolism. Her underlying fitness helped carry her
through that difficult time.
Jan began her own program of rehabilitation at home. Beginning
with simple exercises, she moved her father steadily through
resistance in the chair, brief standing exercises, even the
seated use of dumbbells. She was not giving up. She took him and
her mother back to the gym.
Eventually, Len was able to stand and transfer to chairs, even
into the car, without use of any special devices.
About a year later, he was at the Kennedy Space Center, on a
Florida vacation with the extended family. The wheelchair was
still useful, but he wasn’t bound to it for all locomotion.
Jan continued to push her her father. In fact, in the years
prior to his illness she had been taking both parents to the
gym, twice a week, and encouraging them to walk the treadmill
and lift weights. It was not uncomon for either of them to leg
press about 270 lbs, not bad in your 70s and 80s! I suspect that
this ‘pre-illness training,’ in no small part, set Len up for
survival, just as it had his daughter.
In time he resumed walking, without cane or walker. He began to
mow his lawn again, to drive and even golf. He has recently had
some setbacks, but for an 86 year old man who survived COVID,
he’s really doing remarkably well.
And I cannot help but attribute much of his success to the fact
that he had, and has, a tireless, stubborn advocate in my wife,
his daughter. She has never accepted less than the best for
those she loves.
Why does this matter? Other than being a wonderful story of how
to ‘honor your father and your mother?’ It matters because so
few people have their own advocates. So few have anyone who will
stand for them, fight for them, invest time, energy and money
for them.
The world of the ER, which I inhabit, is full of those adrift.
They are poor, or old, or sometimes even very young (children
and adolescents need advocates, but we more readily realize
that).
Those we see are homeless or alone. Their families are too often
disasters. They are addicted. They are barely functional. The
state does its best but we have far too few social workers and
they are far too overwhelmed. Nursing homes are closing, and yet
the need is exploding. Many people need them due to age,
infirmity, mental illness, dementia, other disability or the
ravages of substance abuse. Social workers are up to their
tear-stained eyeballs.
But it isn’t just about nursing homes. I’m writing about those
who simply aren’t fully capable of caring for themselves or of
navigating even a minor illness or injury while facing life all
alone. There’s a swelling tsunami of individuals who have no one
to argue for the care they need when they are ill. They have no
loved one to monitor their course when they are hospitalized.
There isn’t anyone to ensure that they have home health when
discharged. They have no champion to fight with insurance
agencies, to get them to doctor’s appointments or pick up
prescriptions. No one to ensure their home has water, food,
power or basic hygiene.
The sad, hard fact of modern illness, injury and aging is this:
without a passionate advocate, you’re in trouble. And it isn’t
getting better anytime soon.
Further, our culture increasingly views child-bearing as
problematic, as too expensive, or dangerous (as if it ever wan’t
those things). Because of this, ever more persons in the west
are embracing childlessness. Thus the future will be replete
with those who have no intercessor with any connection more
significant or passionate than the minimum required by their
jobs and by state law.
My father-in-law was one of 17 children born in rural WV. Twelve
lived to adulthood and have been fiercely devoted to one another
as long as I have been part of this family. My wife is one of
four children, all of whom love and care for their parents and
one another. All are advocates.
As they grow older, as time passes, they can all view their
father’s success, his added years, the holidays and birthdays
and Sunday dinners and all the rest as the result of living life
in the intricate web of family and with the gift of advocacy.
And it was never modeled better than by my wife, his daughter,
Jan Mahon Leap.
Way to go baby. You nailed it.
HTML https://edwinleap.substack.com/p/everyone-needs-an-advocate
Selected COMMENTS:
AGelbert
You correctly described the deliberately planned state of U.S.
Medical "Care" available to middle class Americans and below
with this irrefutably true statement:
"There’s a swelling tsunami of individuals who have no one to
argue for the care they need when they are ill."
The deliberate abandonment of those individuals has absolutely
nothing to do with "modern illness" and everything to do with a
medical system that, unlike the medical systems in other
industrialized countries, has decided that Social Darwinsim is
more profitable than Matthew 7:12.
Here are the FACTS:
COVID Deaths per Million and Life Expectancy Decline in our
greed corrupted country:
[center]
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/a-graph-of-covid-19-deaths-per-million-descriptio.png[/center]
[center]
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/a-graph-showing-the-difference-between-the-u-s-a.png[/center]
The above is the DIRECT RESULT of the inequality fostering U.S.
Corporate greed rampage:
[center]
HTML https://inequality.comm.ccsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/wealthdistribution-1024x675.jpg[/center]
Doctor Leap, I know you are part of the solution, but ignoring
the core cause of this increase in inadequate health care caused
misery (and consequent decrease in longevity) for 80 million
PLUS Americans, cynically "priced out" of Matthew 7:12 based
Medicine, will not help solve this
[glow=maroon,2,300]evil[/glow].
Steven Brown
How very true.
It is also true that care is so fragmented that when a patient
sees their outpatient doctor, the only way they can learn what
happened during their long stay at hospital and rehab except
through the patient and their advocate. Even if they use the
same computerized record, that record has hundreds of pages. And
the discharge “summary” is largely computer generated and
prepared by the doctor who saw them during their last three days
in the hospital. Usually there is no meaningful narrative of
what happened during their stay.
If you are an advocate, come to that appointment prepared to
provide what information you can, and bring all of the pills in
their original bottles, or the doctor will have no idea what the
patient is taking.
As a doctor myself I can tell you that the system is broken.
AGelbert > [b]Steven Brown[/b]
Yes, the system is broken. I am convinced that is by design.
Here are the facts:
COVID Deaths per Million and Life Expectancy Decline in our
greed corrupted country:
[center]
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/a-graph-of-covid-19-deaths-per-million-descriptio.png[/center]
[center]
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/a-graph-showing-the-difference-between-the-u-s-a.png[/center]
The above is the direct result of the inequality fostering U.S.
Corporate greed rampage:
[center]
HTML https://inequality.comm.ccsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/wealthdistribution-1024x675.jpg[/center]
The [glow=red,2,300]Social Darwinists[/glow] running this
travesty can never get enough profit from the pain, misery and
bankrupting costs visited on average American patients. Unless
doctors depose the greedball "[glow=red,2,300]Business
Managers[/glow]" running our Hospitals and "Health" Insurance
Corporations like cash cows, it will get
[glow=maroon,2,300]worse[/glow].
AGelbert NOTE: Related Source of Graphics Article:
COUNTERPUNCH
SEPTEMBER 11, 2023 BY [glow=green,2,300]ROB URIE[/glow]
[center]Will It Be Socialism or Barbarism for the Twenty-First
Century?[/center]
SNIPPET:
The nature of the American political system is often hidden
behind theories of how democracy works. In these we, the people,
choose politicians to represent ‘our’ interests within the
realms of government, foreign affairs, and commerce. In
contrast, at least according to the annual polls conducted by
the Alliance of Democracies, fewer than half of Americans
believe that the US is democratic; is a democracy. The reasons
given against the US being a democracy are 1) corruption (73%),
followed by 2) corporate control of the political system (72%).
In other words, the reasons for this missing democracy are
economic.
From the advent of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s to today, the
US has been systematically deindustrialized. Capitalist industry
has been the motivation for much modern political theory,
fostering explanations of capitalist production such as
‘economics,’ as well as competing systems of political economy
such as socialism, communism, and fascism that constitute the
fault lines claimed to motivate geopolitics and wars. The
deindustrialization of the US undertaken from the 1970s forward
punished workers in the ‘old economy’ while directing Federal
largesse toward favored industries such as finance and
technology.
The ideological explanation for this shift was ‘markets.’ The US
is subject to the immutable laws of nature, went the claim.
Economic relations are subject to these immutable laws
(continues the logic). There was therefore little that the
American political and economic leadership could do in the face
of ‘nature.’ That deindustrialization was undertaken at the
behest of connected industrialists to [glow=red,2,300]break the
back [/glow]of [glow=green,2,300]organized labor[/glow] was left
out of this explanation. Likewise, Federal largesse toward
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622210450-1415528.gif<br
/>[glow=maroon,2,300]Wall Street[/glow] and Big Tech represented
the evolution of markets which Wall Street existed to support,
and which Big Tech sold into. In other words,
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202719-1406786.gif<br
/>markets uber alles. ... ...
The irony that the political class was selling the magical
qualities of markets both going into the Wall Street bailouts of
2008 and coming back out of them illustrates the political
use-value of economic misdirection. ‘Markets’ would have meant
the demise of Wall Street and the American auto industry around
2008 had the Feds not intervened. Then consider the politics.
Half of the US workforce had been cut loose and left to its own
devices through deindustrialization while the other half was
subsidized through Federal largesse for favored industries. How
plausible was it then that ‘markets’ explained the mercantilist
policies of neoliberal governance? ... ...
The motive for deindustrialization was to crush labor unions,
[glow=red,2,300]eviscerate[/glow] environmental standards, and
establish a center – periphery relationship (imperialism) with
the rest of the world. Before 2007 or thereabouts, this program
remained vaguely plausible to powerful constituencies. ... ...
[glow=red,2,300]Joe Biden[/glow] calls himself a ‘labor
President’ while he has perpetuated the urban, bourgeois, war
against displaced industrial workers. For instance, Mr. Biden
promised to raise the minimum wage and then reneged. He promised
to support labor activism and then crushed the railway workers’
strike. More recently, he reneged on the ‘just transition’
previously embedded in his environmental proposals in favor of
the direct transfer of 💰 tax credits to
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622210450-1415528.gif<br
/>corporate
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-010922192452.gif<br
/>coffers. While the lip service suggests ‘liberal,’
[glow=red,2,300]Mr. Biden’s actual policies[/glow] are
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202719-14071062.gif<br
/>[glow=red,2,300]neo-fascist[/glow].
Full article:
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-110422205132-6482188.gif
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/09/11/will-it-be-socialism-or-barbarism-for-the-twenty-first-century/
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