Just taking a moment to celebrate 1500 posts on this ragged little blog. I’m celebrating from a hospital bed in Utica’s Faxton-St. Luke’s, waiting for doctors to tell me what’s what. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is minding the hammer mill in my absence. (“Minding” is a charitable way of putting it.) Don’t burn the mill down, Marvin! (Again!)
I’ll post more when I’m able. Stay well and be happy, people.
Spent most of the week in the belly of America’s healthcare beast. And it started with something in my belly. Suffice to say, I needed an ambulance ride to the ER and emergency surgery for something totally unforeseen, unrelated to but in the midst of the current COVID crisis.
I will tell you that the nurses, orderlies, custodial and food workers were all kind and dedicated professionals, and I couldn’t be more grateful to them. But there were some truly bizarre moments, and I want to share one of them with you.
I’m lying on a gurney in the ready room at the COVID Hilton, my gut scrubbed and primed for incision. The bemasked surgeon enters the room and asks the nurse attending me, “Where is the other doctor?”
“Jeremy is here,” she says, tapping away at the roll-away laptop next to my bed on wheels.
“Jeremy,” the surgeon repeats, looking around. He turns to me and asks if I’m ready. I say something vaguely affirmative, but he’s distracted. He sits down at a desk across from me and takes out his phone.
The surgical nurse arrives, introduces herself to me, then starts helping the attending nurse with her data entry. “You can’t confirm the post op care plan because it hasn’t been entered yet,” she’s says. “See? They haven’t done it.”
“Where is the second doctor?” the surgeon barks into his phone, his legs up on a chair.
“Scroll down,” says the surgical nurse. The accounting system is giving them an argument. “It won’t let you confirm until you put something in here,” she says.
“When the patient dies, who’s going to call the family?” asks the surgeon.
Another guy in scrubs and hairnet arrives. The surg nurse hails him. “Jeremy! Where did you come from?”
“My mother,” Jeremy says. “Always.”
It seemed we were ready. On the way into the operating theater, the orderly sang, “We’re off to see the wizard!”
When I was discharged on Thursday, I was asked to sign an agreement that, if I were to return to the hospital with any additional problems related to this health issue, I would need to do so by noon the next day or it would be considered a second incident and, therefore, be charged separately (i.e. not be covered by insurance). This is America’s health care system in a nutshell. (As it turned out, I went back the next day at 4am. Plenty of time!)
luv u,
jp
Hmmm. Try shift-F7. No good? Okay, wait. Isn’t there a big red button somewhere that gets you out of this shit? No? Huh. I must be thinking of the clothes washer.
Oh, yeah … hi. Well, as you might have guessed, your friends in Big Green are struggling to make ends meet, like most bands these days. It’s not easy. Frankly, it’s downright discouraging sometimes. This week, we spent at least three days trying to get the ends to meet, only to discover that the metaphor apparently doesn’t involve bringing ends together into a kind of loop, but, well … something quite different, it seems. There goes another three days! We spend time like company scrip at a Massey coal mine. (Which reminds me …. sixteen tons!)
Okay, so, a lot of bands are now doing digital performances in order to comply with social distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are passing the digital hat, and that’s all good … very much like the sound of that. This whole thing has prompted a brisk discussion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – should we start doing live performances via YouTube, Facebook, etc.? Should we record performances and just toss them up there? Or should we run around in circles, waving our arms above our heads and yelling “Catastrophe! Catastrophe!”? If we do that, maybe Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can hold up my smart phone and send it out on YouTube, Facebook, etc. Yes, a brisk conversation … brisk as Lipton Tea.
Trouble is, nearly all of us are technically challenged when it comes to the internets. I’m not even sure how this blog works. I type shit into, press a button, and hey-presto, there it is, on the internets. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to broadcasting something into the ether, something that requires cameras, microphones, digital input devices, modems, routers, CAT6 cables, tin foil hats, clown shoes, cardboard backdrops, etc., we start getting into areas that are less familiar to us simple country folk. Sure, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee knows a thing or two about the internets, but every time we ask him for advice or assistance, he comes back with some claptrap about inventing an alternative to the internets. Always has to start from scratch, that Mitch. (God help us if he encounters that itch he cannot scratch.)
So, short answer, we’ll see if Shift-F7 gets us anywhere in the short run. Got better suggestions for magical key commands? Send them our way!