It was a grizzly, vile thing, like chewing a vasectomy scar with a pustular, yellow skin — as nasty a burger as I’ve eaten this year.
Yeah, but tell us how you really feel.
I love AA Gill; he makes me glad to be a reader and very, very glad not to be a restaurateur.
Who don’t luv a good, dirty pun, eh?
Thanks to Metro for the pointer.
I’d like to thank all the little people…before they turn on me.
Also the Generator Blog, from whence I stole this Web-award generator. Hey, no sense in waiting for the grass to grow, eh? I thought I’d give all those web-awarders a helping hand. That’s right; raincoaster is always thinking of others. So put your feet up, guys. I’ve gotcha covered.
Meanwhile, in Operation Global Media Domination news, I am happy to report that I have cracked the top 89,000 on Technorati, out of about 45 million blogs, and only since the second-last day of February, when I started the blog. Mother would be so proud. Thanks are particularly due all those Brits who have mistaken me for one of themselves, and a True Patriot at that. Look, I hate Tony Blair as much as any of you, but I also have extremely mixed feelings. It’s…it’s complicated, okay??? Oh yeah, and somebody came to the blog looking for BoJo Porn; try the Times.
The posts most responsible for this rush to the cranial summit of the blogosphere are, of course, Beautiful Agony and 101 Bottles of diet coke, 523 mentos, and 2 mad scientists. Baby Eagles are still big in parts of Cyberia, and some poor, demented dude keeps hitting the blog every damn day looking for Charo porn and finding only a cool, Up With Queers music video. Speaking of gays, Ernest and Bertram went viral for a day or so, landing on a couple of forums across the ocean until the bandwidth got bustickated or whatever it is that happens to bandwidth; short form, E&B viral campaign snipped in the bud, dammit!!!
The latest potentially-viral stars are a couple of YouTubers: Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager, the sad tale of Darth‘s loserish brother’s humdrum life, and Paris Hilton stewing, nearly nekkid, in poop soup. Then there’s the Found Porn Slideshow, always a big hit with the Neanderthals.
The only serious post that’s showing any longevity is From Israel, With Love, the Update which is good as the MSM and much of the blogosphere including BoingBoing seems to have got the story substantially wrong, even after corrections.
So that’s all for this edition of Operation Global Media Domination, other than to say that going offline for a few days actually increased the hits. When I went on vacation, my “take it for granted” number of hits was 300. Now it’s 650.
I should take more vacations.
This is one smart lady.
I complained about all the death-with-dignity pressure to my father’s doctor, an Orthodox Jew, who said that his religion forbids the termination of care but that he would be perfectly willing to “look the other way” if we wanted my father to die. We didn’t. Then a light bulb went off in my head. We could devise a strategy to fend off the death-happy residents: We would tell them we were Orthodox Jews.
My little ruse worked. During the few days after I announced this faux fact, it was as though an invisible fence had been drawn around my mother, my sister and me. No one dared mutter that hateful phrase “death with dignity.”
Though my father was born to an Orthodox Jewish family, he is an avowed atheist who long ago had rejected his parents’ ways. As I sat in the ICU, blips on the various screens the only proof that my father was alive, the irony struck me: My father, who had long ago rejected Orthodox Judaism, was now under its protection.
As though to confirm this, there came a series of miracles. Just a week after he was rushed to ICU, my father was pronounced well enough to be moved out of the unit into North Shore‘s long-term respiratory care unit. A day later he was off the respirator, able to breathe on his own. He still mostly slept, but then he began to awaken for minutes at a time, at first groggy, but soon he was as alert (and funny) as ever. A day later, we walked in to find him sitting upright in a chair, reading the New York Times.
Seems a few of the residents want to decrease their patientload. Now, I’m sure we can all sympathize with people who are routinely put on 72-hour shifts. People who do most of the hospital’s heavy lifting (always excluding the nurses, because the nurses are always excluded).
But I don’t think any of us wants to watch a guy chasing a family down the hallway, begging for permission to end the suffering.
I know that euthanasia and assisted suicide are hot topics all over the world. But surely there’s a difference between doctors who qualified only in healing the sick deciding when to shove you through the doorway, particularly against the stated wishes of the family. No training whatsoever is provided to MDs for this type of task, which is one reason I would like to see a special profession develop around the issue, one that doesn’t have an obvious interest in the outcome of the patient, either economic (the US medical system) or or spiritual (the clergy). I want doctors to have a vested interest only in curing the patients.
Is that so wrong?
My own father made it very clear for very many years that he wanted a DNR order when he went into the hospital. Of course, his ex-wife reversed that when she tried to convince the medical staff they were still together, but the fact that I came every damn day and she high-tailed it back to Buttfuck Nowhere when I showed up led the nursing staff to trust my word against hers.
I made it equally clear that I did not want a DNR. From my family’s reaction, I obviously need to put this in writing, because every time the subject comes up they say, “You’d want to die with dignity.”
Fuck that.
They don’t have as much experience with hospitals as I do. Check dignity at the door. Keep the plugs in me because, by God, if you pull them I WILL COME BACK FOR YOU.
And I’ll get you, too. That’s another thing that runs in my family.
raincoaster 