Flippy - I Rant, You Read

Monday, November 22, 2010

late at night

Nothing to Envy - Ordinary Lives in North Korea

After hours and hours and HOURS of our modem being out, I can finally post this.  (by the way, I HATE YOU, AT&T!)  I lied, it keeps going out.  Arrrgghhh!  I will write in Notepad and save it.

I thought considering what was going on in the world, a 30 second review of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea was timely.  Leigh-Ann read the book before I did, and when I told her about N. Korea firing on S. Korea, she said she figured that N. Korea once again had something to hide, so they were trying divert attention away from some new (or old, I suppose) awful thing going on there.

When I started the book, I probably knew what the average American knows about North Korea.  Kim Yong-Il and his funny glasses, his (former) love of movies, the scary nuclear stuff, etc.  What I didn’t know was that because they spend so much money on weapons, they don’t have electricity, internet, food, healthcare, and on and on.  And, the citizens there have no idea what’s going on outside their little circle of life.  Many of them are starving to death, eating weeds and ground corn husks, and other practically inedible stuff.  The propaganda is EVERYWHERE.  In fact, everything most citizens hear is propaganda.  They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world - even less than the average American.  HaHa.

Since this is only a thirty second book review, I’m going to finish this up with telling you that the book is fascinating, and even if you only have the tiniest bit of interest in North Korea, you should read it.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

late evening

Brrr, It’s Cold

I don’t wanna blog.  I’m cold, and the cold, cold, cold week is just beginning.  My guess is that it’s going to get into the high teens here.  The dogs HATE the cold.  We need to get coats for all of them because their teeth are chattering outside when it’s below the mid-30’s.  I don’t blame them.  It’s kind of eery here when it’s cold - it truly looks like we’re on another planet or something.  It looks like there’s fog hanging over the neighbors’ yards and everything looks blue.  I’m not sure what’s causing that, if maybe it’s just the lack of street lights.  Regardless of what’s causing it, it appears that we’re going to have to find all of our boxes of clothing and jackets, because what we’ve found so far isn’t close to warm enough.  I’m doubling up on sweatshirts, but my outer zip up sweatshirt fits too snugly to go over my regular sweatshirts properly.  I feel like the Michelin Man and my arms are all stiff, but I can’t go out with just one sweatshirt or the wind bites right through my sleeves.

Damn, this is a boring blog entry.  I should’ve just posted a picture, instead.  But, yay me, three weeks of daily posts, lousy or not, they’re here.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

evening

A Post I Wrote About Chronic Pain Recently

[According to my doctor, every person on opiates is addicted after a week or two.] - this is someone’s else line, to which I was responding.

That’s one of the problems right there. If our doctors don’t even know the difference between dependence and addiction, it’s no small wonder that the general public is so misinformed.  Not only are people NOT addicted after a week or two of opiates, most people aren’t even DEPENDENT after that short a period of time. It’s not like anyone starts off with a dose of 60mg of Oxycodone. I started off with a 5mg Lortab and then moved to a 10mg Combunox, and then gradually increased my dose over years.

If we can get people to quit worrying about addiction with pain patients (I think the percentage is like 2-5% or something like that) and get them to treat the pain, everyone would be a whole lot better off. Frankly, even if people are addicted, wouldn’t it be better for them to pay for their meds and be seen by a doctor once a month than get cut off and go looking for street drugs to replace their pain meds. Also, many of the addicts are also pain patients, so I’d rather their pain was managed and then when they decided their addiction was affecting their life, then they took it upon themselves to get help.

I’ve never had a single sign of addiction (never “lost” a prescription, never run out early, never look wasted, never driven while impaired, etc.), yet my stupid ******-**-*** accused me of being a drug addict, then got my ******** involved, and then I was accused of faking being ill and drug seeking. Yeah, I sure faked that herniated disk so well that the MRI had every single doctor who saw it exclaiming, “Wow, that’s big!” Yeah, I’m a big ol’ faker alright. Ugh. It turns out my ***-**-***l was arrested for drunk driving shortly after accusing ME of abusing drugs. So, yeah, I’m pretty sick of these addiction accusations…for all of us.  Oh yeah, and I’ve never addressed this point publicly - Leigh-Ann and I were both accused of being “high” because someone said we had red-rimmed eyes.  That’s not a sign of presciption medication use, red eyes.  That would be a sign of maybe pot use (Leigh-Ann has never tried ANY illegal drugs…I’m not quite that innocent), allergies, or perhaps crying.  I have never driven under the influence of anything (okay, ONCE, when I was 17…and I drove very slowly through side streets - it never happened again), so if someone ever sees me out somewhere and thinks I’m high, they’re tottally and utterly wrong.  I take my safety and the safety of my passengers and fellow drivers seriously.  I spent my twenties being horrified at friends driving drunk (one totalled multiple cars) and trying to stop them.  More than once, our friends banded together to drive the drunk person’s car home for them, while one of us followed to give the sober driver a ride home.  Now that I’m even older (and wiser, heh), there is no way I would be even more reckless than I was in my youth, when I didn’t, even then, drive impaired.

I think doctors need to treat our pain, while making sure our dosage is appropriate for us. For us, not for the DEA or our relatives or our friends. Some of us have a huge tolerance for meds, some of us don’t. There isn’t a pat answer for what will help each pain patient. We’re all different. For instance, I can’t take any morphine based meds. They do nothing for me. It’s like I’m taking water pills. MSContin, Dilaudid, et al., don’t work. I suppose it might be different if they were IV meds, but the pills don’t work at all for me. Other people, I know they’re knocked out by those meds. Flexeril is my Kryptonite - it puts me to sleep for days. One teeny little pill knocks me out.  It works like a super powerful sleeping pill.  I’ve only taken two or three in my whole life because the reaction was so awful.

P.S.  I used asterisks to protect the “reputations” of the guilty.  They know who they are, but I don’t need strangers coming across my blog to know who they are.

Friday, November 19, 2010

mid-afternoon

Recriminations

[redacted]

Thursday, November 18, 2010

the wee hours

White Food

I’m trying to see how quickly I can suffer from malnutrition by only eating cheap white food.  So far, the experiment is very successful.  I feel like I’m walking against the wind with weights tied on to me, even though I’ve actually lost a lot of weight in the past month.  I just read a book about life in North Korea, so I’m thankful that I’m not eating weeds from the yard or the dogs…yet.