Friday Fish Wrap: December 3. 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010 at 20:21 Gawd, there’s another week down. Monday started out with about two hours of awesome skiing and Thursday offered high winds that nearly took me off the top of Mt. Rose. It was a dark and stormy morning, that could only result in tucking tail - literally - and sliding my wimpy butt off the mountain to get my blue, shivering little hands wrapped around some hot coffee.
Perhaps that’s one reason a wholesome and heartfelt Hanukkah dinner tasted oh, so good. Suggie may not be able to make gravy, but her matzo ball soup, latkes and salmon are to die for. My gallbladder even chose to ignore the schmaltz in the chicken soup and sour cream on the latkes. Hanukkah isn’t really a huge religious holiday - more a commemoration of a battle long ago and the rededication of the temple. In America, it’s proximity to the pagan holiday of Christmas - co-opted by christians - is coincidental. But I’ll take it all the same.
I’ve been fighting the epic annual battle of the allergy season. First came the itching. Then the sneezing. My nasal passages are welded as tightly shut as a schoolgirl’s knees. Neti pot and all can’t budge it open. Only drugs, my friends, can do the trick.
So - standing as brave and tall as 5 foot 3 inches gets you - drugs it is.
Talking about standing tall, this monster (shown at left) is from a friends garden, and I think it’s on the menu for Sunday night.
I’m hoping it comes with a hollandaise sauce rather than batteries. Right, Dossie?
I wish there’d been more in the way of pharmacoepia around here last night. Neither of us was sleeping. With Mr. Maven thrasing about with the pain in his shoulder - now the medical community has decided it’s a pinched nerve between C6 and C7 - I gave up to wide open eyes as well. He sat in the recliner reading whilst I played computer solitare from oh, 0230 to about 0430 hours.
Swell. Oh, to be young again, and able to sleep blissfully through anybody else’s pain.
Have you ever wondered why it’s so easy to sleep right through the deliciously sinful hours of 0700 and 0800 hours?
Did you see the headline in the Reno Gazette-Journal on Thursday morning? $8.3 billion requested by state agencies minus $5.3 billion of projected state revenue over two years … what’s $3 billion between friends, eh? That’s the supposed shortfall that the State of Dismay, aka Nevada, faces. Or as state Assemblywoman, Debbie Smith, so eloquently put it “That’s a pretty big hole”. Yup.
How, I ask you, will incoming Guv, Brian Sandoval tackle this challenge? New taxes, perhaps? Noooooooo! The so-called experts are now telling us that we need to diversify the Nevada economy beyond the unholy siamese twins of mining and gaming. Whoa. Who woulda thunk it? And just how fast do you think that magical diversification will happen?
Here’s what really scares the living daylights out of me - what’s going on here, is happening in Washington D. C. on a much larger scale.
I don’t think Brian Sandoval is a complete nimrod - especially when compared to the outgoing idiotic oozing pustule of a governor - but the true test of Sandoval’s mettle will be whether or not he tries to take any more out of the hide of education and sorely needed social services. It’s called punishing the victims. Not like we could ask gaming to step up.
Las Vegas, riding high back in the day, has fallen. Not quite as far as Dublin, Ireland or Thessaloniki, Greece mind you, but you can practically hear Oscar Goodman claiming permanent neck and back injuries and interviewing personal injury attorneys. What we didn’t hear him clamoring for was economic diversification. Nor were any other of the civic wheeler-dealers around the state. They were so comfy, doing what they’d always done, and getting the payoffs they’d always gotten.
Look outside, folks. That’s the cold, cruel light of day.
Continuing to push the TeaNut dope that it’s all Obama/Reid/Pelosi’s fault might soothe some, but all the rest of us are going to somehow have to come to grips with reality - Nevada knew exactly what a flimsy house of cards they had built, and didn’t fucking care as long as the money kept rolling in.
Earth calling Nevada - Hey, kids are Mommy or Daddy at home?
If you think education is the only thing sucking fumes here in the Silver State, then you haven’t had cancer.
I had lunch today with a woman who has Stage IV breast cancer, and after hearing her story, I came away emotionally shell-shocked. The so-called ‘system’ in Nevada has done it again. As in completely failed to provide a reasonable continuum of care and treatment. And if you think she is some under-educated ne’er do well, think again. She’s a retired Registered Nurse. And she is probably facing a recurrence.
But she doesn’t really know for sure yet, since she can’t get answers out of her oncologist. The guy is an arrogant prick who probably needs to be brought up on charges by his peers. Not content to simply be an ego who doesn’t want to be bothered by the silly ideas of women worried about their boobs, but one who seems to bring “creepy” to his doctor-patient interactions. She’s not the first one to tell me this.
I guess the most important thing we talked about today was the need to be her own advocate. To rattle the cage. Insist that phone calls be returned. To get another oncologist if need be. And maybe to go out of the area to a multi-disciplinary cancer center.
She needs help. I wish I could drop everything as I have in the past and give it - beyond names, websites, phone numbers, suggestions. That could’ve been me eight years ago, but for a couple of very fortunate phone calls and a loving, dedicated husband to stand by me. I was able to get ‘out of Dodge’ and go where my life could be saved.
I’ll go to bed tonight wondering how some people can still think the United States is the center of the best of everything when good people can’t get good medical care. Illegals didn’t cause this problem. Neither did Obama, or Liberals, or any of the other bogeymen that TeaNuts like to blame.
A seriously broken for-profit centered healthcare delivery system is what caused it. Oh, and the political gutlessness to change it once and for all. If you don’t realize that congressional ‘gridlock’ has real life consequences, think again.
This woman’s life is one of those ‘consequences’.
-maven
Nevada budget, cancer, hanukkah, health care, las vegas, sandoval, skiing in Friday Fish Wrap 
