HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-08-29, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2013. PAGE 5.
My doctor is a gem. A magnificent
diamond. One of the crown jewels
of the Canadian medical
establishment. He is an insightful practitioner,
a brilliant diagnostician, an inspired clinician
and a tireless champion for anyone fortunate
enough to count themselves among his
patients. My doctor is smart, down to earth,
empathetic and charismatic. In case you
haven’t guessed, I love the guy, but... he writes
like a three year old.
I’m not talking scrawly or crabbed
or merely sloppy writing. I’m talking about
penmanship so spectacularly horrendous
it looks like it might be written in Aramaic.
By an orangutan holding a ballpoint in
his teeth. This is writing that ruptures the
outer boundaries of cursive communication.
A prescription from my doctor looks like a
piece of paper that’s been dive-bombed by
a squadron of ink-soaked, methamphetamine-
addled kamikaze fruit flies.
I know doctors should be forgiven their
scrawls because they have to write a lot of
things – and fast. Well, here’s a flash: so do
news reporters. The difference is reporters
have to be able to read their own writing when
it comes time to type it out.
Doctors have no such problem.
That thankless chore falls to their reception-
ist or to some poor chump down at the
pharmacy.
Of course it doesn’t help that a lot of
prescriptions employ a language that’s been
extinct for 2,000 years. Do doctors and
pharmacists speak Latin? No, but they write
and read it every day. Even the word
for prescription – Rx – is a medieval
English translation of the Latin original. It
means ‘Receive thou’. Or in plain English –
‘take’.
The language of prescriptions written by
English-speaking physicians borders on the
Kafkaesque. In a sane universe the medical
short form for ‘after meals’ might be ‘A.M.’,
right? Wrong. It’s ‘PC’. For ‘twice daily’ the
secret code is ‘BID’ whereas ‘QOD’ is ‘every
other day’.
For some reason we’ve decided to
cut doctors some slack about this. We treat
their sloppy handwriting as a kind of
amusing cultural cliché like thrifty
Scotsmen, gesticulating Italians and snobby
Brits.
Except it’s not funny. According to a report
in Time magazine preventable medication
mistakes injure one and a half million
American patients every year. It also claims
that sloppy handwriting and/or improper
deciphering of prescriptions kills 7,000
patients annually worldwide.
I’m not the only one that thinks this
is lunacy. So does Louis Francescutti –
Dr. Francescutti to the rest of us. He
is president of the Royal College of
Physicians and Surgeons and he’s fed
up with the prescriptive status quo.
Two years ago Dr. Francescutti reviewed
the case of Nova Scotia nurse Wilfred
Douglas Gordon, one of the few medical
practitioners to be officially reprimanded
for his incomprehensible notations on
nurses’ notes and patient’s charts. Dr.
Francescutti told reporters “It’s totally
unacceptable that we’re still handwriting –
that’s how the monks did it. Everything
should be dictated or typed.”
I say Amen to that. I’d say a lot more but
I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.
Sure hope I see him before he sees today’s
paper.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
Take two %#@ and call me in the morning
It’s a scary world out there. You figure, at
least I do, that if you go through life
keeping your nose clean, and out of the
shady corners of the world, that you’ll escape a
violent end. Unfortunately that’s not always
the case.
In the last week, there have been two cases
that have caused global sadness and head-
shaking at how brutal and random they are.
The first case involves a young man with his
whole life ahead of him who was off to a great
start and the second deals with a man who
dedicated himself to the pursuit of freedom
who met an unfitting end to a life full of
bravery and honour.
The most disturbing aspect of the two cases,
universally, is how random they seem to be.
Both are being reported by mainstream media
outlets as “thrill kills”.
The first case is the story of Christopher
Lane, a promising 22-year-old college baseball
player from Australia (a country not known for
its baseball talent) who was in Oklahoma on
scholarship. Visiting his girlfriend in the town
of Duncan, Lane was out for a jog when he was
shot in the back by three cowards who admit to
carrying out the crime due to boredom.
Three teens, aged 15, 16 and 17, according to
local police chief Danny Ford, were bored and
picked Lane at random.
“We were bored and didn’t have anything to
do, so we decided to kill somebody,” Ford said
one of the teens told him. Once targetting
Lane, the trio drove up behind the young man
and shot him in the back.
Further reporting has revealed that one of the
teens in custody posted on Twitter, just three
days before the shooting, that it was “time to
start taken life’s.”
It’s too bad they’ll likely be in jail for a long,
long time, because who knows what kind of
great things these guys could have gone on to
do?
The second incident is the murder of 88-
year-old Delbert Belton, a Spokane,
Washington veteran of World War II whose
only crime was waiting in his car for a friend
outside an Eagles Lodge last week when he
was beaten to death.
Police are also saying that the two teens had
no motive in killing Belton.
His friends say that he was wounded during
the battle of Okinawa before returning from the
war and working for Kaiser Aluminum for 33
years before retiring in 1982. Reports say that
Belton loved to dance, he loved to fix up old
cars and that he was always surrounded with a
group of his family and his friends.
When incidents like this happen, I can’t
believe that I somehow breathe the same air as
people who think cowardly beating an 88-year-
old man to death, or shooting a promising
young athlete in the back as he jogged is
something to do on a night that offers little
entertainment.
It’s absolutely heartbreaking that Lane’s
story will cease to be told because of three
pieces of garbage with easy access to guns.
Lane could have had a promising baseball
career and a storybook family life, but instead
the story ends with him dying face down in the
street bleeding to death.
And after Belton survived World War II, one
of the most dangerous periods in this planet’s
history, a man so brave that he risked his life so
that others could live did not deserve to die at
the hands of two cowards who simply saw the
old man as a target, not as the reason they’re
afforded all they have in the U.S.
These are truly sad times, and for reasons
that no right-thinking person can understand.
Shoot to thrill
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Admitting to indiscretions is a
dangerous gambit for political
hopefuls. While it can provide a
chance for people to see a candidate as human
or as more than a political puppet it can also
alienate people who would otherwise support
the candidate.
For Quebec MP and Prime Minister hopeful
Justin Trudeau, he may have done both in one
fell swoop.
In a recent interview with The Huffington
Post’s Canadian bureau, Trudeau came out
with one startling revelation and one less-than-
startling admission.
One was that he had smoked pot on a
singular occasion since becoming a Member
of Parliament. The second is that he doesn’t
drink coffee.
It seems that the latter of the two
admissions is causing more waves than the
first.
While I am sure that the Conservative
Party’s attack ad machine will have a hay
day (or a great day for hay) with the admission
of cannabis use, I, along with other news
outlets and journalists, feel that the admis-
sion that he doesn’t drink coffee is likely to be
more damaging than any casual drug use
scandal.
This kind of admission makes him more
alien than human. In a climate dominated
by both franchise (Tim Hortons, Second
Cup, Coffee Culture, Starbucks) and non-
franchise coffee shops, how can someone
fathom a political leader who doesn’t drink
coffee?
It used to be that a man in a suit and tie could
have a cigarette and coffee and maintain the air
of someone who made decisions (Mad Men
has taught me that much).
Now, while the cigarette is considered
unconscionable, the presence of coffee in the
hands of someone at the helm of a country is
expected.
When it comes time to burn the
midnight oil and make those big decisions
about the future of our country how will
we view Trudeau making them? Will he
be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thanks to
the double-double on his desk or will
he look haggard and exhausted without
a cup of java jive?
(Or worse yet, will we picture him
with a bag of Cheetos or Doritos and that
joint he admitted to smoking smoldering
quietly on the desk? I’m not saying it has
to be one or the other, I’m just saying, he
has forever linked the two notions in my
mind.)
A brief search of other leaders around the
world (including current Prime Minister
Stephen Harper) shows them enjoying their
java.
Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill and
Hillary Clinton can all be found (in the
same image) drinking coffee. Russian
President Vladimir Putin sips his from fine
china. United Kingdom Prime Minister David
Cameron posed (somewhat unknowingly) with
his wife while on vacation in Italy drinking
coffee. Kate Middleton gave up caffeine for
her recent pregnancy, but she enjoys it
nonetheless (and continued to drink decaf at
Starbucks throughout the pregnancy).
Recently elected Australian Prime Minister
had coffee with the editor of The Northern
Star, a newspaper in New South Wales in
Australia.
The list could go on indefinitely, but
I’ll end it there. The point of the matter
is that a politician drinking coffee is like a
politician philandering in my mind: it’s
expected of them. (And yes, I know that Kate
Middleton isn’t a politician, but the point here
is that there are so few things people have in
common with their leaders and coffee is one of
them.)
Heck, Harper was about as Canadian as
lacrosse in February when, at a hockey game,
he won (and proudly bragged about) his first
Roll up the Rim of the season by tweeting “1/1
@TimHortons #RollUpTheRim.” (As a
pioneer of the Facebook Roll up the Rim
counter before I even started post-secondary
school I’ll be expecting a royalty cheque in the
mail Mr. Harper.)
Coffee is such a big a part of my life
that a common joke I tell my friends is,
as a journalist, my primary job is to turn
caffeine into pictures and words. I drink
a lot more coffee in a day than I likely should
but my over-self-medication-with-caffeine
isn’t what’s on trial today.
Maybe I’m way off the mark here.
Maybe my own obsession with all things
coffee (mugs, special brewing machines, the
best brews, the different kinds of coffee-
infused drinks) makes me the exception and
not the rule by which politicians should
attempt to reach out to their constituents,
however, I can’t help but think that
recent news in North and Central Huron has
shown just how important our morning bean
brew is.
One of the first things I heard about when I
came back from vacation was the rumour (that
later proved true) that a company was looking
at building a Tim Hortons right outside of
Blyth.
As The Citizen’s Publisher Keith Roulston
pointed out last week, we can’t let
ourselves get carried away and forget our
neighbours and small business owners just
because the celebrity of Tim Hortons has
arrived.
However, its presence here is something
to note. Carrying a Tim Hortons’ travel
mug overseas is as sure a way to identify
yourself as sewing a Canadian flag on to your
backpack.
If you asked me what made Canada, I
would say our national identity includes
hockey, lacrosse, winter, public healthcare,
good beer, great comedians and coffee.
How could anyone hoping to be our leader not
drink it?
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
What kind of alien doesn’t like coffee?
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and
I will spend the first four sharpening the
axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Final Thought