HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2004-09-02, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2004. PAGE 5.
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In case of illness, be very afraid
Most people think that medical care is
good for you. The fact is that some
medical care is good for you, a great
deal is irrelevant and, unfortunately, some of it
is harmful.
Heading off to the hospital for some
corporeal customizing, are we? Going to let
the sawbones hoist the old carcass up on the
hospital lube rack for a little surgical nipping
and tucking?
Then I have just two words of advice for
you: Good and Luck.
Not to put the knock on our diagnosticians
and surgeons. They do a helluva job
considering their onerous caseload, not to
mention the dwindling resources and
antiquated equipment they have to work with,
thanks to our skinflint Ottawa bean counters.
But that doesn't make the prospect of a
hospital stay any less daunting. Checking into
a Canadian hospital these days is a bit like
diving into a shark tank with a 'Bite me' sign
stapled to your butt.
How dangerous is it? Pretty darned.
In the past few years surgeons have removed
wrong organs, amputated healthy limbs,
drilled into the wrong part of a patient's skull
— even performed heart surgery on the wrong
patient.
The good news? All of the above happened
in U.S. hospitals.
The bad news? The situation on this side of
the border is even worse. A recent study
published in the Canadian Medical
Aformer candidate for leader of the
Ontario New Democratic Party and
scourge of any in it who dared
backslide has been pictured in wide-brimmed
straw hat, sitting on his tractor in his vineyards
and musing on his life as a gentleman farmer.
'Red Richard' Johnston is the latest in a long
line of NDP politicians, fighters for the
underdog, who have managed to land on their
feet.
Johnston, who was pictured in a newspaper
here, was a feisty MPP noted for living briefly
on welfare benefits and sleeping in streets to
draw attention to the poor, who once
reprimanded his party leader Bob Rae as
evasive for refusing to call himself a Socialist.
Since leaving the legislature, Johnston has
been appointed president of a community
college and chair of a council overseeing
colleges and he has now retired at the ripe old
age of 58 with appropriate pensions to
concentrate on making wine on an historic
200-acre farm he acquired in a trendy area east
of Toronto.
Johnston was the heart of far leftists in his
party, but says he has learned relationships
between people sometimes are more important
than ideology, and one can hope his wines
have similarly mellowed.
Rae, when opposition leader, accused
Liberal yuppie premier David Peterson of
making Ontario a haven for the "lifestyles of
the rich and famous," the name of a popular
TV show, and ignoring the poor.
But Rae, who ousted Peterson as premier,
now spends his time as a lawyer advising
wealthy corporations and restoring harmony to
this city's troubled symphony orchestra.
Stephen Lewis, an earlier NDP leader who
grew up in austere surroundings, has lived for
many years in swanky Forest Hill and sent his
children to expensive private schools while
preaching the need to strengthen the public
system.
He once had a small farm where he kept
Association Journal took a look at 'adverse
effects' — i.e. medical screw-ups — across the
country. They studied 3,745 randomly chosen
patient charts from 20 hospitals in five
provinces. They documented drug overdoses,
botched diagnoses, patients whose spines were
sliced by clumsy surgeons — even one woman
whose ovaries were removed.
Which might have been fine if she hadn't
been expecting merely to have her appendix
out.
The horror stories are right out of a Stephen
King novel. The study says that 24,000
patients die in Canadian hospitals every year as
a result of preventable medical errors.
Another 185,000 are crippled, injured or
poisoned through professional incompetence,
negligence or carelessness.
Read that number again: 185,000. That's
more than the population of Regina.
American medical authorities are attempting
to correct their abysmal record by imposing a
Speedy Muffler King-style checklist on all
U.S. surgical teams.
The list includes such elementary
exotic animals and a llama went missing,
prompting the oddest question ever at a
legislature news conference, "Stephen, have
you found your llama?"
Donald C. MacDonald, NDP leader before
him, put out messages every Christmas and
New Year complaining the Tory government
neglected the poor, but phoned them from the
Caribbean, where he found the warmer festive
season more congenial.
The NDP had a couple MPPs who were self-
made multi-millionaires. But Morton Shulman
made his pile in the stock market and wrote
books including Anyone Can Make A Million
before he became an MPP and was only
nominally a New Democrat.
Shulman had been chief coroner and
supported a Tory government until it fired him
for accusing it of cover-ups. He devoted all his
efforts as an MPP to pushing it out and never
expressed enthusiasm for left-wing
philosophies.
John Brown, an innovative and often praised
social worker, made big money setting up
homes to which the province sent emotionally
disturbed children.
Brown owned real estate all over the
Final Thought
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you
don't mind ... it doesn't matter.
— Mark Twain
procedures as:
(a) Making certain that the correct patient is
on the table,
(b) Having the entire surgical team agree on
precisely which part of the body they're
supposed to be working on ("Right knee? I
thought they said left knee!")
(c) Making sure that the X-rays are not read
backwards: and
(d) Having the presiding surgeon actually
sign the incision site — preferably while the
Patient is still conscious.
Which is all well and good I suppose, but
even if every surgeon was as wise as Solomon
and as adept as Zorro, we'd still have medical
muck-ups, because we'd still have the non-
perfectible part of the puzzle — which is to say
the patients.
Such as the woman who rushed into the
emergency room of a hospital in Vancouver
demanding to be directed to the 'fraternity
ward'.
"You must mean the Maternity Ward," said
the receptionist.
"Whatever," says the lady, "I've gotta see an
upturn right away."
"You must mean an intern," says the
receptionist.
"Fraternity, maternity," the woman yells,
"upturn, intern — I don't care what you call it —
all I know is, even though I use an IOU and my
husband's had a bisectomy, I haven't
demonstrated 'for two months and I think I'm
probably fragrant."
province and drove a Mercedes. Reporters
remember him, nattily attired, swooping down
in his private plane to join ordinary MPPs on a
rail trip getting to know the north in the 1960s
and taking admiring colleagues back with him.
But Brown also billed the province for
services he did not deliver and was jailed for
three years for defrauding it.
Ian Deans had a firefighter's pay before
being elected an MPP and, upset after losing a
race for leader, switched to the federal
parliament, where he found prime minister
Brian Mulroney needing to name an opponent
to a high-profile post to muffle complaints he
was appointing only Tories.
He made Deans chair of a public board, so
he collected its salary, and pensions for having
been an MPP and MP, totaling $120,000, big
money for the times.
Almost all these New Democrats also were
among the most effective MPPs and there is no
reason NDP MPPs should live in penury after
they retire. But in looking after the underdogs
they often also looked after themselves.
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• Bonnie
Gropp
The short of it
Breathe and chant
Wr
ten the sun is high in the afternoon
sky, you can always find something to
do;
But from dusk til dawn, as the clock ticks on,
Something happens to you.
—David Mann and Bob Hilliard
Silence is as thick as the darkness that
surrounds you. Not a hint of sounds breaks the
stillness. The only light beams from the dial of
the clock at your bedside, an illumination that
annoyingly reminds you this is an hour to be
sleeping.
The wee small hours of the morning have
become familiar to me. For no understandable
reason, my eyelids will pop up in the middle of
a perfectly relaxing sleep. On occasion the
interruption is brief. But more often my
wakefulness is an invitation to solve problems,
plan or organize.
A deep breath in and with tremendous
concentration I focus on the word calm, then
exhale as my brain chants serenity. Other
thoughts are soothed away as I continue what
has become my pre-dawn mantra.
A mantra is a sound, word or phrase repeated
as a meditation. Though they actually pre-date
Buddhism they are often associated with the
spiritual traits of particular Buddhist figures.
Through centuries it has been believed that
uttering certain words or names can control the
world or unseen forces. Today many people are
using meditation and the mantra as effective
stress management techniques. ,
The mantra's purpose is to get rid of normal
thoughts and focus awareness inward. While
the more formal practices have specific
mantras, the mantra you choose can be
anything from a single word to the lyrics of a
song. It need only be meditative to you.
Before beginning a mantra it's important to
be physically comfortable, to close your eyes
and breathe naturally. Attention should be
focussed on breathing as you start to think your
mantra, slowly and rhythmically matching it to
your breath.
Thoughts and feelings will creep in, but let
them come and go. Should you realize you're
not repeating the mantra, simply re-focus on
your breathing and start again.
Such meditations should take at least 10
minutes. Total relaxation may not happen the
first time but will come with practice.
Relaxation is not the only purpose of the
mantra. It is used to boost self-esteem and
empower. It is said to improve health and
cleanse your spirit.
Though some may consider all of this
hocum, there is strong evidence to suggest that
at least at the simplest level, the mind and body
react to the repetition of the mantra.
Consistent use can take the subconscious
thoughts we harbour and calm them.
Few would argue the power of positive
thinking. A mantra is simply taking that
thought and instilling it into your subconscious
over and over again.
There are many people, such as myself, who
don't use one mantra, but have several, one to
fit every emotion. Finding what works is the
first step.
Personally, my mantras have never been too
fancy, rather more tongue-in-cheek. I have
come to know that "this too shall pass," though
pat, is perfect for many of life's trials. "Just
smile and wave" affirms for me that sometimes
you can't win; so let it go.
But in the wee small hours of the morning,
when a groggy mind is jumping way too fast,
simple and serious still works best.
New Democrats land on feet