I don't drink coffee anymore these days

Well, maybe just bits of coffee in random other fancy drinks.

Yeah, I been on blogging vacation and will be for awhile longer.

sapphoq

Religion and Politics

The topic of faith comes up a lot these days and of course it has more to do with politics than religion itself. Of all the divisive issues out there religion and the offshoots of things that can be called religious come front and center. It’s almost too easy to herd people in one direction or another by pointing it out. Most of the time I find it offensive, and wish it wasn’t an issue. This group likes or dislikes someone because they are religious or not religious enough, and for all of you thinking smugly that religion ruins everything, the anti-religious spend just as much time making dumb decisions for the exact opposite reasons. Most issues that can be considered “moral” have very little to do with religion at all.

Front and center is the case of abortion. I make no decisions based on pro-life or pro-choice standards because it has no bearing on the greater justice of the world in general. I have no problem saying that I find abortion to be an amoral form of birth control, but if someone comes out as pro-choice and everything else they are into seems to be to the betterment of the world as a whole, I will vote for them. The other side of the coin has far more people that will walk into a voting booth completely controlled by who they think will protect the right to abortion. This of course is the right that everyone has had for over 40 years, regardless of who has won any election. That is the type of idiot that has been sending the world into the crapper, and fast.

Now it seems to be all the rage to talk about the loud mouthed Presbyterian and the soft spoken seventh day Adventist, but why should anyone care? On the other side it is the liar against the socialist and I haven’t heard talk of either of their religion? Last go around it was the Catholic that almost beat the Mormon to take on the guy that some say is a Muslim but spent 20 years in the church of a black liberation theologian. I agree with Bill Maher (will miracles never cease) that he is really an atheist, and I could care two licks about his religion anyway. Two of my best friends are an atheist and a pagan who happen to be pro-life and believe in Federalism. Unfortunately neither of them is running for president so I have to choose amongst the others, and religion won’t play a part in it.

I personally like the old Ross Perot theory when it comes to voting for a president. No it had nothing to do with his policies or anything; it was his last infomercial before the last election he ran in. He asked the American people to think long and hard about which candidate you would hand your baby to in a life boat on a sinking ship. I think personally he was trying to remind people that you couldn’t trust the guy who was president at the time. I still don’t know his religion but his wife is the “liar” on the Democrat side of this go around, and I don’t know or care what her religion is. Ross was right about one thing though, I wouldn't have handed my baby to that guy or his lying wife. Now we need to consider whether it matters to anyone anymore, while we argue about someone’s religion, which last I checked was still a constitutional right.

Score Zero for the Non-Helping Office Help

No one is a generalist in the doctors' front offices anymore. Everyone has a specialty. There are receptionists who answer the phones after the patient is routed through several menus of choices, insurance mediators, plant maintenance engineers, environmental statisticians, medical records compliance officers, and those-who-ought-to-be-eaten-by-Baba-Yaga.




     I fell the other day. This is not unusual for me these days. The balance problems that I have due to some brain damage acquired in a motor vehicle accident means that every so often despite my best efforts otherwise, I will fall.


     This time, I hurt my arm. Doc sends me for x-rays on Wednesday. I find out on Thursday that I have a broken ulna up at the head where it slides into the elbow. Not the worse fracture certainly, especially considering that there is no displacement. I am managing the pain with over the counter pills taken according to directions.


     Doc wants me to see an orthopedist, a receptionist that I do not know from his office tells me. Okay. I will not see the local butcher, I tell her. Anyone else anywhere else but that one. She says she will pass it on to the referral specialist.


     She doesn't. Actually, she doesn't advise the referral specialist that I need a referral at all. Thursday passes in a haze of little blue pills and a little blue pillow that I keep stuffed under my arm.


     Friday mid-morning arrives. I stop in at the appointment desk to pick up a hard copy of the radiology report. I ask about my referral. I am directed to the referral specialist's window.


     I don't know this referral specialist. She doesn't know that I need a referral, hasn't heard anything about my "broken elbow"-- the office help has all referred to my broken ulna this way and I don't correct them-- and in fact has not received any message from the receptionist that I need a referral to a bone doc. I give her my details and leave.


     I do not hear from her. It is now Friday at five minutes after four. I call the doctor's office. The new receptionist answers. "All of our referral specialists have left. They are not the usual ones," she tells me as some sort of excuse. She cannot tell me if any work has been done on my referral, if an appointment has been made. Nothing. "Call back on Monday," she suggests. "You won't get to see a bone doctor this weekend anyway. You can see one anytime." She hangs up.


     This is not satisfactory. I call back and firmly insist upon speaking with a nurse. The nurse talks with me, answers my medical questions-- I have never broken or even sprained an arm before-- and then she calls my doctor.


     My doctor calls me back. He will be handling the referral himself on Monday.


sapphoq reviews says:
To all office workers in physicians' offices everywhere, I have some tips for you:




1.  Please do not make light of any patient's concern or pain by telling them that they can see a specialist "anytime" or that they will not be getting to see a specialist this weekend anyway.
My referral should have been taken care of on Thursday. I should have been provided with an appointment with a specialist-- or at the very least, a phone number of the office of a specialist-- on Thursday or at the very latest on Friday morning. The appointment itself would not have had to occur on Friday morning. I was not asking for a miracle here. I was expecting the same consideration that you would give your own older relative with a broken body part.


2.  Please do not make excuses for why something was not done in a timely fashion.
Telling me that the referral specialists "are not the usual ones" leaves me to wonder if they are imports from a distant planet. Not helpful.
I may be brain damaged but I am not brain dead. I know that the initial problem may have started when you did not hand my referral to the referral specialist.
I was not proficient at carrying out my own job responsibilities for a number of years myself. I know what slacking off at the job looks like. It looks like you.


3.  Please do not tell me that you do not know if anything was done about referring me to a specialist.
I find it unbelievable that you could not be bothered to pick up my chart-- or the electronic equivalent of my chart-- and physically look at the last page to check if there were any notes about a referral in progress.


Yes, I am on first name basis with my doctor, your employer. Yes I did tell him what transpired in his office in his absence.


It is your job to know how to do your job and to do your job. Do your job or get a different one. Do not irritate this particular irritating patient because I will not just sit back and "take it." I have a blog and I know how to use it.

Vicar Vicarious

It appears that religion has become a very important part of society again, now that the far left has found an ally in the Pope of all people. The far right who has been in the trenches fighting the good fight on abortion, hand in hand (my ass) with the Catholic church have finally been cast aside for more pressing issues like amnesty for illegal aliens, global climate whatever they call it this week, seems warm but who knows, and of course a favorite topic of the left, eating the rich. Yes now that the Pope is the little darling of the far left we can assume that the overwhelming majority of Catholics that vote for far left nutjobs anyway can finally just come out of the closet once and for all.

The only real view I have ever shared with Catholics is the pro life one. The atheist that owns this blog happens to be pro-life (and if it is at all possible probably more pro life than me) so it doesn’t always have to be a religious issue, but it always gets dismissed as one. I of course have always been of the belief that there is a certain moral obligation that anyone should have with abortion, from the roots of Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger truly believed that Planned Parenthood would help black Americans to self exterminate) to the fact that most people wouldn’t treat a household pet as carelessly as they do a fetus. Now of course we have the entire disingenuous way they are selling fetal tissues and preserving fetus “lives” until they can be harvested. It’s pretty sick really.

In turn regardless of how you feel about the abortion issue, the issue has ramped up to the danger phase. I have always been angry with the left as they say a fetus is nothing but worthless tissue, but then hide every aspect of what they do with it. The act like they are actually ashamed, or know others would be scornful if they really saw what was going on. Worthless tissue like a mole or a cancerous growth doesn’t get any debate or secrecy when it is being dealt with; it is just dealt with, because IT IS actually worthless tissue. You don’t harvest it and if this trend continues you could actually see farms of destitute women breeding for fetal tissue. Oh that would never happen right? Well it is about what a woman can and cannot do with their bodies anyway so why not?

This is what separated me from the Pope once and for all. I realize that the Catholic church is a dying creed, and they need to bring more people into the religion and especially those that are already inclined to be subservient to a master, but to hug and kiss a brutal dictator like Castro, and then come here? To not bring up the one and only thing that the bulk of America has had in common with the Catholics and simply so not to offend their New Leftist friends, during a time when the Pope had the stage? No thank you, I’m perfectly fine with myself and happy to be without them.

Stay Out of My Happy Place

When I am at the gym, I just want to think about health. I just want to talk shop, and shop would mean things that pertain to picking things up and putting them down enough times to build muscle. I may like to dally in the idea of what I am going to eat, and what supplements we think is best, but that is about all that I need to deal with when I am in my happy place. You see because when I am in my happy place I don’t want to talk about the things that aren’t relative to the happy place like politics, religion or morality. These are not happy place subjects’ folks, and what is worse than that I happen to be a self righteous jerk, so I can only stand pestering by an idiot for so long. This was a day that started to look unsalvageable, but I will explain further.

There are very few people at the gym that know I even have political, religious or moral views, and unfortunately my big mouth is the only reasons a few do. On a brighter note the average gym enthusiast is a lot harder to find than you would think. Sure we all have our groups on the internet that hang out and talk shop, but that is global in scale, and the average gym will only have one or two people that always seem to be there. I am one of the two where I work out, and the idiots that want to argue politics, religion and morality are not. Of course that doesn’t mean that the average pain in my ass doesn’t run into me once or twice a year either, and here was one of those days. He was locked and loaded for argument from the moment he walked in.

Now despite what most people might think of me I have NEVER allowed politics, religion or morality to end a friendship, or even stew in myself for more than a hour, maybe two if it was that bad. Life is too short, and there are enough people in this world who completely disagree with me that are fine people. Then of course there are very few who are not, but I still don’t waste my time hating on them. This one person in particular, I haven’t seen in at least six months and they must have spent that entire time thinking up what they were going to say to me the next time they saw me, but of course doesn’t have their facts straight when dealing with me. “So what do you think about that person in jail in Kentucky who wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to gay people?”

Of all the subjects in the world that people have always tried to pin me down on I really hate the gay marriage one. Why? Simply because I have never been against gay marriage. I have told everyone this but when they have their brain in the fog they always assume that I hate the issue, when all I hate are the people who won’t get over it. Without getting to crazy, I explained to the idiot that the woman should have been fired because moral issue or not, if she couldn’t do what is her actual job because of a moral issue then she should find another job. I actually said that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had committed a crime by making gay marriage legal and then holding their judgment for 3 months so the Mass. Congress could create a new law. Once the MSC proclaimed gay marriage legal it was legal, and not up for a “holding” period. I have never wavered on what is and is not legal.

The problem now is that because I didn’t give the person the argument that they had come to me for, they were obligated to start hunting for one. I really hate that. His favorite at that point is to go straight after abortion, because I am pro-life. He’s one of those atheists that demands Christians admit they are wrong about things. Anything actually, it doesn’t matter; he just wants me to be wrong. I’ve had these arguments before and it isn’t worth it, his religion of atheism is (faith is faith folks) gets really bothersome so I tried to blow him off. This of course means he is right, and he started celebrating this. Well until someone else decided to step in and continue the argument.

I’ll long story short this one too, but the other friend was quite disdainful of the whole topic, and came right out and asked the associate that started all the arguments, why morality is something that only the religious seem to have in his eyes? That really enraged the first person who started in on the whole “your God, your God,” thing. The other person pointed out that he too was an atheist but was also pro-life, because wrong is wrong. Again that made the person crazy, and he started arguing that he had to be a “God freak” to think that way. I completely stayed out of it, but the second person managed to argue how the Ten Commandments didn’t affect either of their lives, murder is murder (the second one is a vegan too from what I gathered) and that if the first one equated all morality to be something that “Cults” are into, then he would rather be in a “Cult” than in his world.

I had a good workout, and I have a feeling I won’t have to see that idiot again for a while. I guess the day was salvageable.