Mostly Harmless
from 2009
February 18, 2009
Well thanks to the fine folks who have brought you: The Department of
Education, The Department of Energy, The Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, and every single other thing that regulates your life, your liberty, and your pursuit of Happiness I am unable to tell you about what is happening with me due to a curious piece of shi--legislation known as HIPPA.
Please do a Google search, I don't have the stomach to explain it. Onward.
You all should read a blog by Jerry Pournelle, he has named the stimulus bill the largest spending bill in the history of the world. Its fitting and descriptive.
I think about a lot of stuff lately since, as a nurse, I have my job duties determined by the same kind of minds who have led us to the brink of economic ruin, the people who have always told me that I lacked the education to have their jobs, I lacked the intellectual background to actually do their jobs. Does anyone believe that if we had chimpanzees in charge that our crisis would be any worse?
Here is what I think--American banks are insolvent, practically all of them are broke, California is certainly broke, many states are in the same situation. The United States is now held hostage by several foreign governments because those governments hold our debt. Should those governments decide that the writing on the wall is true, and they begin to sell those treasury bills, and God knows what else they have, the United States will, like the Emperor in the fairy tale, be seen for what it is, broke, homeless, and without clothing.
The evidence for this bleak outlook is in the amounts of money this government is willing to spend to keep this truth from being perceived, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and are apparently willing to spend "whatever it takes" to keep this economy from crashing. The government will spend without end. They don't know how much money it will take, but they are willing to spend it. This is unprecedented in our history, and it is the clearest sign that some very important people are very scared of something very big. We would not be seriously thinking of keeping people in homes they cannot afford if the alternative was something we could handle.
Here is my take--no amount of money is going to help, and in fact throwing money at this problem may be making things worse, and may be lengthening this mess. What needs to happen is that layoffs need to occur, and as tough as this is to contemplate, maybe some businesses need to go away, including the car companies. The pride of American capitalism needs to contract because they have been feeding at the trough of fiat money, money with no intrinsic value, money that has been chasing an economy that for at least thirty years or more has been based on hope rather than real wealth. No one knows for certain what needs to be done, including me. But certainly this crisis has been the result of some very bad decisions, made by people who claimed that they knew better than you or me. And now that the mistakes have been made, those people who are responsible are now going to the government and asking for a bailout, that money will come from taxes sometime, and that means that you and I are going to help play for our betters mistakes. Is anyone going to get angry about this? Where are the people who come from the point of view that founded this country?
November 14, 2008
Headline in news stories are an editors attempt at grabbing your attention long enough to get the reader to read the news story. One that I see from time to time focuses on the "nursing shortage" that seems to be a contributing factor in the mess that is health care in America.
I am a nurse. I am out of work. Lost my job after one month. My bosses had "difficulty" with the decision to let me go, they told me, and I believe them, that they fought to keep me, but I was let go. In the face of a nursing shortage my employer chose to fire me despite my bosses protests. Allow me to elaborate.
In late September I learned that I was being investigated for an allegation of "abuse". This was due to a course of events in May, when I had two paramedics and a police officer called in by me to transport a combative resident to the hospital. This resident had tried to hit one of the paramedics, and the police officer was not successful in talking this resident on to the gurney, when I saw the resident head for the dining room, which was filled with residents eating their dinners, knowing that the last time this had happened this resident went around dumping the dinner plates of other residents on to the tables they were trying to eat at, I knew I had to act to keep those other residents safe, when I approached the resident, the resident screamed, and tried to bite me, I put her in a bear hug, lifted her off the ground and walked to the gurney and put her down.
This took about one minute from start to finish.
This action was the abuse I have been accused of. The restraining of this combative and dangerous resident, the bear hug restricted her movement you see, was apparently disturbing enough that one of the three people who I called in to help me called my state nursing board to report my actions. And one of my aids supposedly called the state as well.
The facilities response when contacted by the state was to suspend me, with pay, while they investigated the incident. The state conducted an investigation of its own.
I was told I was exonerated. That was wrong.
In late September I learned that the state investigated the facility I was working for, and not my actions. Now, in September, a state investigator told me that the state was still investigating, only now it was me that was being investigated. I answered all questions asked of me. I was told this was information gathering, and the investigator would gather all the information available and pass it up to the people who would decide how to classify my actions in May. The investigator told me that the "worst case scenario" would be that I would not be allowed to work with a vulnerable population ever again. Vulnerable population is a legal term that in essence means all children, long term care residents, people who are vulnerable, or in practice where most of the nursing jobs are. This information was quite upsetting, and I called my boss at work and asked her if she knew anything about this investigation. She did not. She spoke with the administrator who called me back to tell me they were suspending me until they could talk with the corporate level managers. I called the state investigator and asked her if she had called my boss, she told me she had been at the facility in late
August, the administrator had been talked with, my notes of the incident had been copied and provided to the investigator, when I asked why my work was acting as if they had never heard of this the investigator had the same question. Then next day my administrator called me to tell me that I was being terminated. I asked her when she was planning to tell me this and she told me that as long as the facility was being investigated she felt she did not need to tell me anything, but since it was who me who was being investigated, the decision had been made to terminate me. Shocked feelings do not begin to describe my reaction. I call the state investigator and I tell her I was terminated for telling my employer something the must have already known, the investigator said that was unnecessary but it happens. I asked her for some guidance on what to do next, the investigator told me that since my license was still "clean" I had no work restrictions, I could work wherever I could find work. Now at this point I am dumbstruck, how can this be possible, it seems like a nightmare but it is real. I go on unemployment and think for a bit.
A couple of weeks go by and I am hired as a resident care manager at another facility in the same state. I appear to be appreciated, and I am often praised for my handling of the job and how I have dealt with some serious family issues with this facility. After about a month someone tells the director of nursing services that I am being investigated for some incident that happened at my last job. This person is unable to provide any details of the termination of the investigation. I am called into the administrator's office and I am told that the corporation believes that "if someone is walking the plank, we want to go out and bring them back from the edge. You don't have to tell us, but if there is anything that I need to know, before it becomes a walk the plank problem, tell me". I believed this, I knew from the state investigator talks that I did not need to tell anyone about the investigation, but this administrator seemed to believe in me, so I believed in him. I told the administrator everything, the director of nursing services was there and heard everything too. They both said that I appeared to have acted properly, and in the same situation they would have acted as I had acted. Corporate policy dictated that the administrator had to inform his boss about this. I thought that this was fine, thinking that they were now coming to aid me.
About two hours later the administrator called me in to his office, the face of my boss told me this was bad, I asked if I should sit down or stand up, the administrator said I should sit down, I did, and he said he did not know how to tell me what he had to tell me. I told him just tell me the truth, and the truth was that I was in my probationary period and they were letting me go. I said that I was fine with that decision, he asked me if I was really OK with this decision and I said no I am not but I can see its been a difficult couple of hours for you. He replied that this was a decision that he and my director were struggling with, I said that I believe it was nothing personal and he said that if anyone is going to ask him he would say that they had lost and excellent nurse and he wished me luck. My director of nurses looked ill and said she was not OK with this decision.
I called the same state investigator, and she tells me that a decision has not been made yet and it may be a "couple of months" before any decision is made.
Which brings me to this post. What to do now? Apply for open nursing jobs only to have this issue hang over me, possibly loosing another job while the state has a good think about what I did in May? Having to go to my doctor a third time in a year asking for documentation about why I am taking medications that show up on a drug screen is not something I want to do, but will need to do for any new job I may land. Or do I quit nursing altogether, take the cut in pay and live miserably ever after? Do I wait out the state and assume that they will see what I did as insuring the safety of my residents and exonerate me? How long must I wait for that? And if it goes the other way, the state decides to place a restriction on my license, what then? Get a lawyer and fight? Take the sanction and shut up? Leave nursing and take my twelve years of experience as a registered nurse with me?
If there is a shortage of nurses in this country, maybe its because we get treated like I have been treated since late September.
How embarrassing. Blogger has been sold and upgraded since I last posted two years ago. But I see I have not missed much, as I have had not much to say. I do have a new job or two. Now I work at what is called a continuing care retirement center. The idea looks good on paper: You pay money up front to join then when you have become too much of a burden to your family, or you want to retire as you have become weary of taking care of a house, you retire to this community. Then as your health begins to get worse (hopefully slowly) your level of care will change but where you live will not. The care begins at an independent level and the facility offers care all the way up to skilled nursing care. But here is the rub--we have not really considered the cases of Alzheimer's disease. It does seem to be on an increase all over the world, but at this facility, built in the later sixties, Alzheimer's was not part of the architectural plan, and significant architectural detail is needed to deal with dementia patients. At the time of the facility's construction, people did not really live long enough to develop dementia (or Alzheimer's, dementia is easier to spell and more widely, or at least intuitively widely understood), so when patients get to that point in the disease, lots of other things have usually happened, including marital difficulties. And how do we deal with divorce? The answer is not well. But that is for another time. The night shift is the shift I work, and it always has the same problem--people are under the assumption that people sleep all night. Dementia patients often suffer from sleep disturbences, causing them to be awake at odd hours. The wee small hours of the night. And since everyone sleeps at night, you obviously do not need more than two nurse's aides at night, and since dementia patients often like to walk, most dementia facilities have some circular shape to them that allow dementia patients to wander until they get tired enough to go to sleep. But our halls are mostly straight lines that do not allow for continuous wandering, and causes us to need to constantly monitor these patients that always sleep through the night.
When people do this I have two reactions. 1) My, they must really be committed to their cause. 2) What a dumbass. Guess which one is the most frequent response. No you can't use the first one.
Blatently ripped off from Boing Boing's website.
http://gominosensei.org/images/pics/fresh_dean_tattoo.jpg
Have you ever tried to use Google to find something on the web, and two hours later found yourself looking at things that, at some point, were related to what you were looking for but now are unable to be related to what you are looking at, or is that just me.
That pretty much sums up my web experiences.
I used to joke that no matter what I was looking at while I was at work, I could relate it to my job. Nobody believed me, but it is my contention that all knowlege is related, well with the exception of porn.
This weblog is the definition of serendipity.
http://boingboing.net/
I just love sites like this. You just never know what you are going to get.
http://www.facto.org/home.asp
Sometimes other weblogs are useful to me as a source for exploring other weblogs. You know, the networking principle? Anyway this web site, though infrequently updated for some time now, has some of the better links for you to investigate. Also read some of camworld's archieves, I find them informative.
http://www.camworld.com/
This blog has some not safe for work entries, but I think they are easy to figure out, but don't say I didn't warn you. I steal only from the best.
Advertising that for one reason or another you won't see. Well isn't that nice--since we now have pixellated nudes selling Virgin cellular phones, it nice to know that there are advertisers with some vestigal conscience left.
Do the clicky thing to see it.
First post of the new blogger site. Some people say to write about what you know. Since I don't know much, the content here may be rather sparse for a time while I get the hang of theis whole blog experience. Be a little patient with me, I'm new. I'm going to try to post my first link next. Its hard to tyoe when your fingers are crossed.
