The Hospital

You wake up in the wee hours of the morning. Carelessly throw on what every clothes are closest. Get in the taxi and head to Manhattan, all the while trying not to think of that upcoming horror. Fill out some forms and get into your paper gown, and you wait. Seven different doctors and interns tell you the same things and ask the same questions seven times. You walk into the operating room. The white and shiny-ness of the whole room almost blinds you as you lay down on the table. It’s freezing in here. They’ll give you a heated blanket, and fuss around you for a minuet getting ready. At my request Kanye West is playing in the background. There having trouble getting a line in to administer the anesthesia to knock me unconscious. They put a mask over my face; ive already requested the injection of anathema and not the mask so they tell me its just oxygen. But I taste the gas. Slowly my world blurs, spins, Kanye's voice slows to an almost inaudible growl, and darkness. I wake up several hours later. In pain. Unable to move or talk. Thirsty. There are doctors all around me still, making sure im alive. Wiggle your toes if you can hear me they say. And I do. Im rolling rolling. Elevator. Rolling. This was three weeks ago.

I hate the hospital. I don’t go there unless I absolutely have to, which actually is quite a lot. Ive got at least 5 doctors, 5 specialists, all working out of hospitals, so even when im not really ill I still have to go to the hospital a lot. 19 hospitalizations in 11 years. It’s hard to write about. Ive tried so very hard to block it all out, but its always haunting my memory. I don’t think I can do this… sorry. 

Sicko

America’s health care system is run completely by the insurance and drug companies, who spend billions buying out members of congress so they can keep robbing and denying deserving Americans the coverage they need. Many have died because they were denied coverage. The government wants us to think that that is they best way to deal with health care, Ask anyone from a nation with socialized healthcare, healthcare for all no matter what is without a doubt the best way to run healthcare. In America if you cant pay you hospital bills you get literally thrown out on the curb, real life heroes, 9/11 rescue workers, volunteers who risked their lives, they get denied health care too. BUT the prisoners at Guantanamo bay have better healthcare available to them than most Americans.

Evidence:

Moore talks to a lot of people who were denied health care and even some people who died (before they were dead of course) and also to a person who’s job it was to get the insurance companies out of paying for health care.

This point is obviously a strong one cause it plays on our sympathy and also shows us gruesome sides to “health care” most people were unaware of.

He also talks about Guantanamo bay, how our nations supposed biggest threats and enemies are getting better health care than most of our citizens.

Personally I think this is such a strong point because it shows just how little out government cares about its people.  

I had heard about this outside of Sicko, that prisoners at Guantanamo bay get better health care than most americans, and it is 100% true. repulsive or not.  http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=25852

like Moore said; out government and out government run media and conglomerate run government, has been lying to the American people for years and years and are now doing the same thing trying to smear Moore's name so people wont take what hes saying seriously, so they can continue lying to us and exploiting us. 

“if you can find money to kill people you can find money to help people…

keeping people hopeless and pessimistic, see I think there are two ways in which people are controlled; first of all frightened people and secondly demoralized. An educated healthy and confident nation is harder to govern, and I think theres an element in the thinking of some people; we don’t want people to be educated healthy and confident because then they would get out of control. The top 1% of the worlds population own 80% of the worlds wealth, I think its incredible that people put up with it, but, there poor there demoralized there frightened so they think perhaps the safest thing to do is take orders and hope for the best”

Tony Benn former member of Parliament 

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

This book is truly something. Paul Farmer, raised without the ideals of the American dream, is one of the very few people in this world and mostly in this country, who truly cares about the world and is actively trying to make it a better place. Here is a man who will risk his life to do justice to a people whose livelihood America completely destroyed.  Farmer doesn’t care about anything but humanity, and helping it in this helter-skelter world.  

I think if you asked Kidder, in an elevator to sum up the book, you’d probably get an earful and end up at a diner drinking coffees and discussing a whole slew of practices of today’s world that are truly horrifying. But here it is not really Kidder who struck my sever intrigue, but Farmer, whom I’d love to sit down and talk with. His interesting and uncommon childhood made him a particularly wonderful man.

“As Farmer was leaving the shelter he heard Joe say to another resident just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, ‘That guys a fuckin’ saint’ it wasn’t the first time that Farmer had heard himself called that, when I asked him his reaction he said…’I don’t care how often people say you’re a saint, its to that I mind it, its that its inaccurate’ this was seemly I thought, resisting the edification. But then he told me’ people call me a saint, and than I think, I have to work harder, because a saint would be a great thing to be.’ I felt a small inner disturbance. It wasn’t that the words seemed immodest, I felt I was in the presence of a different person from the one id been chatting with a moment ago. Someone whose ambitions I hadn't yet begun to fathom.”

I think this book spoke to me so much because it’s exactly the kind of thing I want to do with my life. I want to be a writer, but above that I want to be like Farmer. He had great opportunities in his life and he saw great injustices across the world. He used his privilege to help people of Haiti who are completely un-self-sufficient because of things America did for its greed. He gave people there a second chance and a new life and he did it with great sacrifices on his own part, because he understands that that’s what it takes to make a difference. He didn’t do it for monetary gain; he did it for universal gain, and knowledge and wisdom. I don’t know about being a doctor, and saving people everywhere, but I want to do something like that for the earth. An earth mostly destroyed by America, that we are all part of, and that by poisoning and killing our planet we in affect are doing just that to ourselves. You cant save people in a world that is dying. 

HW 19

Everyone wants to be healthy, weather its most important to you or not. Even if you don’t take great or even good care of your body, it’s a natural human instinct to keep healthy. The dominant social practices around illness and dying in America subdue this instinct into a consumerist coma.

I remember running around the isles in the health food store with my sister as a little kid. And today I take care of my self in even more wholistic ways. My mom is as always a huge fan of homeopathic remedies, herbal teas, vitamins, and sleeps, taught me these ways from the beginning. As I grew older and began to take care of my self I kept that natural health ways I had learned and also expanded on them ever more, with yoga and meditation.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time in hospitals and with doctors, burses, and other sick children, I am very appreciative of medical advances that have been made. With out them I might be alive today and I certainly would not look the way I do. Sometimes science does have the answers. But it will never have them all. In my opinion a wholistic way of being healthy is the best way to stay in touch with the earth, your soul, and the sprit world, and being in touch there is the best way to stay healthy and avoid illness. While antibiotics can cure your cold, emanation and yoga could keep you from ever even getting that cold.  Threes a scientific cure for almost everything, but why would you want to bring your body even further form nature. Well, that’s just not natural!

I am medical-breakthroughs. Everyone diagnosed with an AVM (Arteriole-venous malformation) before or in the same year as me, is dead.  I don’t think ill ever know for sure but maybe it was my wholistic upbringing that saved me, or my contact with the spirit world. Ill never knows, but ill continues to live this way and hope I continue making breakthroughs. Over the years I have watched the treatment methods get better. But science still has no answer for me. Im not saying im a religious person at all, but in my soul I know I will be all right.

About three years ago my grandpa sustained brain damage. The doctors told us if we took him off the feeding tubes he wouldn’t last the week. Everyone knew he didn’t want to live like that, and no one wanted to subject him to that kind of pseudo-life.  We decided to bring him home. Not only did he live the week, he lived for almost two more years. When he got home, he got better. He was able to join us at the dinner table, and even if he could barely remember out names, he could still brighten our days, and we his.

I remember in the weeks before he dies, all he could talk about was going home. His usually mostly incoherent and constant talking began to feature his mother, and lost war comrades. My grandpa slowly began to slip away into the world of the dead, and just like that, he was gone. 

HW 18

This thanksgiving was a hard one for my family. We have had two deaths in the last three years and my uncle just died so no one was really in the thankful celebratory mood. (Besides the idea of thanksgiving sickens me anyway, just be thankful on this one day and than for the rest of the year you can go back to your self absorbed ways. a holiday for the neocolonialist capitalist imperialist motherfuckers. being thankful on this day they invaded a land of prosper stole all of their resources and virgins with advanced weaponry killed them all off put the remaining few on reservations with no options and took claim of their land and distorted it in every way they were against.) But I digress. 

This thanksgiving was a rather odd one for me. Seeing as I am thankful for very little, and seeing as I no longer eat tainted meat, which is the only kind of meat readily available, I don’t really eat meat anymore, so no typical thanksgiving foods for me, although I did enjoy the non meet ones a lot, and I also really enjoyed seeing my not blood family who I haven't seen all together in ages. 

We didn't watch football, we watched comedy. And we laughed and laughed, while admittedly it is still being plugged in to electronics I think its better than watching other people exercise... that turned into the usual discussion of the revolution, and where the hell it is, and how we need to get there. I brought up this class, to much awe and excitement from the crowd, who are probably the reason I, my whole life, have thought teachers should be revolutionary gardeners and not tentacles of the government. 

HW 17

This unit could not be coming at a more ironic time in my life, seeing as I will be missing a lot of it to be in the hospital. I have been hospitalized 16 times in 10 years, so by now I’m used to it. That doesn't mean I don’t hate it however. That doesn't mean I can’t smell the death and taste the fear when I’m in a hospital. It just means I have grown accustomed to those things as a part of my life. I've probably been accustomed to them since the tender age of 6. I think all that time being in the hospital, trying to think about anything else but the present, or looking deep inside your self past your lifetime into your own soul, brings you to a level that most people today couldn't fathom.

I almost died a bunch of times. The first time I was three, I slipped off my floating device and quickly sank to the bottom of the pool. I remember sitting there, on the floor of the deep end, and the overwhelming blue that was surrounding me. I wasn't scared at all, I didn't even really understand what was going on. Soon my mom had leapt into the pool and dragged me out again. December 1, death 0.

But just because I had cheated death, doesn't mean I wasn't keenly aware of it. In-fact from then on, I could always feel death, just steps behind me, seeking me out. But I remained hidden.

Another time, I was probably 10, I woke up bleeding which I had also grown used to. But this morning was different. I opened my mouth and it was like a fire hose in reverse. What was gushing profusely was hot and red. My blood. I swaggered to the bathroom where my memory ended. Years later, when I had gathered enough courage to relive that moment in my head, I found my memory didn't really stop there. It just moved. When I remember that day it all goes up to that moment, and then I pass out from blood loss. My best friend is in the kitchen helping my frantic grandma dial 911. There I am bleeding out ever so quickly, my whole family is gathered around me. The paramedics come, they rush in and clear out the room. How come I can remember all of that so well if I was passed out on the floor? I’ll tell you: because I was watching it. I saw it all happen from above. My soul left my body and it hovered there, and it decided that it had way too many plans to start all over, so it went back.

I think it’s comparable to enlightenment, if it isn't actually enlightenment. And its too damn bad that everyone can’t reach this level. That’s what we need to fix the world.



You can believe me or not. You can think I’m conceited or not. But I know what I lived. I know I’m much more in touch with my soul than most people nowadays are. I know death is looking for me, and I know I will keep outsmarting it till I’m good and ready.