Comments - failing the captcha

I can't prove I'm not a robot!

I just tried to add a comment to a post without logging in - I failed the visual captcha a bunch of times and I failed the audio captcha a bunch of times too - do they want Friday or friday, for or four, ...  Anyhow, if you are trying to comment, thanks, ...So far no one has succeeded.

Prescription Solutions

My health insurer encourages me to use online services and order a 90 day supply of medication. I like that too. They remind me by phone/snail/and email when I'm running out. I don't like that so much. When the doctor's office faxes, the insurer bills me by mail, and then I have to phone to charge to my credit card. Because the doctor isn't authorized to charge to my credit card (I guess that's OK) and the online system has no provision for defaulting to charge to the card on file. So there is this nifty electronic system that requires me to take an extra step and either snail a check or phone.

Last week the insurer held up a delivery.  I phoned to ask why, had the hold cleared up, asked that my file be annotated to always charge to the credit card on file. 

The prescription then came very quickly.  And the package included seven single sided photocopied pages of caveats. 

And an invoice, unpaid.

Hope

Hope is the subjunctive and thus speaks to “irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred (Wikipedia)”; or “desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain with God's help (FreeDictionary).”  Hope is fantasy, delusion, avoidance, procrastination, ...

The remarks I never gave

I am here to bookend two decades of Rama Khalsa's support for people who experience moods swings, fear, voices and visions.  20 years ago she hired the county's first consumer specialist and made sure two dozen of us were able to attend a national alternatives conference in Berkeley. That led to the founding of the Mental Health Client Action Network. And last year Rama made sure Santa Cruz applied for a federal transformation grant which has created Second Story, our voluntary short-stay house run by and for people with lived experience of psychiatric disability.

Rama Khalsa met the challenge of holding to a vision of health while walking the political middle way. She was an early adopter of health technology - The Santa Cruz Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) is the longest running successful Health Information Exchange (HIE) in the United States. In addition to electronic networks, she was in charge during the construction of Building K, El Dorado Center, and now a Psychiatric Facility. Rama leaves us a legacy of both bytes and buildings It's a privilege to share a few of her many gifts to our county. 

 

Thank you, Rama

About dementia

I have a theory about dementia - start with the left and right brain injury studies, how people make up different stories from the same input with the different sides of the brain. Then add very slight losses of vision and hearing. Something doesn't 'look right' and the mind quickly compensates, instead of investigating makes a story. The stories begin to trump 'common sense' and the mind likes them, saves them for the next confusion. That orientation gets embedded. Think about the overly suspicious, transmitters embedded in their teeth, merchants always cheating them, ... The neutral investigative option has been lost.

So early losses of peripheral vision, tinnitus, dulling of touch and taste and balance create confusion with explanation, the mind creates and keeps an explanation, and dementia develops as the story is expanded and the compensating physiology fails.

 

If the chosen story is questioned, the person might become irritable; if the chosen story fails to meet the situation, the person might become impatient.  Because it is too contradictory and so very uncomfortable to hold in one's thoughts a story that doesn't conform to what the senses are saying and it's easier to ignore the senses than change the story.

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A few weeks later, NYT is reporting this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/health/aging-of-eyes-is-blamed-in-circadian-rhythm-disturbances.html?_r=1

After Graeber

I'm reading David Graeber's Debt.  I wonder if part of the Axial Age convergences were also the result of human brain development, evolving physiological consciousness as well as general literacy, needs sufficiently met, minds sufficiently sophisticated to begin to ponder abstractions, spirit, exchange, morality, obligation, and to codify both market and moral rules for governing and for religion.

To my medical specialists

I'm working very hard at closure, winding down, … evaluating how best to spend my assets – time and money. I'd like to deteriorate and die in peace, gradually withdrawing interventions and maintenance. It feels very wearying and disrespectful to have others wanting for me what I do not want for myself.