Callous behavior towards customers & no common sense by Veterinarians in two states

It's bad enough that medical care in the US is so expensive that people regularly go bankrupt and lose their homes to predatory collection policies at for-profit hospitals. But now private equity firms have begun buying up vet practices - and why? They see easy profits - vet care costs have increased 60% since 2014 according to PBS (see link at the bottom) which beats the heck out of inflation.

This month I am aware of two - not one but TWO - people of limited means, living only on social security and insured by Medicaid being taken advantage of by veterinarians perhaps from avarice, or by rigid adherence to the idea of always doing all the procedures you can just in case. (An affliction human medicine also suffers from....) Some sensitivity to people's financial situation should be a factor as well. If they can't afford it, what alternative approach might be presented?

One person's 16 year old cat had stopped eating and cried constantly in pain. The vet did several thousand dollars of x-rays and blood tests ON AN ELDERLY CAT THAT WAS CLEARLY SUFFERING whose owner was on Medicaid. Instead of advising that a clearly suffering 16 year old cat that stops eating for three days, is telling you something about their will to live -- that the kindest thing is to do, is the really the hard thing -  to stay with her and hold her in your arms while she is medicated across the rainbow bridge, and have the last sight and sound she experiences be her beloved care-er, comforting her with pets and soft words.

And this literally poor pet owner leaves her crying kitty in the vets care,  goes home and her pet dies all alone at the vets.  The next day she is called in, not to pick up her kitty - but to pay a $2,175 bill. This fragile elderly person on Medicaid...  

NO COMMON SENSE. NONE.  

For the other person, the vet is still pushing dental cleaning, dental xrays, dental work, more blood work & kidney tests on a 16 year old cat who is already on palliative care and is comfortable - a cat that is eating, sleeping,  peeing and pooping, going out and laying in the sun on the porch, laying in her dads lap - still enjoying life. But of course who doesn't want to spend more time in the hospital being stabbed and probed, far away from your human, and the house and yard you have always known and loved - just in case they can find something more expensive to treat and bill your income poor human being for??  NO COMMON SENSE.  While she is enjoying her life -- LET HER LIVE IT. 

Allegedly it's all the interests of your pet. But wouldn't you know - many local vet practices have been bought up by giant corporations whose policies and procedures are not to do the kindest thing in the end - but to make you pay them every last cent they can possibly bill you for....

PBS on private equity buying vet practices

The Terrible Mistake

The Terrible Mistake

On the Seventh Day, 

when the Almighty should have been napping,

He paced the glassy surface of new poured sea 

wringing his sculptor's hands in celestial anxiety.
A nagging tug, a vexing doubt about creation, 

something about creation -something obvious 

and overlooked. a single lively thread, woven
in his own image in a split second of pride. 

One thread, twisting in the solar winds
unraveling slowly down the eons....

April 2016 Poem a Day #23 Sole Entanglements

For this prompt (to write a poem about footware) I am posting a poem I wrote many (MANY) years ago - because it is my definitive footware poem.

Sole Entanglements

Old shoelaces unravel
unruly as love
as likely to trip you.
Untied, each lace dances
frayed and flaccid
reluctant to knot again.
.
Velcro closures lock
and cling too willing to grip
but Velcro can't let go
There's rip and uproar
when suddenly undone.
.
Old loafers are the best.
So easy to slip
in or out of at a
moment's whim, they
shelter your pennies
never ask for socks.

April 2016 Poem A Day #19 Heaven and Hell explained

Heaven and Hell explained

Considering the sea, it may be, life and time
must brew themselves in boiling brine
near some star 'splosion or volcanic vent
Melt the immobile start the drip
set off the ticking universe
for a hot, rotational trip.
But for timeless or eternal
an absolute zero temperature is best.
As any motion
would be a timeline,
cancel out eternal rest.

Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

Although I've always thought of Marge Piercy, the author of Woman on the Edge of Time,  as a poet -  she is also a novelist.  This particular book is an odd and interesting novel which came out in 1976, one of a half dozen novels she wrote. According to Wikipedia it's "considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic."  (I picked this up this classic at Newtown's annual blow-out used book sale. It's a great sale!)

Woman on the Edge of Time is sort of a sci-fi tapestry woven with intricate anthropological/futurist twists, inner-landscape psychological-chatmeup, environmental philosophy and humanity.  It's not a quick read but I liked the heroine Consuelo, and felt compelled to keep reading.

Much of the plot occurs in some bleak present time in an insane asylum where regard for human rights is not in evidence and the abuse of the powerless by those with sometimes only a crumb more power, is rampant.  The other half  unfolds in fits and starts in a egalitarian argraian New England village in the far future where men and women are equals and balance in all things is important.

And it is a book that requires thinking as some aspects of the plot are not particularly obvious until you ponder them in retrospect. It's ending was not was I supposed.

And in the end it's hard to tell what really happened.  Did Consuelo save the future with her violent eposode in the present?  Was she railroaded by the power structure of patriarchy or was she really crazy?  I was also left wondering if Piercy meant to say that the end justifies the means.  Was it the 60s declaring war on what came before and perhaps what came after?

 Each reader must decide for themselves.
Woman on the Edige of Time at Google Books
Woman on the Edge of Time - Wikipedia
Woman on the Edge of Time - Amazon

Do you drive with a phone in your hand? STOP IT!

I was followed today by a large man in LARGE silver Ford Truck - the kind that sits way up high - a 150 or something like that. And he had a phone in his right hand and was clearly thumb typing as he drove. Frankly I was terrified. I have twice been rear-ended - once by  a huge red pickup and once by a guy hurtling along around 40mph in a magenta jeep, while talking on his phone. IF you drive with a phone in hand ask yourself - is this message so important that it's worth a life? OR worth a life of pain for someone ELSE, after getting serious neck injury when you hit them????  Or worth a huge lawsuit and losing your license?   Frankly there is NO MESSAGE THAT IS THAT IMPORTANT. So put down your damn phone and drive.

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems

Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker

The argument takes a surprising turn

This seems very French to me. It's all digital and I think that most people will not like it, as it is not very realistic. It depicts the inner not the outer color of this fictional event. One crazy frilly oddball is getting ready to shoot another crazy frilly oddball. Go figure.

Oil Pastel: Overwhelmed

For some of us, holidays feel a lot like this sketch — we sit quietly while other folks race around acting crazy, trying to match some past holiday ideal. It's done in oil pastel on a 5 by 7 inch index card. (low buget materials.) For me, this year was a relatively good holiday, less stress. Today is work day though, with more than enough stress for everyone.