Friday, October 02, 2015

Scattershooting old folks' homes

Posting schedule remains light through the weekend as we shop assisted living facilities for Mom.  Funnies are being gathered for Sunday as always.  A few headlines...

-- Scary Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is scaring conservaDems.  They're throwing around big numbers, and not of the fundraising kind.  Robert Reich takes the frightened children to school (they may not learn, however).  My problem is that Sanders is not thinking big enough, personally.  Now how scary would that be?

Why in the wide world of sports are Americans so paranoid?

-- Another community college school shooting.  Another mildly irritated president saying something about it.  Another day in America.  There will be another shooting next week, a couple more before the end of the year.  Everybody's reaction outside the circle of families and friends of those killed will be the same.

-- Another blog bites the dust.  I remember that Tom DeLay conference call with Amanda and Pandagon and the rest of the then-thriving Texblogosphere.  Alas, most people would rather troll Twitter or bloviate on Facebook.  There's just a few of us left now, and many of those are are only good for a once-a-week posting.  I can still recall dreaming that we were going to change the world.  The world changed all right, just not in the direction I was intending.

-- The world's largest pharmaceutical companies don't need $13 pills to increase to $750 overnight in order to pay for research and development of new, more effective, life-saving medication.  They need it for their CEO's bonuses, of course, but they also need those millions to pay for lobbyists in Congress to keep things that way.  They actually spend seven times as much on lobbying as they do on political contributions.

Maybe we have a problem that a pill can't cure.

-- Set some time aside to read the story of Demetri Kofinas, who developed a brain tumor that slowly robbed him of every memory he had, and which all came flooding back to him -- sometimes out of order -- after successful brain surgery.

4 comments:

Gadfly said...

Condolences and best wishes with the "shopping." We had to do an intervention, 11-12 years ago, with my mom, after we found out she had first been kind of rooked by an HVAC guy, then, more seriously, that her house was 6 months delinquent and about to go on sheriff's sale. The week we were planning to see her, she then was driving the wrong way on a divided boulevard, and it wasn't an accident like you or I would make on the wrong way on a one-way.

It was the early stages of non-alzheimer's dementia.

A silver lining of sorts. She eventually became *less* depressed with a bit more memory loss. And, after my sis, with power of atty (she eventually moved to sis's city) stopped the wingnut credit card offers and such (I'm glad mom is dead in that she'd be full on Tea Party today), her occasional paranoaic thinking (Art Bell, HAARP, etc.) also went away.

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Dad? No dementia. Just smoked himself to death. I can tell you personally that COPD is a pretty ugly way to go.

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Pandagon, et al? Makes me wish I had started blogging 6-12 months earlier, and been doing it heavier by 2004 Dem races, to already get more publicity as anti-war, promoting Greens, etc. Timing, eh?

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Wingers want an enemy. It's part of the narrative. Unfortunately, it is for the New New Left, too.

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Thinking bigger? I'd love for Bernie to call for an NHS and nationalize the entire health system.

PDiddie said...

Mom's doing quite well. Still argues with the IRS over her quarterly taxes. But most all the neighbors have passed; there's none of them she knows now well enough to look in on her occasionally, and she's feeling a little lonely. So this is just preliminary. She may choose one in Beaumont, closer to her remaining friends, or choose to stay at home awhile longer.

What you describe is pretty much what we went through with Dad, though.

Gadfly said...

Sure ... and she may need a light level of assistance, no more. My mom spent much of her time in a place that offered multiple levels of care at one facility, in different wings.

PDiddie said...

It's called "independent" living and it's less expensive than "assisted" living, in case anyone was wondering. (I also know more about this topic than I wish I did.)