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Unpopular Ideas

Ramblings and Digressions from out of left field, and beyond....

Name:
Location: Piedmont of Virginia, United States

All human history, and just about everything else as well, consists of a never-ending struggle against ignorance.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Visiting the Hospital

An unusual number of my online friends are having medical urgencies these days, while maybe the most pressing question of the day is how people are to pay for all the highly improved and also expensive services that are available.

Andante of Collective Sigh has been undergoing chemo for several weeks now. Meanwhile Left-Leaning Lady is waiting to hear what her options are on some female troubles she's having, and this morning Guy Andrew H. of Rook's Rant reported to the hospital to get some readings on pains in his gastric area.

I composed but have not yet posted a comment to Rook wishing him well. My delay is caused by feeling too tempted to add saying that 54 years ago, while in the Air Force, I entered the hospital with similar symptoms -- and ended up staying there for two months! But he couldn't possibly be under any sort of threat like that. My experience had to have been in one of the Stone Ages of medicine, compared to now, and anyway my trouble -- an inflammation of the intestine called regional ileitis or enteritis -- is obviously reserved only for the most accomplished citizens. This is shown by the fact that to date, the only person I've ever heard of that also contracted it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he did it in that same long bygone year.

Meanwhile I was greatly impressed by LeftLady's forthrightness in giving a highly detailed account of her situation, which she very helpfully warned us of (and maybe drew us in) in the catchy title of her post, "This Post May Contain Too Much Information about the Female Reproductive System, Menstruation, and My Body."

Her report reminded me of what complex and crucial structures women are fated to carry around with them all their lives, compared to men, so that it seems only right and fair that on average they live longer than men. It also reminded me of how horrible and wrong it is that legislative systems are so packed with a segment of the population that is out of all proportion to their numbers. These guys are clearly lacking both in intelligence and in common decency as compared to, in this case, women, yet they are allowed to have all the say in how the law looks at how women should manage human reproduction. To add insult to injury, regardless of all the artificial efforts to get them more involved, men play a relatively minor role in the reproductive process. This is true not only in the carrying and the birth of a child but also in nurturing it through at least the next 18 years, and sometimes also in the grandmother years, when women had hopes to spend their days in more carefree pursuits, like traveling.

Congenitally bad legislatures are one of the main reasons why the affairs of the human animal are so badly out of whack, but that's what you get when they consist mainly of groups with more access to weapons of all kinds and a greater propensity to use them.

2 Comments:

Blogger LeftLeaningLady said...

which she very helpfully warned us of (and maybe drew us in). Too funny. It was a warning, a lot of people are grossed out by that sort of thing.

You are correct, of course, that the Legislators have no clue. That is bad enough, to me, the worst part is that they are all concerned with fetuses and even clumps of cells, or the sick, like Terri Schaivo, but they don't give a damn when a real baby is starving.

Strange, strange world we live in.

9:06 AM  
Blogger Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) said...

Yes, but you didn't really think your post would gross out any of your readers, did you? Otherwise I can't see you posting it or even going to the trouble of writing it at all. I would guess that gross-outs are high on your list of things to avoid at all times. Anyway these days such testimony is part of the normal recitals of the experience of life.

11:51 PM  

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