Being handicapped with a doggie, pouring rain, and a taxi

Yesterday was a long day.  As I exited a Blacktop cab at 8:00 in the morning my shoes got soaking wet from the pouring rain.  All day I had no shoes or socks.  I was barefoot and cold. When I have to wait I usually read but I forgot my glasses at home so the day went very slowly.  The good thing was that I had an extra pair of Depends.

I had to wait until 4:00 at which time I phoned for a Blacktop cab with a lift to pick me and Missey from Boundary and Lougheed so that we can get home.  It was pouring rain again.  The dispatcher ;said a cab would be there shortly.  I waited twenty minutes and I knew it would not be coming shortly as the cab would have called my cell saying it was in the neighbourhood.  The lady at the professional building said she would talk to Blacktop as my fear that no cab would arrive was unfounded. 

So from thereon she tried every twenty to thirty minutes to call Blacktop as to the ETA and was told that I was on the high priority list.  It turned out that I was on the high priority list to be avoided.  Finally at 5:00 o'clock the woman was told that Blacktop only had two vans and both were in downtown Vancouver. Not true. Blacktop has at least 27 vans.  Finally at 6:30 my cell phone rings and it was a Blacktop cabbie responding to my 4:00 o'clock call. He had just dropped off a fare on Hastings and Boundary and saw my call on his display.  The dispatcher was lying as no cab was ever on its way.
    
This whole thing flashed back to 2011 when I tried to get a cab for myself and the doggies at the Delta Hotel downtown Vancouver.  It was pouring rain.  Two cabs refused to take us as two passengers were doggies.  Finally, what seemed like hours a cab came who was willing to take us to 41st and Cambie. Again the weather was pouring rain and I soaking wet. 

On top of the $30.00 fare I had to pay $15.00 for Missey.  A handicapped person in a wheelchair that required a van would have not be charged $15.00 and he would have been more work than a doggie who just laid on the floor of the van. I got very bad service from Blacktop which was witnessed because I was handicapped with a doggie. 

I still haven't unpacked Randy's belongings from George Pearson Centre  as I know there will be a flood of emotion when I touch each item of clothing.  Even getting Randy's stuff from GPC proved to be difficult but that is another segment.It will be seven months since Randy died on April 13 2014 so I will unpack his stuff on November 13, 2014. 

I am still thinking on how to deconstruct the Calder Report: there is so much information to deconstruct.  I still cannot believe VCH doing this.  I cannot understand why the media isn't investigating the report.  Just leaving me by myself with the sharks isn't right.

PS  At around 6:00 pm the receptionist decided to call Yellow cabs who said that a cab would be there in ten minutes.  In a panic I said to her not to do that as no cab would come because the cabs companies are hooked up to a common computer and then no one would come if a caller called multiple cabs and I would be blacklisted.  She didn't believe me.  The ten minutes came and went and no yellow cab.  Searching Black Top cabs on the internet there was a rant about Black Top and Yellow Cab doing this.  Cabs should be designated emergency vehicles if the customer says so or the points of pickup or departure are at a hospital which in this case it was: an animal hospital.

The Most Dangerous Person in the State

To Hyfeland, it was not up to the doctor to decide whether the patient was "happy or unhappy, worthwhile or not." Should the doctor make these decisions, "the consequences would be unforeseeable and the doctor could well become the most dangerous person in the state."

Rationing of care based on quality of life as decided by the doctors is happening now in our hospitals. They rationed Randy's care to hasten his death. .They won't even let me see him until I got a supreme court order so I could watch him die.

According to the internet Euthanasia is illegal in China and Russia (abortions are legal).

Where is Mary Turner.  Is she alive, is she dead, is she in Alberta.  I am thinking of going  to  the police and report her missing.  They would have to locate her and determine if I the person who saved her life would like to see me.  I think so.


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Maggie Karner Connecticut Fund

This post is to counter Britanny Magnard's Fund found on the internet and You Tube.  It is a statement of a young woman, Maggie Karner, from Connecticut, who wants to fight for every moment of her life.  She should get equal billing.

  So the 10 million of you who have seen Britanny's web site/You Tube video should also see Maggie Karner's.  Even the letter Maggie drafted out you can partially see it, in her words. The family being together at the end of life which is what every person who dies wants.  Maggie's father wants his family to be cohesive and loving and the extra time allotted to forgive and get to know each other again..The pain of the body is nothing. 

We live in a ghastly world why can't we be allowed a Norman Rockwell death. 

By allowing the elderly and the chronic to live it creates work (taxes) paid by employees and for medical supplies so what is the rush to hasten their deaths.This is a viable industry. Soon we will not have a medical industry like the manufacturing industry which is destroying North America. I do not think we can outsource near dead bodies.

More money is paid on lotteries than is paid for the care of the elderly and those in chronic care. What cost is three more months of life.

To see Maggie Karner's video connect with Euthanasia Prevention Coalition International News and Information.and listen to Maggie's letter to Brittany October 30 2014.  It would be something if these women would join forces for life.  info@epcc.ca, 1-877-439-3348 Alexander Schadenberg

Family Institute of Connecticut, 77 Buckington Street, Hartford, Ct./ 1-800-548-006

Margaret  Dore, Choice is an Illusion: 10001 4th Avenue #44 Seatle Washington 98154 1-206,223,1922

Ron Panzer, Hospice Patients Alliance, 4680 Shank Street, NE, Rockford, MI 49341, 616-866-9127

Compassion and Choices and its affiliates have spend millions of dollars on convincing Americans that they have a right to die even convincing state governments to allow death for those who are not productive (DNRs)..They have made a multimillion dollar industry for themselves (a make work project killing people)  .Biomedics is unethical.  It is another word for cost accounting. Sick people are not $commodities. Scarcity of medical resources can/has been created to allow rationing of care which in turn forces sleath euthanasia.

 Maggie Karner now has a YouTube video: A letter to Brittany Maynard.


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25 October 2014

I attended an all candidates meeting this afternoon.  I discovered the CEDAR civic party and I would ask that you vote for them.  During the years I contacted all the other political parties to help me with my banning from Vancouver Coastal Health.  I never heard anything from them.  I suggested to CEDAR that the city could use moral suasion to ensure that no one gets banned from a facility in Vancouver unless there is a court order.  One of the candidates said he was a lawyer and that he had a client that was banned and he understood the problem.  I told him that banninig isn't just for one or two individuals; it was a serious problem which is not documented.  The only way not to be banned is to show up only at Christmas for ten minutes and also make sure your first language is not English. 

I read the platform for the CEDAR civic party and I would vote for it and so should you. There is no other alternative except to vote for the candidates that are independent.

Some light news....

CNN Opinion dated October 14 2014 The danger of assisted suicide laws by Marilyn Golden


"At less than $300, assisted suicide is, to put it bluntly, the cheapest treatment for a terminal illness."

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Will Euthanasia become normalized or are we already there.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Margaret Somerville: Should Canada permit assisted suicide.

This article was published by the Globe and Mail on October 15, 2015 as one of two articles comprising a debate between Margaret Somerville and Arthur Schafer.

Assisted suicide leads to normalization of euthanasia, harms the vulnerable and degrades our respect for the value of human life.

Margaret Somerville

By Margaret Somerville:

Euthanasia and assisted suicide go beyond personal ethics to involve social ethics. Advocates frequently resort to a personal story, often that of a suffering relative, to explain their stance. They avoid asking the question, “What does it say about a society that deals with the big problems of human existence by legalizing the ‘quick fix’ of inflicting death?” Such a society is abandoning the great philosophic traditions of Western civilization. Everything now depends only on majority opinion and technological capacity.

Moreover, euthanasia differentially implicates the most vulnerable members of a society. We can’t judge the ethical tone of a society by how it treats its strongest, most privileged, most powerful members, but by how it treats its weakest, most vulnerable and most in need.

The strongest case for legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide is at the level of the individual person, such as Sue Rodriguez or Dr. Donald Low, whose heartbreaking pleas for euthanasia rightly move us.

But we must also consider where such legalization would lead and what its impact would be on other people, the institutions of law and medicine, and the foundational values of society. And we must take into account, not just its impact in the present, but also in the future. Ask yourself: “How do you not want your great-great grandchildren to die?” As current reports from the Netherlands and Belgium, where euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, show, euthanasia will be normalized and we will see an exponential increase in its use in ever broadening circumstances. That is, slippery slopes are unavoidable.

Initially, claims are made that euthanasia will be used only in rare cases on competent, consenting, dying adults who are in unrelievable pain and suffering. But these requirements don’t last. In the Netherlands, at least 4 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia and in Belgium on average there are five cases a day. It’s not rare. Children with disabilities can be euthanized (with their consent) as can those who are mentally, but not physically, ill or who wish to avoid future suffering. Belgium is currently debating euthanasia for people with Alzheimer’s Disease. Euthanasia is now so normalized only extreme cases make the media, such as two very recent ones, a prisoner who received euthanasia for unbearable suffering caused by imprisonment and an old lady who chose euthanasia instead of a nursing home, which she dreaded.

People are afraid to accept palliative care or necessary pain management because they fear euthanasia. We must be able to reassure them that we will kill their pain, but never intentionally kill them and we can’t do that if euthanasia or assisted suicide are legalized.

Seeing death as an appropriate response to suffering raises serious problems with respect to suicide prevention in general. It establishes suicide as an appropriate response to suffering. And society’s agreement to help elderly and vulnerable persons to kill themselves or to allow physicians to kill them sends a powerful message that their lives are not worth living. State-sanctioned suicide and euthanasia ask not that we attempt to preserve life -- the normal role of medicine and the state -- but that we accept and act communally upon a person’s judgment that his or her life is unworthy of continuance and become complicit in ending it.

And legalized euthanasia is abused. Just as we don’t report driving through a red light, doctors and nurses acting outside the law don’t report those cases. Abuse of old people with euthanasia is especially likely and should be seen as a major public-health threat. The combination of an ageing population, scarce healthcare resources and euthanasia is a lethal cocktail.

Confusion is used to promote public acceptance of euthanasia: Concealing language such as the euphemism “medical aid in dying.” An Ipsos marketing survey showed 60 per cent of 1000 Quebecers did not understand that this phrase meant a lethal injection and 40 per cent of just over 2000 Canadians did not comprehend that euthanasia meant that. Similarly, the “no difference” argument that assisted suicide is only an incremental extension of rights to refuse treatment that result in death promotes euthanasia through confusion. There is a radical difference between allowing a natural death to occur and killing a person.

This debate involves a clash of the values of respect for life and respect for individual autonomy. Anti-euthanasia advocates give priority to respect for life, pro-euthanasia to respect for individual autonomy.

But all societies in which reasonable people would want to live need to uphold respect for both each individual human life and for human life in general. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms affirms this for Canada. And legalizing euthanasia would harm the ability of medicine and law to carry the value of respect for life, as they must do for a secular society.

Just as we now realize our actions could destroy our physical ecosystem and we must hold it in trust for future generations, we must also hold our metaphysical ecosystem — the collection of values, principles, beliefs, attitudes, shared stories, and so on that bind us together as a society —likewise, in trust for them. That requires that we reject euthanasia, but always react to pain and suffering with deep compassion and assistance to relieve it -- that we kill the pain and suffering, not the person with the pain and suffering. That requires that everyone who needs it receives good palliative care. At present at least 70 percent of such Canadians have no access, which is appalling and a serious breach of ethics.

Might, however, the strongest argument against euthanasia relate not to death, but to life? That argument is that normalizing euthanasia would destroy a sense of the unfathomable mystery of life and seriously damage our universal “human spirit,” especially our capacity to find meaning in life, that which makes life worth living.

To legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia is not an incremental change. It’s a seismic and radical change in one of the most important values on which our society and civilization is founded, respect for human life and its protection. We must employ our ethical imaginations to appreciate that and act accordingly.

Margaret Somerville is the founding Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University and professor in faculties of Law and Medicine

Posted by Alex Schadenberg at 10:36 AM  
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Ebola, Ebola, Ebola, the tragedy of Ebola

The tragedy of Ebola in Texas is to my believe which I verily believe to be true is that the health care professionals and customs officials are so lazy that they do not read the newspaper or listen to the news. 

I was always amazed when I asked a question of a health care professional at George Pearson Centre and/orVancouver General Hospital how unknowing and arrogrant they were.  "I don't read the newspapers, I do not care what is going on, and what did Tanu say ... she doesn't have to worry as she is public servant and nothing will ever happen to her."

Each day all health care professionals and entry customs people in every country should be forced to do a touchscreen multiple choice test before they are even allowed on hospital or airport property.
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