Category: General Discussion

No time for blogging today but make sure to welcome ERV, on of my favorite bloggers, to the network.

Welcome ERV!

Dear Mr. Steenland,
I would contact you using more conventional means, but getting through to even a minor lackey at your company is next to impossible. Thank you in advance for reading this.

I hate your company. They are perhaps the most difficult company I have ever dealt with as a consumer, and I won’t be sorry to see them go, although I doubt it will change anything.

Let me give you a little background.

In December, my in-laws planned a family trip for their 50th anniversary. I’ll spare you some of the details, but let me give you the basics—an elderly couple, and two young couples with children show up early for their flight to meet the cruise ship. Airplane breaks, new airplane is called in, with time to spare to meet ship. Once on new plane, NW realizes that the cabin crew has “timed out” and we need a new one. They finally arrive, and then NW realizes that flight crew has timed out. After waiting for new flight crew, we get in line for de-icing. We arrive in San Juan just in time to see our boat leave without us. Northwest’s response was as expected—horrible. They did try to put us up in a hotel, but it didn’t accept kids, so we couldn’t stay there. There are more details, but I’ll spare you. The level of incompetence to allow such a thing to happen is hard to fathom. If I sent a patient to surgery, and after getting on the table, the nurses found they were off the clock, and then after finding new ones, the surgeons had to leave, until the surgery was finally postponed…well, you can follow the analogy.

So, my wife and I decided to take a vacation alone together—no children. Just before we were to leave, my daughter got a terribly contagious respiratory illness and was hospitalized. I called Northwest and I was informed that we cannot have a refund. I tried to explain that given our situation and the amount of planning for work and child care, we are unlikely to be able to use the tickets in the next year. I was passed to a supervisor twice, and chided like a child for being annoyed that I was asked to listen to the same script multiple times. I was given the direct number for customer care, which isn’t accepting calls. I was told I have to email, and when the supervisor gave me the email address, it started with “www.”. When I explained that that is a web address, not an email address, she discontinued the conversation with this angry doctor-blogger.

Clearly, Northwest doesn’t care a bit about their customers. I’m shocked, shocked to find a large American company only cares about taking customers’ money, and not about pleasing and retaining them. Shocked.

I would appreciate, but of couse do not expect, a response.

Sincerely, but angrily,

Peter A. Lipson, M.D.

P.S. Please buy something nice with my 2000 bucks. I hope it looks good on you.

We’re heading home from the hospital soon.We’ve gone from, “Daddy, I don’t want to cough anymore…it’s too boring,” to, “Daddy, do pirates have convertibles?”

But infectious diseases have lots of consequences. I’m starting to get a tickle in my throat and a bit of a cough. I have asthma, and this could really set it off. My father has a type of immunity problem, so he can’t come around her for a while.

My wife and I planned our first vacation alone together since we were married. Unfortunately, that vacation starts at the end of the week. The kiddo can’t stay with my folks while she’s shedding RSV, so I guess we’ll enjoy springtime in the Midwest.

But at least I have my curious, funny, adorable daughter back.

BTW, thanks for all the kind comments. While I don’t believe anyone’s prayers will help my kid, it helps me to know that folks care. Damn, I guess I’m an evil atheist who hates children and puppies (but likes veal).

Yesterday my daughter (the one in my picture, but older now) started sneezing—a lot. Allergy season in this part of the country is brutal. We keep a box of kleenex on every flat surface in the house. But this morning she started coughing, and had a low-grade fever, so we knew she was sick, not just allergic. My wife stayed home with her while I represented us at our family’s Passover Seder. When I got home, she was still coughing—a lot. I grabbed a stethoscope and listened to her chest. It wasn’t perfectly clear, but she was coughing and crying so it was hard to hear (also, I’m not a pediatrician). I stepped back for a minute and looked at her. She was miserable. She was using her neck and chest muscles to help her breathe, and her stomach was moving in and out in what’s called a paradoxical pattern. She was clearly not doing well. We grabbed a few things and jumped in the car, heading for my hospital.

When we got there, she was really struggling. Thankfully, lots of people I knew were working, and we got plugged in pretty fast. After a breathing treatment, she was a little more cheerful, but still breathing about 40 times per minute.

Any parent knows what it’s like to see your child ill. When I look at her as a patient, I can see how sick she really is, but I try to keep a calm demeanor for her and for my wife—inside I’m screaming, tearing at my clothing, shaking. Her oxygen saturation is in the high 80s to low 90s, but she’s improved since we came in. My wife sends me home to get some rest (like hell!), and the plan is for me to pick them both up in the morning when I come in to round—assuming the little one is well enough.

I feel horrible leaving them there without me, but one of my residents is taking care of them and I know he’ll call me if anything is going on. Still, it’s laughable to think I can just come home and sleep.

It turns out she has respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a nasty little respiratory virus that makes little ones miserable. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for this one. We’re stuck with chance, and I don’t like chance very much tonight. In fact, I don’t like anything very much tonight except my daughter and her big, brown eyes that shine when she laughs, which is most of the time. When she coughs so hard that she can’t speak, I want to vomit.

But instead, I’m sitting at home next to the phone, typing, and hoping and waiting.

Addendum:
So, as soon as I settled in at home, I got called back to the hospital. She’s doing a little better, but not well enough to go home. More later.

More under the fold—>
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It’s all the buzz around here, so it’s my turn to share some interesting verse with you. Death and dying is a common topic of discussion with my patients and colleagues.

Some of these are well-known to all, some of them aren’t, but I enjoy all of them.
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Bloggers are an odd bunch. Some are “serious journalists”, some glorified editorialists, but most are just folks with access to a computer. This was the genesis of the blogosphere—individuals writing whatever they wanted, not knowing (but hoping) that maybe a few others might read their work.

As it turns out, there are some excellent writers out there that we might never have read were it not for the internet. But most still maintain an independence of spirit and of thought. Yes, there are “corporate” bloggers out there. For instance, one of the local hospitals has an internal blog by some corporate type. It’s very different from the blogs most of us are used to reading. It’s, um, very positive. And commenting requires entry of an employee ID number. It’s not exactly designed for the free flow of ideas.

But most of the blogosphere isn’t designed for anything. It’s an emergent phenomenon, fueled by individuality.

If your purpose as a writer is to influence large numbers of people, blogging probably isn’t your best choice. Op-ed columns, books, almost any medium gets a larger readership.

And since bloggers are individuals, beholden to no one, they have no duties as such. They can write whatever they wish.

Rarely, a blogger is read nearly as widely as a journalist, and PZ Myers is one of the few. Dr. Myers is a professor, and teaches at a University. In this capacity, his duties to transmit information are a bit more clear, and he has made it known on many occasions that his classroom is not a bully pulpit for atheism.

A biologist can use the classroom to teach biology, but as a blogger, he can deliver any message he wishes.

In my work, I have to frame messages in a certain way. I am communicating to individual patients, and I need to persuade them on the most intimate level that what I am telling them is the course they should follow. If they are futzing around with altie remedies, I can’t be overtly dismissive, or I’ll lose them immediately.

But in delivering a message to a somewhat larger audience, I use a different tone, one of compassionate snarkiness, for example. I do this not only because it suits me, but because I feel that on some level it is effective.

Scientists always have a duty to deliver the truth about their fields. The tone in which it is delivered depends greatly upon the medium and the audience. But most of all, it depends on the writer. Most bloggers of science have a fierce attachment to the truth which cannot be compromised for any reason, and if it happens to piss people off, so be it.

I’m sure that a creationist student in a biology class might be uncomfortable, but since it is a classroom, they must learn the material to succeed. Our readers have no such obligation. Therefore, we have no obligation to kiss anyone’s tukhes.

Science is the investigation of reality. Reality is, by definition, everything. It is all we can see, all we can measure. It is, for all practical purposes, a god; it is omnipresent, omnipotent. The only tool that successfully measures and describes reality is science (including mathematics).

So why the desire to placate theologians and theocrats in scientific discussions? What can religion offer the exploration of reality?

The only thing it has to offer is a potentially consistent moral code; and that isn’t unique to religion. Religion can offer beauty, song, art, poetry, fellowship, but it cannot offer insight into physical reality. Those who say it can are either deceiving themselves, or deceiving others.

That isn’t to say religion is inherently at odds with science. Human beings are very capable of simultaneously holding mutually contradictory thoughts—it is indeed possible to be a religious scientist, but not if the carefully constructed wall between these magisteria falls. As soon as religious thought starts to influence scientific investigation (outside, perhaps, the realm of ethics), science is destroyed.

There is no way to “deal” with Creationism and other cults; there is no way to make the message of science more palatable to them. They don’t buy it. Telling them that six days could mean 3 billion years or that God isn’t susceptible to empiric investigation is lying to them and lying to ourselves. Anything humans can conceive of is open to scientific investigation, including God. Nothing is “outside science”. Some Creationists are susceptible to deprogramming—and that is the “wedge” for rational people to exploit.

Sure, we should be polite to people of (almost) all beliefs. Politeness does not include allowing them to destroy our school cirricula, compromise science, or change our secular Constitution.

God will not educate our children, cure disease, or fuel our society. It’s all up to us, and making nice with those who vehemently believe otherwise will only slow progress.

Scientists shouldn’t look to God for answers; God should look to science for answers.

It means nothing to those who have lost someone. One is the only number that matters. The one brother my friend lost. The one son my patient lost. The one child a nameless Iraqi mother lost.

People say they find solace in God. Bullshit. People say they find solace in heroism and valor. Bull-fucking-shit. Those left behind are still devastated. Lives are left unfinished. Valor could have taken place on a street corner or in a factory.

I’m not going to make friends with this post. I don’t know the answers. I don’t even know if we should be leaving Iraq soon. What I do know is that puppet-masters in Washington committed an unforgivable sin. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and acted on their arrogant ignorance sending kids to kill and die and break. There was ignorance, there was deception. There will be undeserved forgiveness given by people looking for a way, any way, to gain meaning from loss.

4000 means nothing. Each 1 means something. The larger the number, the harder it is for someone to understand, a face lost in a crowd. Each person has a name, and whether it’s carved into a tombstone or scribbled onto a waiting list at a VA clinic, someone knows that person, someone is left behind. The ripples spread from each broken body and broken mind.

I’m forgiving no one, for the dead, the living, the broken, the deserted, for the fact that people will hate me for writing these words.

Wars break people.