Remembering Our Veterans Who Still Live

                 

                 If you listen to American news, they proudly report that an upswing in available jobs and hiring,  is occurring. "The recession is over !" they hail.   Of course, none of the long term unemployed with whom we are acquainted, have been hired.   They are getting a few more interviews from time to time though. There is another phenomenon we are seeing in Virginia which I find particularly disturbing.  About twice a week or so, I make a run by car to one of two cities within a days drive from here. Consistent with having good situational awareness, there are lot of things I notice on these trips.  I also dress as "the grey woman" so I can come and go quickly, unnoticed, and a lot of people talk to me, and I respond. I learn a lot of things by simply speaking to people in my travels.  There is, a decided uptick in the number of veterans who are panhandling within my state.  There is a veteran from the  Vietnam conflict  panhandling on one corner who has listed his numerous medical diagnoses, on a giant cardboard placard, many of these diagnoses are likely correct, but misspelled. One of them is metastatic bone cancer.  He is standing on the corner, and from the gentle sway, he is obviously in pain. I had seen him and spoken to him several times to make sure that the staggering was pain and not drunkenness, before I gave him money. He is homeless and waiting for some type of disability. to come through  He stays at the mission whenever they are open or they have room.  I accept that there are people out there who won't take help sometimes, and who fall through the cracks in even the best systems. However, I am seeing an increase in the number of veterans in really serious situations who aren't getting what they need, and as an American citizen, I am both embarrassed and  ashamed.  I have done a little research on this, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs claims that there is help, housing, vocational rehabilitation, and medical care for these people.  If this is so, then why would so many veterans of so many different conflicts, and of both sexes, with differing issues not make use of the available help ?  Certainly, the social workers at the missions and homeless shelters have internet access and can help these souls who gave so much to us some direction to such programs, if such programs exist.  Why is this system not working ?   The VA says that homeless veterans are usually of African American or Hispanic ancestry and I don't know how they could even know this, because so many don't wish to be counted.  So many wish to be completely off grid.  The ones I mention in this particular post have all been caucasian.  I don't actually care what their ethnicity is identified as. Someone who served our country and was damaged or injured in the course of doing so, should have our support in both the short and the long term until they once again can take an important role in our mainstream.

                        There is a young woman who is a veteran of one of our recent wars. She has an amputation, and panhandles about one day a week  She has a dog who is protective of her.  She doesn't say much other than she "doesn't have anywhere to go".      I have met a number of fairly able bodied looking former soldiers in the community in the past six months.  Most are trying to adapt, and trying to fit in, even those without continuing medical issues from injuries. Goodwill has provided a job to a few of them.   It is quite difficult for many of them.  Some of them find a willing ear in the preparedness or survivalist communities.  Some of them over time are able to calm themselves enough to begin to piece together a life.  What bothers me is how many of these former soldiers claim that there are no resources allocated to help them reintegrate into their communities.  I know only one who found a job and is doing fairly well there.  Some of them don't trust the systems in which they once worked enough to confide in them to get the help they need. For a few, the Department of Defense has become a secondary untrustworthy enemy.  Many of them know what happened to Brandon Raub and they are acutely aware of NSA gathering of information, of Edward Snowden, and of the progressive erosion of the US Constitution under the Obama regime.

                       Yesterday, as I picked up fruit at a Wal-Mart in a distant town, I noticed a warmly dressed man in a beard in the line in the express line in back of me.  He had a bottled water and an inexpensive compilation video of an action series. "Sir, why don't you go ahead of me ?" I asked.   He looked surprised, but he silently went ahead and thanked me.  I commented that the compilation for five dollars is a very good buy.  At that point the female clerk in at the checkout said that he often finds the best priced videos.  As we headed out to the cold, he told me that he is a former marine, homeless and  living in a tent in nearby woods and watching compilation videos from a small portable battery operated player, whenever it's time to hunker down, like on the holidays.  I thanked him for his service to our country. For a moment he stood a bit taller and straighter, and didn't seem quite so cold.  How sad our country didn't find a better way to help those who have sacrificed so much of themselves to run operations which were said, at least at the time, to benefit America and her security.   As I shivered my way back to my car and thought about how when I finally got home,  I would have to spend a couple of hours once again today outdoors in snow and rain caring for horses and other livestock, caring for them, and placing them in the barn. I thought about the lives of so many who are simply living out in the cold all the time.  I said a prayer for the men and women like the marine.I met today. Please do the same.

Revisiting "Why There is Thanksgiving Sadness"

Every Thanksgiving is a snapshot in time which may not come again.  (dvd-ppt-slideshow.com)

     


                      This post was first written and posted on November 21, 2012.  I don't think I have anything more profound to say at Thanksgiving, other than please have a safe and good one.
 

    I am a little reticent about Thanksgiving.   In the 90s, my mother in law died in her fifties before Thanksgiving.   Then in 2006, my beloved golden retriever Susan, who had helped to raise all our children, passed of old age, early in the morning the day after Thanksgiving.  She passed at 5 am on a pillow on our bedroom floor. Despite her old age, this was a great loss, and I knew even then, it was the beginning of a trail of losses.   The following year, my mother passed in the hospital the day after Thanksgiving.  I was eating some leftover turkey with some stuffing and gravy when I got the phone call. I still remember how I felt as I sat down in the dining room to compose myself.  The following year, my father passed before Thanksgiving, and I had the great honor to sit with him for five days beforehand.  He was quite lucid and this gave us both a chance to tell each other some things and for me to confirm some final life directions.  Just after Thanksgiving in 2008, our youngest son passed at 12 1/2.   There was a clean autopsy, and physician think he may have had a spontaneous heart rhythm disturbance.  We were supposed to be comforted by the fact that this is happening more and more to children who play sports and to professional athletes also.  I don't think misery really loves company.  I don't think I want anyone to lose a loved one, on a holiday, just after, or any other time.
             I suppose it's probably normal for me to approach Thanksgiving with a little trepidation.  "Whose turn is it this year ?"  is a thought which sneaks in sometimes.  With my new onset atrial fibrillation experienced seven times this year, I think the likelihood is there that it will be me.
             Still, with all this holiday baggage, it doesn't matter.  We ARE here, and we ARE going to celebrate because no one is every promised or guaranteed any day, let alone another Thanksgiving, or another Christmas.  We are here, until we aren't.  The crime would be squandering that time in which we are.
              I could look at our trail of Thanksgiving losses as very bad luck.  Or I could see it as it is.  God has orchestrated for us that He calls us when he is ready, and is demonstrating to our family that there is a plan.  Our family members will be well until they are called, and then they will be lovingly called to go home.  I try really hard not to be sad in the holiday season.  Most of the time, it works.

   Happy Thanksgiving Everyone.  Give a hug to everyone because sometimes it IS their last year with us.

                                                             ~~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATE:    Thanksgiving Day, 2013        So many people are reading this post this year, that I thought I owed all of you an update.   My health has improved greatly from a year ago.  I am no longer having atrial fibrillation since I supplemented magnesium glycinate, and changed from omeprazole which decreases needed magnesium levels over time, to ranitidine, for GERD.
   There is a book called "Beat Your A-Fib" which you can see at http://www.beatyoura-fib.com/     If atrial fibrillation is a problem for you, read this book and then discuss whether implementing its recommendations are right for you, with your doctor.
                  I am still dealing with animal health issues this year.   My son's thirteen year old Siberian Husky is requiring pretty intensive care as a result of probable Addison's Disease with fluid and electrolyte imbalances.  This Thanksgiving, I will be working hard with him on his appetite, until the vet reopens after Thanksgiving for more definitive treatment.    It is my hope that we will avoid a Thanksgiving season loss this year.


 UPDATE:  Thanksgiving Day, 2014
              Our Siberian Husky is still with us and will be sixteen years old in January.  He requires a lot of care but still enjoys his life, and we very much enjoy having him with us.
                                                            ~~~~~~~~~~~

Introducing "Ash Fall"

                    

                        My friend, Deborah D. Moore is the author of The Journal: Cracked Earth which found its rightful place on the best seller's list last year after only six weeks.    The Journal: Ash Fall is the second book in the trilogy which is now available as a kindle edition.

           Buy Ash Fall as a Kindle edition


                       Deborah is not only an expert in family and regional preparedness in her area of the US but she has also been on television in both the US and in Canada.   Her unraveling of the story of Moose Creek is not only very instructive from a standpoint of disaster preparedness, but is entertaining as well.

                     The e-book and printed version of Ash Fall will be available within two weeks and is probably most easily obtained through Amazon.com .

A Piece of Perspective at "Black Friday, Indeed"

               

 
  When you have a chance, please visit one of my other blogs at:



http://learnedfromdaniel.blogspot.com/2014/11/black-friday-indeed.html


                This post concerns long term survival of self and of family in loss and in layered losses.

The Disc-O-Bed Cam-O-Cot

                

This is the Disc o bed Cam O Cot shown with organizers attached.

  I have promised that from time to time when I see a product that I think could be helpful to some of you, to call your attention to it.  As always, other than my very own books, I have no financial interests whatsoever in the products which I mention here.   Make sure you do your own due diligence. Ask good questions and see that you understand everything about any product you see here before investing your hard earned ever shrinking dollars on them.

      If you have a home sized even slightly larger than you need for daily needs, or if you have a dry basement, you could be called upon to be an emergency shelter for relatives or close friends.  Even a simple snowstorm on Thanksgiving could cause you to need to provide emergency dwelling for friends or family. I keep a number of sleeping bags, but many people can't sleep on them, or on a concrete floor, as would often be in most basements.  The Disc O bed Cam O Cot comes in easily stored bags.  It assembles fairly easily, or you could assemble them and leave them up if you have the space.  You can configure them, as above, as bunks, or you can configure them as separate beds.  These are particularly helpful for your own cabins too should you plan to use those in emergencies and lack the space or money for genuine beds.  These beds can be ordered either in 28 inch or 35 inch wide sizes.

These are the largest beds unassembled in their storage bags.

This is inside one of those bags.  These are easily transported.

                 

  These beds are used by the US military and are especially helpful in tough-to-bunk places.  The organizers as seen in the picture at the top of the page come with the package.  Each bed can be converted to a bench should you need a bench with a back later the next day.  No tools are required for the assembly of these bunks.

       Please let me know how you like them.



One Source of these beds starting at $299.95 per set

Cabela's Page for this Product

The Onus is On the Republicans

                     

( Rendering: fabiusmaximus.com  )

                   So, it seems that the discontent which is so pervasive with regard to the Obama Regime manifest itself yesterday by the loss of a number of Congressional and Senate seats.  People are tired of knowing lots of people who have been out of work for years.  They are tired of their adult kids looking for jobs all week, and remaining in their home for another year.  They are unhappy with a thousand dollar a month rise in their health insurance deduction from their salaries (as was the case this month for us.)  The Republicans control more than they did and I wish I believed that this was a wholly good thing. Already, the new Speaker of the House has said he doesn't know how practical it will be to repeal Obamacare.


                          When I vote, I generally vote for the individual I believe is best suited for the job, and whose ideas best approximate my own.  I am an issue driven voter, which increasingly seems to be unusual.   In much of the past, I have voted Republican, particularly during the presidential elections.  However, I must also say that I have friends who are politicians who consider themselves to be Democrats and although we might agree on some things, we often don't agree on how we might get there.   I have never voted Libertarian although more and more, I find myself agreeing with some of the things they are saying also.  I believe in federal government only for the things which are essential for them.  They need to consider national defense, national security, securing borders etc.  They do not need to be tinkering with education or health care.  States do a marvelous job of addressing the issues in their location. What is right for Texas or Louisiana might not be needed in Rhode Island, New Jersey or Alaska.  Let's let the states manage their own issues starting with education, and environmental issues.  Why are we paying for redundant agencies ?  Why does every federal agency have its very own SWAT team ?   Why does the CDC have one ?    Is the US Postal Service getting one next ?  Are they going to break down the doors of those who are late on postage due fees or post  box fees ?


                         The point is that America has spoken. They are not embracing Mr. Obama's grand transformation of America.  It hasn't worked and we are awakening to a much higher national deficit than we had prior to his presidency coupled with infringements or the dilution of many, many of our rights, often by weekend or holiday executive order.   The Republicans have a narrow window in which to begin repealing the madness gently and deliberately.   If they do not, then the infringements of our rights continue as does the economic death spiral of our nation.



                    So, please excuse that I am not dancing for joy that a party which in theory should oppose everything Barack Obama stands for now has more control.  Their election will be meaningless if they cannot grow a spine sufficient to make hard decisions which repeal tinkerings the Obama regime made which are strangling the economic machine of our once great nation.

Ebola ? Worry About This Instead

                 As regular readers know, my daughter has been a juvenile diabetic since age 9. (Which was 1993)    No, she is not overweight. She will never outgrow this, and losing weight or any such life change or magic will never impact the fact that she will never make insulin herself again.  She does not have Type II diabetes, the current scourge of the United States, she has the rarer autoimmune variety which afflicts about 10% of diabetics, and is actually a different illness than the Diabetes Mellitus Type II which is so common now.        How did she get it ?    We do not know how all cases of Type I autoimmune diabetes mellitus start, but we do know this information, in her particular case.

                   When my daughter was 9, my father-in-law caught a virus in his office.  (He was in his fifties and worked as a engineer in a large office in the city.)   Within several days he became ill enough to be hospitalized with pneumonia, cardiac arrhythmia, and  generally was miserable with a flu-like illness.   The doctors thought he would be released by Monday, but he thought he was dying.  It turned out,  he was correct.  Despite being in a cardiac monitored intensive care stepdown unit,, he coded and died as the physician in charge was actually watching the monitor, and could therefore start attempts at resuscitation immediately.  Since this was an unexpected death, the hospital paid for a full autopsy and the results were surprising.   The causative organism to his flu was Coxsackie B4, which among other things, can invade the heart's conduction system and cause death, just as it did in this case.   We were all in shock as we made funeral arrangements, and many of the people where he worked came to the funeral although I noted many of them were sick or recovering from a viral illness also.   None of our physicians indicated that there may be implications for our family, and no one asked us about the health of the rest of our family or our kids.  They had the sniffles, but nothing more.

                 During the viewing, a room was set up in another part of the funeral home for the family and especially the kids. There was a television  and food was set up there.   In a very brief period of time, our daughter who had the sniffles downed quite a bit of soda,  and ate quite a bit.   Each time we checked on her, she seemed to be in the bathroom a great deal. This was quite uncharacteristic for her.and so I called the pediatrician to report rapid onset   polydipsia, polyuria and polyphagia,** all things that indicated that new onset Type I Diabetes Mellitus needed to be ruled out.  The pediatrician thought this was a grief reaction and tried to discourage our coming in.  When I called later to report a flushed face with a fever, she agreed to "let us be reassured" by the pediatric endocrinologist.  The endocrinologist thought she looked great and took blood for thyroid testing, but declined to get even a blood sugar. He proclaimed that she was simply in a growth spurt.  I was not okay with this. I wanted diabetes ruled out even though no one in my family had ever had it   So, on the way back from the endocrinologists office, I bought an inexpensive screening test kit at the CVS Pharmacy for glucose and sugar in urine. We didn't have to wait long on our return home to check it.  It was highly positive for glucose and ketones.  I took the time to explain to my daughter that there was no other reason this could be true that I knew of, other than a new case of juvenile diabetes.  I also told her that blood glucose monitoring devices and that teeny insulin syringes and improvements in technology have made this a much easier disease to control than it was even a few years prior.  I also told her that between the two of us, we could control it, and that after a brief hospitalization, she would give all her own insulin.  She accepted this, and while she went to pack and get her teddy bear, I called the endocrinologist and the pediatrician to arrange the inpatient emergency hospitalization.

                 The endocrinologist was flabbergasted that a parent who called his attention to something was actually correct.  "I should have listened to you, because you are a nurse !"  he said.  " That's not why you should have listened to me", I said.   When any parent tells you that something is really wrong with their child, then you should listen, because the parent is the expert historian on their child."    When my daughter was admitted to the hospital with a glucose level of 547,  (70-120 being the desirable range.)   we were told that she likely escaped death in her sleep because we had acted so quickly.   When I brought up whether this could have anything to do with the virus that had killed my father-in-law just a few days before, initially I was pooh-poohed.   My daughter's fever made it harder for them to brush me off.    Eventually the labs were done which indicated that my daughter too, had Coxsackie B4, and that it had likely activated the autoimmune chain of events which wiped out her ability to make insulin on the beta cell level.     I did not know of Coxsackie B4 virus at the time, but I learned that it can both invade the conduction systems of hearts and cause lethal arrhythmias, or it can cause a cascading effect which can cause the patient to attack and destroy their own beta cells, the functional unit in the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.  Both my father-in-law and my daughter were severely impacted by the same virus !  The link between viral exposure and Type I diabetes has been known for 40 years, yet is seldom discussed, even by nurses or physicians.

              This leads me to my concern in the present day.   While many are obsessing about Ebola, they are ignoring Enterovirus, which is much more common and much more easily transmissible.  A large nationwide study in Taiwan, published recently, indicates that children with enterovirus have a whopping 48% increased likelihood of developing Type I (autoimmune, juvenile) diabetes mellitus !    This is the first such study of its kind and the implications to the world are staggering.  No antiviral strategies are yet effective against it.   The article postulates that perhaps we can develop a vaccine for Enterovirus to try to head off some of these cases of Type I diabetes mellitus that will be heading down the pike. We are already seeing an increase in the incidence of the Type I variety of diabetes mellitus.   Learning to control this chronic illness is time consuming, expensive, and it can be life limiting. Not all of the children who develop it, survive. This needs to be a major focus of public health.


    So, think a bit about taking your baby or young child out to crowded places.   The old strategy of masks on visitors to babies, and frequent handwashing is a good one.  Perhaps a smaller daycare is a better idea than a large one.Perhaps having someone who does good daycare for only two children in her home has merit. Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who can sidestep all the germs and viruses in daycare altogether.  Can you or your wife work from home ? Can one of you stay home with your young child ?

             Before you bet the farm on bugging out due to Ebola, please realize that there are far more common and more likely infections out there, which can be physically and financially devastating, and can change your child's life and your own forever.

                As for my daughter, it was hard work for us all controlling her blood sugars, even with the insulin pump she eventually received.   She grew up, went to college, graduated with honors,  drives a car, and has a life partner and a new home.  She has survived the birth and  the first month of her own new baby's life.   She realizes how layered viral exposures can adversely impact her child's life and is taking steps to limit those exposures.  I don't think my daughter will be taking her baby to the Coliseum to watch Sesame Street on Ice, as I did when the kids were toddlers.   She uses a pediatrician where sick children are segregated from those who are ill as they all wait.   Please think about doing the same. We need to do more to keep our children from layered viral infections.


**  Polydipsia means drinking liquids a great deal, polyuria means urinating frequently and in larger amounts, and polyphagia means eating a great deal.  These are earmarks of new onset diabetes, especially Type I.


More information:


http://www.healthline.com/health-news/could-enteroviruses-be-behind-type-1-diabetes-rising-rates-102214

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/833474?nlid=68107_3042&src=wnl_edit_medp_diab&uac=49270BG&spon=22