Newspaper Page Text
Page 20 November 12, 2023 StarNews www.starnewsgaonline.com
Commentary
Hospice Care, Palliative Care, and Assisted
Diane
hack
West Georgia Right to Life
PRESIDENT
“The Heartbeat of Georgia”
Duanehack46@gmail.com
470-370-2452
I’ve shared an in earlier column about the
differences between Palliative Care and
Hospice Care. Palliative care is specialized
care for people living with serious illnesses,
such as cancer, heart failure, kidney disease etc.
With palliative care, patients receive medica
tion care for symptoms with hopes to cure the
illness. Hospice care is health care that focuses
on palliation of a terminally ill patient, tending
to both spiritual and physical needs at the end
oflife.
There is a Bill that’s being developed in the
Senate in Washington, SB 4260 PCHETA-
Palliative Care and Hospice Education and
Training Act. Washington is trying to secure
tax dollars for each of the above parts of the
Bill, but not explaining how the funds will be
dispersed within the bill: either for Palliative or
Hospice care? The Bill will create an open
checkbook to earmark the funds at their own
discretion.
A group called “Compassion and Choices”
sent out a request for donations and also a
reach out request to respective constituents to
contact their legislators to support SB 4260
PCHETA. Within the donation letter, it states:
“If you are comfortable telling your personal
story of how you came to support medical aid
in dying, please include it in the editable body
of your letter. We can’t overstate the impor
tance of personal storytelling in this
campaign.”
With no jurisdiction, discretion or account
ability as to how our tax dollars will be used;
Palliative or Hospice; are we again granting
our government an opportunity to push
Assisted Suicide even further?
There is a similar scenario going on today
within Planned Parenthood and the use of our
$620 million tax dollars they received in 2022.
Automated phone systems.... grrr
I ■'****'
BOURIS
digi@mindspring.com
Back around 1957 or ‘58,1 got my first com
puter job. It was with a nuclear engineering
company that had been financed by the
Rockefellers. Their idea, back then, was to pio
neer peace-time nuclear reactor design for the
generation of electrical power. I was told that
the computer I trained on was probably the sec
ond programmable digital computer in the New
York City area. Back then, you wore a suit and
tie to work in the presence of such a machine,
even during the night-shift, when no one else
but the security guard was around.
Some seven short years later, because com
puters had become so useful to society, I was
on my way to my fourth computer job as a pro
grammer. I had been working at Stanford
University, in the Bay Area, and had just been
hired by a lab at Emory in Atlanta. But before
reporting to Emory, I was to spend a month in
the Boston area at the factory where our new
computer was being made, attending classes
about its design, manufacture, maintenance,
and programming. That month was eye-open
ing and life-changing, and I am forever grateful
to Bryan Robinson from Emory, the man who
had hired me away from Stanford. Back then,
in the mid-60s, Computer Science courses were
hardly established. So, the knowledge and
training I received at the computer factory has
served me well through the decades.
Ever since, I have felt I had a good grip on
understanding our changing times. That is, until
recently, when I used up the pills of one of my
medical prescriptions. So, I dialed the phone
number for my pharmacy.
Ever since we moved her to Carroll County,
Georgia, more than 50 years ago, I have pretty
much used the same pharmacy, and have rec
ognized the different stages of automation that
have been introduced into their business opera-
Suicide
Funding is fungible (interchangable), meaning
the tax dollars given to PPH can be used at
their discretion, as they see fit. Thus, we see the
rise each year in the revenue-generating abor
tion on demand performed in their facilities
throughout the U. S.!
There are now nine states and Washington,
D.C. that legalize Physician Assisted Suicide:
Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont,
California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey,
Maine, and New Mexico.
As stated above, the goal of Palliative Care
is to relieve symptoms, including pain and
stress, at any stage in a serious illness.
Palliative Care can be provided in conjunction
with curative or life-prolonging treatment.
Hospice is a subset of Palliative Care. Hospice
provides comfort care when a person no longer
has curative options or has chosen to forgo
treatment because the burdens of treatment out
weigh the benefits. The founding principles of
Hospice were to maintain dignity, increase
quality of life, and provide comfort and pain
control. When these principles are followed
and staff members are trained in proper pain
tions when handling my prescription requests.
I haven’t kept track, but I think it was in the
1990s when the “system”, which now required
digital dialing (instead of rotary dialing) began
asking you for single-digit button pressing to
get to the right person, like a clerk or pharma
cist. Today, there is hardly a possibility of
speaking with a clerk or pharmacist. And, with
the recent introduction of voice-recognition and
AI, the design seems to be that the customer
never needs to speak with staff.
However, you can get lost, and it can feel
like it’s deliberate, in what seems to be a sys
tem of menus that waste your time. . . So, I
dialed the phone number of my pharmacy.
After some preliminary choices (just saying
the words or pressing the right keys), including
my birth date, I was taken to the section that we
can call “Prescription Refill”. The next step
was really new to me. At least I hadn’t noticed
it before. It went something like, “SAY or
TYPE IN your prescription number...NOW”.
And I responded with saying that number,
“123456789”. And I get, “You said
‘123456789’. RIGHT?”
Climate is what you study, weather is what
Sybil
'1 ROSEN
1 THOMAS
River Rambles
syllabil17@aol.com
It was late September 2009. As Glyn and I
drove north from New Orleans, we were
receiving texts from friends in Carroll County,
something on the order of “Do you want us to
come and help you evacuate the cabin?”
We were perplexed. It was like being asked,
“Is it time to come over and deliver your
baby?” when you’ve been celibate for 3 years.
Did they know something we didn’t? We were
aware that it was raining at home, but clearly
we had yet to grasp the volume of water being
dropped on Carroll County or the widespread
flooding the storm was inflicting.
By late afternoon, we were home. The rain
had mercifully moved on. But, now, we
understood our friends’ concerns. The
Chattahoochee River was breathtakingly high,
its banks extended half-a-mile from one side of
the river to the other. The roaring channel bore
on its bloated back huge whole trunks of
uprooted trees, tom-olf mailboxes still on their
posts, the wooden steps and painted planks of
somebody’s back porch. The size and sound of
the water made me, literally, weak in the knees.
The river was closer to the cabin than it had
been in all of Glyn’s then forty years of living
there.
Built into a hill held in place by granite
boulders, the back deck of the house stands
approximately 75 feet above the floodplain on
thick wooden stilts cemented to embedded
rock. In the ten years I’d been living here, I’d
seen the river rise to just a few feet below these
rocks, floods brought by Hurricanes Frances
and Ivan. That day, in 2009, while the house
was in no danger of being flooded, the water
surrounded the rock on which one of the back-
deck pillars stood. From our upper perch, we
watched the river calmly lapping the boulder, as
if she did this all the time and was planning to
do more. Sobering, to say the least.
The entire county was inundated. Roads
sank, wide pieces carried off. Bridges were
impassable. Basements filled with mud, debris,
you get
and sewage. Tragically, on Snake Creek, a flash
flood poured down a ravine and broke a trailer
in half. An toddler was lost. The event was
being called a “500-year flood.”
Seeing Georgia on the news, far-flung
friends called to see if we were all right.
“Don’t worry,” I told them. “The whole
southeastern United States would have to be
underwater for the cabin to flood.” I laughed a
laugh intended to reassure. “That won’t happen
in our lifetime.”
Fourteen years later, I’m still alive and no
longer laughing. Feeling far less blase about
that won’t-happen-in-our-lifetime thing.
Unimaginable images of an underwater New
York City at the beginning of October were
shocking, but lest we forget the first 11 days of
September brought eight devastating floods on
four different continents. In Spain, Libya,
Greece, Turkey, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, and
southwestern USA. In the Mediterranean,
Storm Daniel caused the death of 11,000
Libyans. Typhoon Haikui in Hong Kong and
China created more than 100 landslides. Towns
washed away. Mudslides and overflow from
collapsed dams irrevocably damaged vital
farmlands. Fast-moving thunderstorms in
management, Hospice can be a blessing for
people in need of expert end-of-life care.
Pretending to Provide Appropriate End of
Life Care: Unfortunately, there is a growing
trend to misapply palliative medications to
make people die, particularly in the hospice
care setting. Because people who are receiving
Hospice Care have a limited life-expectancy, it
is the “ideal” setting for stealth euthanasia. The
term “stealth euthanasia” means to cause a
patient’s death while pretending to provide
appropriate end-of-life care. Patients and lami-
lies must be vigilant.
“Numerous reports from families of hospice
and palliative care patients indicate that a one-
size-fits-all pattern of administering a combina
tion of opioids and anti-anxiety dmgs has
emerged. Whether or not patients have pain
and/or agitation, they may begin to receive
these dmgs upon admission.” [Quote from
“Dmgs Commonly Used in Hospice and
Palliative Care,” Making a Difference, A Guide
for Defending the Medically Vulnerable.]
Here is a typical report that HALO (Health
See DUANE HACK page 23
And I said “Right”. After a short pause, I
hear “PLEASE ANSWER ‘yes’ OR ‘no’...”
And it repeated, “You said ‘123456789’.
RIGHT?” And I said “Yes!”, and we moved
on. At this point, I was thinking, “What a clever
piece of new programming! And that rhetorical
question, ‘RIGHT?’, and the follow-up
reminder to stick to the mles (...ANSWER
‘yes’ OR ‘no’...)”.
Well, it tmly seemed to be a sophisticated
automated telephone-answering system! But,
what happened next ended up taking several
days of calling and finally talking to my physi
cian’s receptionist who, it turned out, misunder
stood me, which compounded my growing
frustration, and made me feel outdated, techni
cally as well as socially.
Anyway, it accepted the prescription number
and then came back and informed me that the
last refill had already been done and what was
now needed was a “prescription renewal”.
Fine, done that many many times.
But there was a problem: It said that the
phone number I was calling from was
See BILL BOURIS page 23
southern Nevada stranded 70,000 festival-
goers at Burning Man in Black Rock Desert.
Whether or not you ascribe to the concept of
climate change, it’s hard not to notice the
weather has picked up. The difference between
climate and weather was once explained to me
this way: Climate is what you study, weather is
what you get.
Those who study climate believe that
human-driven changes are having an impact on
the weather we’re getting, evidenced by the
rainfall and flooding with which the world
seems beset. Increased heat the globe over has
intensified the planet’s water cycle. Warmer
temperatures increase evaporation; a hotter
atmosphere holds more moisture. Hence these
storms that are unleashing unprecedented
amounts of H20. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, global
precipitation has increased 0.04 inches per
decade since 1901. That’s half-an-inch by now,
and though that doesn’t seem like a lot,
imagine an extra half-inch falling at once
practically everywhere in the world.
Other things can affect the frequency,
intensity, and duration of flooding. Dry or wet
See RIVER RAMBLES page 27