Not the way we’d want to go to Vegas!

Melrose-Wakefield Hospital - stay far, far away unless you have a death wish!

I can’t believe that summer is almost over!  As David Letterman just said, “summer has gone by quicker than a Brett Favre retirement”.  And this summer was a good one – nice weather, and no major medical issues.  As you may know, we’ve had a couple of summers all but ruined due to the ineptitude of Melrose-Wakefield Hospital.  If you do a search of that name on this blog, you’ll see some of the horror stories about that dump.  Not only did they almost kill my husband, but did you also know that they could very well have gotten him addicted to morphine?

It’s true.  A few years ago, Mike had to have an emergency appendectomy.  After the surgery, he was hooked up to this IV thing where you push a little button and it puts morphine into your system, in order to reduce any pain.

But the thing was, he wasn’t in very much pain, so he barely hit that little button.  Also, he knew that it was morphine, and he didn’t want to risk getting hooked on the stuff.

So you would think that the nurses would be happy that he wasn’t in much pain and did not need to use much of the drug.  But NOOOOOO…they YELLED at him for NOT using enough of the stuff!  Can you believe it?

WHY?  Did they WANT to get him hooked on the stuff?  We know that they like to keep patients in this hospital for as long as possible, in order to soak the insurance companies for as much as possible.  We know that Hallmark Health has been having money problems.  Is getting a patient hooked on a narcotic drug another way to keep patients incarcerated for longer?  Who knows?

As far as I know, Melrose-Wakefield does not do any sort of detox/drug rehab stuff.  So what would they do with a drug addict, except keep him there and keep feeding him the dope?

If Mike had gotten addicted to this drug, possibly the only way he’d ever have a chance of resuming his life and his career is to go to a rapid detox center. Rapid detox is an intensive treatment, in which the patient is withdrawn from the drug within a few hours, as opposed to a week or more.  This reduces the symptoms of withdrawal dramatically.

However, this is only for the physical dependence on the drug, the patient would still need to get the appropriate psychological counseling.

I don’t know how many such places are in the United States, but I know of this one place out in Las Vegas.  Hey, I like Vegas, but this isn’t my idea of what I’d want to do while there!  And it is rather pricey – starting at $13,000, and not covered by insurance.  They do offer various forms of financing, though.  And I think it’s well worth it for those addicts who truly want to get their lives back.

But still I wonder, WHY would a nurse, a medical professional, want to try to force a patient to take such a drug, risk getting addicted, when it was not truly needed for pain?  I mean, in Mike’s case, just some regular over-the-counter Tylenol would have been sufficient.  I know people who really do suffer chronic pain and are on narcotic pain-killers.  Without them, they cannot function.  But these people are also under the care of specialized pain doctors, who carefully monitor their patients’ use of these drugs.  They do not want to see their patients abusing these drugs and turning into addicts who need a rapid detox program.

This whole thing with Mike and the morphine happened years ago, but I’m still shaking my head over the insanity of it all.  Needless to say, we will never so much as get a Band-Aid from any Hallmark Health facility ever again.  We now get all of our health care from Lahey Clinic, which is a much better place.  Thanks to their excellent level of care, Mike is no longer in and out of the hospital all the time, as he was when he was still with Melrose-Wakefield.  Lahey prefers to keep people OUT of the hospital, by caring for their patients properly in the first place.

So, once again, I remind you that if you want to live a good quality life, stay away from Hallmark Health!

Banned in Boston?

Beer served in a plastic cup at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill at Merchantsauto.com Stadium, Manchester, NH

You’ve probably heard the story about a man being killed by a shard of glass from a beer mug, as the result of a bar fight at the Landsdowne Pub in Boston.  Now, this bar is serving all drinks in plastic cups.  I don’t know what this bar is like, because I’ve never been there, but this is probably a good idea.

But now, according to an article on BeerAdvocate.com, the Boston licensing board is considering banning glass containers in ALL of the city’s bars.

It’s one thing to drink beer from plastic cups at a baseball game or other sporting event.    In addition to eliminating the risk of drunken fans throwing glass containers at players on the field, or at other fans in the stands, there are other practical reasons.  The cost of breakage would go through the roof, and make ballpark beer even more expensive than it already it.  And then they’d have to worry about washing all those glasses that don’t get broken.

Even at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill, which is located inside the NH Fisher Cats’ ballpark in Manchester, all drinks are served in plastic or paper cups.  This place has a really nice mahogany bar and all, and looks like the sort of place where you’d not expect your beer to be served in a plastic cup.  But they also allow people to take drinks out of the place and into the seating area of the ballpark.  They can’t watch every single person the whole time, so plastic all around makes the most sense.

On the other hand, I would not want to go into a nice beer bar and have my beer served in a plastic cup.  Different styles of beer are supposed to be served in different kinds of glassware; something they can’t do if they were forced to use only plastic.  Rather than give you a lesson on proper beer glassware, here’s a basic article about it from BeerAdvocate.com.  Many beer lovers have assorted glassware in their homes (we have a good collection), and we expect bartenders at better beer bars to know what beer goes in what glass.

The banning of glass would hurt these businesses.  Who is going to pay top dollar for a fine beer dinner, when all of the brews are served in plastic cups?  Beer geeks will simply go to places outside of Boston, the people who plan the beer dinners will have them at other restaurants, etc.

Also, at these higher-end establishments, people are less likely to get so drunk that they get into fights.  There is a huge difference between “beer geeks” like us, and people who go into some dive bar to get drunk on Bud Light or some other cheap, mass-produced swill.  Beer geeks enjoy the flavor of beer, we don’t drink to get so drunk that we can’t taste anything.  We’ve grown way beyond the college days of keggers and cases upon cases of Natty Light.

Those who drink to get drunk do not only not care what their beer is served in, they also do not care what beer they drink, as long as it’s cheap and there is plenty of it.  So the places that cater to such a clientele should, by all means, eliminate serving anything in glass.  But they should also be paying more attention to patrons who’ve had too much, and shut them off as necessary.  This not just because of potential bar fights, but for the safety of the general public.  You would not want someone to get so drunk that they cannot safely drive home.  Even the better beer bars should be paying attention; they would not likely serve somebody endless glasses of some 9.0% ABV double IPA.  As much as I personally love beers like this, I might have one serving at the beer bar, and then switch over to something with a lower ABV (alcohol by volume).

Hopefully, the owners of beer bars and brewpubs in Boston will speak out against this stupid law, and it will never be passed.  Let the bar and restaurant owners decide what to do, according to what would be best for them.  But don’t put people out of business over an issue which is not applicable to their establishment.

Do Not Call Registry – FAIL?

Could be.  It seems that more and more telemarketers are growing some brass gonads and calling people anyway, even if they are on the list.  This isn’t just a New England thing, it is going on everywhere, and the calls are coming from everywhere, as well.  Many of these jerks are blocking their numbers from being visible on Caller ID, while others are “spoofing” numbers so that a fake number shows up on Caller ID, but when you call it back to yell at them, you get a recorded message saying that the number is not in service.

The good news is that if you get repeated calls from the same number, spoofed or not, you can block these calls.  Where I live,  Verizon doesn’t offer a call-blocking service.  But fear not – many cordless phones are available out there that offer a call-blocking feature.  When our old landline phone was dying, we took advantage of that to look for a new one that had the call-blocking feature.  We read a lot of cordless phone reviews, looked in a lot of stores, both online and brick & mortar.  We found that we’d have to pay more for the call-blocking feature, but if it meant that we’d have to get fewer repeat telephone calls from annoying people, it would be worth every penny.

We bought a nice cordless phone set from Panasonic, and we’ve been very pleased.  What happens with this phone if you block a number is that it will ring once, then the computer inside the phone checks the number, and if it is on the blocked list, the caller on the other end gets a busy signal.  We have found that eventually, the calls will stop because people get tired of the endless busy signal.

Still, the government needs to do better with the Do Not Call Registry.  Not sure exactly WHAT they can do, but they need to work on it.  In the meantime, consider buying a new cordless telephone that has a call-blocking feature.  It also works great when you are getting calls from collection agencies for someone who had your number before you did.  We were getting these all the time, and now that I’ve blocked them, they stopped calling completely.

Now I wish I could find a cell phone with call blocking.  Can the CrackBerry do this?  i was thinking of getting one, but if it has call blocking, I’d definitely buy one!

Opinion – The Massachusetts Bottle Bill

So now, Massachusetts wants to expand their current “bottle bill” by including containers other beverages, such as water, juice, iced tea, etc.  Right now, only containers of soda and beer come with a five-cent deposit, to be refunded upon return of said containers.  Story here.

My opinion?  Not only is this a bad idea, but I wish they’d do away with the whole bottle bill.  It’s nothing but a time-consuming annoyance that is completely unnecessary.  If more cities and towns would encourage recycling, then people could just put these containers out in their recycling bin once a week, and have them taken away.  See?  You can recycle without it taking up too much time and hassle.

Most stores that are convenient to us have bottle/can return machines, as shown here.  You just stick the containers in one by one, and when you are done, you push a button, and they give you a receipt, kind of like one that comes out of one of those Epson tm-t88iv receipt machines. You take it to a cashier in the store and they give you your money. Simple, huh?  But not so fast…

Every single time I have tried to use one of these things, I am pushed and shoved by other people trying to use them, you’d think it was Fort Knox, the way they go crazy and can’t wait their turn to use the machines.  It’s absolutely insane!

There are two Kappy’s stores near us that have a redemption counter, and for the most part, those are easier to deal with than the machines.  But sometimes there are lines, and often, even if there is no line, you have to wait for someone to come and take your stuff.  They do not have a dedicated container redemption person, usually it’s one of the cashiers who comes over and takes care of it, when s/he is not busy ringing up customers.  And the fact is, the most convenient times for us to return anything would be evenings and weekends, when Kappy’s and similar stores are the busiest.  So there you have the time-consuming part!

So, you may ask, why don’t we just put them into the recycling bin and let homeless/poor people take them if they want them?  After all, there are a LOT of people in our town who go around with carts that they stole from Stop & Shop and pick through people’s garbage looking for deposit containers.

Because they can’t just be satisfied picking through the recycling bins, that’s why?  They have to rip through every single garbage bag looking for more, and they often leave a mess.  And now that we have a Pay-As-You-Throw program here, we have to pay up to $2 per trash bag.  If the bags are all ripped up, the trash collectors won’t take them, we have to put the trash into another $2 bag and hope that it won’t get ripped up again by the time the garbage truck comes back next week.  And anything that is strewn on the ground, WE have to clean up.  More time-consuming crap!  By not putting out ANYTHING that might be worth money, we’ve managed to keep these people away from our trash.

Up in New Hampshire, they do not have a bottle bill.  People just put their beer and soda containers into their recycling bins, they get picked up, end of story.  No skeevy people picking through the trash and making a mess.  Another good reason to move there.

When  we go up there for a weekend of Fisher Cats ball games, we always buy beer to drink in the hotel room, and we buy it in New Hampshire.  We always leave the empties in the room, in the beer box they came in, when we leave, because if we bring them home, we’ll have no choice but to put them into our recycling.  And since they LOOK like deposit bottles, they will attract the undesirables.  However, they will not work in the machines here, they have a special bar code on them saying that they came from NH.  But the hotel we always stay at has a restaurant/bar downstairs that serves bottled beer.  So they have big recycling barrels somewhere.  They can just dump our bottles into that.  And yes, I do leave a decent tip for housekeeping for this service.  I also don’t want to put them in the trash at home, because of Pay-As-You-Throw, it can get very expensive.

For a while, I was saving empty Sam Adams beer bottles, to use for bottling my own home-brewed beer.  These bottles do not have screw-top grooves on top, and can be capped using the bottle-capping tool that commonly comes with most home-brewing equipment kits.  I saved far more than I’ll ever need for making the typical five-gallon batch, we have a ton of them in our storage area, more than enough to allow for the inevitable breakage.  But now we have more than enough, no more room, we have to get rid of them somehow.

In our town, there is no limit as to how much we can put out each week for recycling.  This is a very good thing.  I think that a state law that would require people to put out more stuff for recycling would go a lot further than any bottle bill in keeping the streets clean and helping the environment.  Then there’d be no homeless people and such ripping open residential trash bags and leaving a mess.

As for people who buy a can of soda or a bottle of water at the store – why not put recycling containers next to regular trash containers on street corners, to make it easy for people to dispose of the containers?

Most working people are under serious time constraints.  But anyone, no matter how busy, can throw all of their empties into a bin and stick it out on the curb.  It only takes a couple of minutes, anyone has time for that.  It’s time for the bottle bill to go bye-bye.

Yarmouth, MA has a DO NOT KNOCK registry

Story HERE.  Will this pave the way to a state-wide, or even nation-wide DO NOT KNOCK registry?

The concern of the people of Yarmouth is crime, which is a reasonable thing.  Many times, unsavory characters pose as door-to-door salespeople, and when the unsuspecting resident answers the door, they force their way in and commit unspeakable crimes.  This is party why I never answer the door unless I’m expecting someone.

But how about the fact that unwanted knocking is just plain annoying?  That’s my number-one reason for wanting a DO NOT KNOCK list where we live!

However, I do not like the fact that they allow religious and political groups to be exempt from this law.  Those are the most annoying ones of all, and the ones who knock the most around here.  We don’t get as many sales people as we did ten years ago, no one trying to sell me everything from encyclopedias to candy to the best prenatal vitamins (not that I have any need for the latter, mind you!).

Still, it’s a start.