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Greetings, Anyone who has come to my site lately knows that it had become way out of date, mostly because my back problems have been getting progressively worse and i just have not had the energy. I had to drop several projects and some people have had to wait excessively for repairs of controllers. This will start to change right now. The pain kept increasing and the side effects from the narcotics became more severe while they provided less and less relief, so I finally told my regular doctor i had to do something besides just sitting around in pain watching TV and waiting to die. He sent me to an orthopedic surgeon, who ordered a bone scan that revealed a problem just below where they fused my injury 19 years ago. The location could not be treated without very major surgery, so he quickly passed me off to somebody else. The somebody else is Dr. Jon Swift Jr. at the Bend Center for Orthopedics here in Oregon. Dr. Swift is a physiatrist, specializing in non surgical pain control. He took the time to listen, and we discussed the options, something quite rare these days. He has given me my life back with RF nerve ablation. This procedure "cooks" the nerves with RF energy to disrupt the pain pathways. I am on permanent disability and have Medicare, but i know they pay only a fraction of the regular price for everything, so i did not think anybody would help me with no other insurance. Boy, was I wrong. The people at the Center for Orthopedics and Cascade Surgicenter did not treat me like a second class patient. I received first class care and my copay for everything is only about $300 out of a bill that was originally over $8000. Without Medicare, I would have been doomed to spend the rest of my life in agony. It is just not right that someone else in the same situation as i who did not have any insurance would have to suffer intolerable pain or make a choice between feeding their family or obtaining medical services. I am so grateful not to be in agony all the time that i feel i must show my gratitude by working as hard as I can to bring about the changes we need so every American can have access to health care. I strongly support the single payer option, HR676 would give us all the medical and dental coverage we deserve without spending any more money than we are now, by cutting out the insurance companies. These parasites have been sucking our blood long enough, raking in 400 BILLION DOLLARS every year that could be used to provide all of us with the care we need so desperately. The time has come to tell our politicians we are sick of them selling their votes to these parasites and ignoring us. The only way we can make this happen is with hard work. I will be working to pass HR676 and with Organizing for America and President Obama to fight for access to affordable healthcare for every American. We MUST convince our President that he is wrong to abandon the idea of single payer; that the money he gets from these special interests sure looks like it is causing him to abandon the promises he made us when we voted for him. Nothing else i could do is more important. They said we could not get Obama elected; how could a bunch of average citizens each making $10 and $20 donations take on the Republican war machine? Now they are saying a bunch of citizen volunteers cannot possibly win this fight with the well-funded special interests. Let's work together and prove them wrong again. These huge insurance companies are our enemies and we must defeat them. There is a story about monkeys on the island of Koshima based on the observations of some scientists. The monkeys were introduced to yams, and some of them learned to wash them in the sea before eating. It appeared to the scientists that when enough monkeys started washing their yams that monkeys on other islands suddenly started washing theirs. This has become somewhat of an urban legend, and has been bashed by critics who refuse to believe that there could be such an effect, and that there is no way for information to have traveled from one island to the others instantaneously. The most common explanation given is that a monkey that had seen other monkeys do it swam to another island and the monkeys there learned from him. There does not have to be anything magical about being the hundredth monkey; information does not have to be transmitted by quantum entanglement or telepathy. All we have to do is change our behavior. Smile at someone, let someone into traffic on the freeway, open a door for someone with their hands full, and it will spread just like a virus from one person to another to another to another and just maybe something wonderful will happen. Something like affordable health care for every American.  We are stardust, we are billion year old carbon, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. |
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