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When senators are being burned in effigy, shouted down at meetings, and having their offices graffitied with swastikas, something is wrong.  In this case, it’s the blatant lies and distortion the media is feeding much of the American public.  This needs to stop.  Meaningful health care reform is something that everyone has a stake in, and whether or not you support a certain component of it, the discussion needs to occur.  We need to put political pressure on the Obama administration not to let the big pharmaceutical companies off the hook with price negotiation bans.  That’s a subjugation of the free market principles the GOP touts so highly, yet backs away from when they interfere with lobbyists desires.

And Obama needs to stop with the diplomatic responses to crackpot questions.  When someone asks him about “death panels”, he shouldn’t say “I don’t support that.”  He should say “That’s not true.  That is not part of the bill.  That is not part of the plan.”

In a way, this situation is analogous to the birthers.  A bunch of lies have dominated the exchange of ideas, and are being regurgitated by the media, and then seized upon by those same pundits when people repeat the claims that the media’s made.  A self-fulfilling prophesy, a vicious and malicious cycle.

America deserves better.

Shawarma is probably one of the best foods there is.  I had a fabulous chickens shawarma sandwich.  We are staying at my aunt and uncle’s apartment now.  We walked around for a bit before coming here, as we had been in the car for about an hour from New Jersey.

This morning, before we left, we visited my great-grandmother at the nursing home she is in.  It was very nice in some ways, and not nice at all in some other ways.  It made me think a lot about how I want to be treated and live when I am that age, and how I want to cope as my parents get towards that age.  I think that it is weird that in America we pay people to live with and take care of our old people, rather than just doing it ourselves.  If everyone was in a better position to take care of their relatives as they aged, we wouldn’t need to spend so much money on those institutions.  Ideally, the government would provide money to anyone who is taking care of relatives to help them cope, but until we are in a position to have that sort of health care infrastructure, we will have to deal with these not-so-friendly institutions.  This particular one is rather nice, but it is still an institution, with all of the benefits and pitfalls that implies.  It is a tricky situation.

I am glad that my relatives are being well taken care of, but I wish it was a little more personal, and I wish I saw them more often.

I am pretty sick and did not go to school today.  I spent the day at home recuperating, running some errands, and I had a rehearsal this evening.

Last night I had a conversation with my mom about transgender health care, and, after reading articles today about the Pope’s anti-condom remarks en route to Cameroon, I am pissed off.  People need to realize that some things supersede religion or personal belief.  Human life and health is always more important.  Always.  Whether or not you think people should be having sex-changing surgery, the fact is that they do, and if you are a health care provider of any kind, you have a duty to those people that supersedes your beliefs about the morality of what they are doing.  The same holds for religious figures.  If you want to preach abstinence, that’s fine, but the fact is that condoms save lives, and to tell people in Africa, the continent worst-hit by AIDS, that condoms are “part of the problem” (yes, he actually said that), is just plain lying.  That is outside of the realm of belief.  That is false, and it should not be tolerated.

Today was an odd day.  My sister is fifteen.  This is a rather advanced age.  I am still grappling with its implications.

The day did not begin well, however.  My sister (yes, the same one whose birthday it is) was very sick, and was up early in the morning.  I was woken at about four, and was able to fall back asleep, but other members of my family were not so lucky.  My sister did not go to school today.  Then, when my youngest sister went out to let the chickens out of their coop this morning, she discovered that one had been locked out last night, and had been killed by a predator.  This is the first time we have had a chicken killed in the almost two years we’ve been raising them, and it was rather shocking.  My sister was rather traumatized, having just been presented face-to-face with the mangled carcass of a bird she thought she was letting out, and she came back inside sobbing.  My father and I had to clean up, and as the poor thing had been out all night, it was frozen solid.  It was quite a job, and I thus had a very sad start to the day.

School went well after that, except that I did not have enough food, and was thus rather headache-ish and grumpy all day.  We had a rather cold ultimate practice outside, and I managed to go the entire day without eating the four cupcakes I was entrusted with by a classmate of my sister’s who had baked them for her birthday and asked me to transmit them to her.  This was no mean, feat, but I got one after dinner, so I am happy.

Our plans for Watchmen are solidified.  A few members of our extended group have been their since a bit before five PM, and I will be meeting them there within a few hours, along with some other friends arriving from elsewhere.  I will be picking up one other on the way.  The movie is two hours and forty-three minutes long, so it’s going to be a late night.  But it will be worth it.

I went to the doctor earlier today, and I’m back on azithromycin. I’ve taken the first day’s two-pill medication, and now have four days of one pill each. Although I haven’t been contagious since I took it the first time, the hope is that this second round will help to knock out the symptoms, which are proving quite tenacious.

I am home from school today; I was up all night coughing and the like. I am hoping this is the worst this thing will get. I thought the pertussis was on the run, but it seems that if you strike it down, it shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Whatever the case, my cough has worsened significantly.
I think a slow day is probably a good thing anyway. I need a bit of time to catch up on college work, generally relax, and drink tea (although we are out of honey).

Although I have long since finished the medication, my cough has persisted, so I am now at the lab to get a blood test before school. What an unpleasant way to spend a morning. At least I get to see all of the cool blood-drawing devices up close. Again.

This morning I cut myself on a can of baked beans. As I was going to the bathroom to get a band-aid, I remembered that a friend had recently sent me a very special band-aid in the mail, one decorated with Jesus’ “visage”, as she put it. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened the package, but I was surprised and pleased beyond my wildest expectations.
I have no doubt that I will soon make a full recovery.

I have been giving a prescription for azithromycin, which is used to treat whooping cough, among other things. It seems that at some point my vaccinations for whooping cough were not up to date, and this may have something to do with it. They are also giving me a spacer for the inhaler, which I am to continue using. It looks as though I may be out of here relatively soon.

I came back from the NHC Summer Institute with a rather terrible cough, which has persisted and worsened significantly. I was prescribed an inhaler on the premise that it was some kind of allergy-induced asthma, but it didn’t help that much. Now am I am in the ER, since it’s Labor Day and the doctor’s office is closed. The doctor on call recommended that I come in to get x-rays and the like, so here I am. It looks like I may be here for a while.