charlesadler.com

The gift of a good death

Margaret Wente - Globe and Mail

May 27, 2011

 

On Mother’s Day last year, I took a pot of orchids to my mom. She hadn’t been feeling well for months. But when I saw her that Sunday, I was shocked. It was plain to me that she was dying.

Mom had had some tests. There was something in her abdomen, and her doctor had obliquely warned us that the news might not good. To get a definitive diagnosis, she needed more tests. That would take more painful rounds of tottering to clinics and doctors’ offices. Her doctor told us that the simplest thing to do was take her to Emergency and get her admitted to the hospital. My mother – a fiercely independent type – was in a lot of pain, so she agreed. “Take these orchids back,” she said. “They won't be any good to me.”

And that is how my mother became trapped in a system that has no idea how to treat the dying.

Most Canadians say they want to die at home, peacefully, with their families. In fact, most Canadians die in hospital. Far too often, their last weeks are marked by invasive procedures, useless treatment, grossly inadequate pain management and nursing care that runs the gamut from outstanding to callous. Our hospitals are engineered to save people. Yet they are increasingly filled with people who can’t be saved. These people don’t need the latest in high-tech medicine. They need care, compassion and comfort.

It didn’t take long for my mother to receive her diagnosis. She had a particularly nasty form of cancer that had already spread far and wide. Nobody suggested treatment, and Mom didn't want it. A couple of sympathetic palliative-care doctors showed up to discuss our concerns. “All I want is not to be in pain,” she said. Everybody told her not to worry. They could manage that.

But they didn’t. Mom was on oral medication because she couldn’t manage a pain pump. The pills were administered according to a strict schedule. We would sit with her as she moaned in agony, begging for the next pill, only to be told that it wasn’t time for her medication yet. We complained to everybody we could find. The medication was adjusted, but things didn’t improve. What were they afraid of, we asked ourselves. That she might stop breathing? When she contracted a hospital-based infection, we hoped it would hasten her demise.

Since then, I’ve asked myself many times what else we could have done. Maybe we could have figured out a way to take her home and nurse her there. But we had no idea how to do that. We kept hoping that if we complained enough, it would make a difference.

By now I’ve heard dozens of stories similar to ours – stories of people pleading in vain for effective pain management for their terminally ill loved ones. Some of the people who told me these stories are medical doctors themselves. They had no more influence on the system than we did.

Why are dying people so often left in pain? Ethicist Margaret Somerville says there’s been a serious failure to teach medical students and physicians the latest approaches to pain relief treatment. Veterinarians get better training in pain management than doctors do. Another reason is that, as in most bureaucracies, the system and its rules are more important than the people it’s supposed to serve. The comfort, calm and security of health-care professionals are more important than the well-being of the patients.

Our massively expensive, high-tech acute-care institutions are simply not able to deliver proper palliative care for the dying, even though that is what many of their patients need. As one person who watched her elderly father die in an acute-care hospital writes, “We knew and saw the staff did not have the skills, empathy or training to look after him properly as he journeyed out of this world.” Her brother’s death in palliative care was a different story. “We knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was receiving the kind of care, attention and love that a family provides.” But palliative care is in shockingly short supply.

My mom was on the list for a palliative-care bed, and we were lucky, because one came open. It was at the Toronto Grace Health Centre, one of the last remaining hospitals run by the Salvation Army. The transfer was a nightmare. Her pain meds gave out, and by the time we arrived, she was in terrible shape. When we promised her – yet again – that everything would soon be okay, she shot us a look of withering contempt.

But this time, things really were okay. Toronto Grace was a different world. The nurses were superb. They treated Mom with utmost kindness and respect. We felt they were on our side, and hers. Her pain was properly controlled. She stopped being terrified, and grew calm. For the first time since she’d entered hospital, we felt she was in good hands. The relief was overwhelming.

Three weeks after Mother’s Day, Mom died. It was a Sunday afternoon, and three Salvation Army officers had come around to sing some hymns. They sang Amazing Grace – one of Mom’s favourites – and as I held her hand, her breathing slowed, and finally stopped. It was a good death, and for that we shall be always profoundly grateful. A year later, the ordinary orchid I took home is still in bloom.

We are really remarkably good in this culture at fixing people up. But we are remarkably bad at helping them to die with dignity and grace. Mom’s death taught me what a gift that is – and what a lot of work we have to do.

Adler: Accidents follow Rae

By Charles Adler,QMI Agency

First posted: Friday, May 27, 2011 2:00:00 EDT AM

There are some Liberal supporters who believe the Liberals have married up — dumping the Visiting Professor and shacking up with the Visiting NDPer.

After Michael Ignatieff took the election bullet, an arrangement was made for a so-called interim leader.

Since the “accident,” Liberals are not trusted to pick leaders at conventions.

The accident was that December weekend in Montreal when Stephane Dion, with fewer than one out of five delegates on the first ballot, emerged as leader.

Pro-Rae people, like Bob Rae, have brooded about the accident for nearly five years, believing if Gerard Kennedy had done the right thing and not thrown his arms around Stephane Dion, the Liberal brand would not have sunk like a stone.

Never mind that Ignatieff is the one who commanded the most support on the first ballot. Never mind that if Rae had even a light dusting of real statesmanship, he would have immediately wrapped his arms around Ignatieff and you would not have had the convention ending with people walking out during Dion’s acceptance speech.

It was the most absurd spectacle I had ever seen. It was a room-service outcome for the Conservatives. Their observers were the only ones in the building who were genuinely happy with the outcome. Rae has been working the outcome like a dagger.

He has some of Dion’s blood on the blade and now some of Ignatieff’s. He couldn’t win the leadership of an Ontario-based party through democratic means. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy has been slow but ultimately successful.

There is no need here to rehash why Ontarians who are not dead or suffering from amnesia are not fans of Rae.

No NDP historian can ever forget the number six. It was the low-water mark for the NDP nationally. And we have yet to hear an apology from Rae for having taken the NDP brand down to that level.

Nationally, the party in 1993, after three years of Rae at the helm of the Ontario NDP, received only 6% of the vote in the federal election. Even the Greens managed a 6.8% in the 2008 general election.

Some people may have selective amnesia about the 1993 election and Rae’s negative impact on his own party.

Jean Chretien ran the table that year. The Kim Campbell Tories were reduced to two seats. Everyone remembers that.

What’s much less remembered is the Ontario caucus of the NDP was completely shut out. Because Rae was in charge of the NDP provincially, the brand in Ontario had become contaminated. Not a single NDP member from Ontario was elected in 1993. Not one.

Rae’s defenders say there should be asterisk beside the five years of agony for Ontario during his reign.

After all, the country was in recession, we’re told. No premier would have come out looking good. You can call that spin another accident story. Accidents seem to follow Rae everywhere he goes.

Several months from now, you may be reading that there really is no money on the balance sheet for a real leadership convention and there aren’t any really big names coming forward to claim the booby prize called the Liberal leadership. You may read that since Bob Rae is doing an OK job, they may just take the interim horns off his head. Some professional con men will tell you it’s just another accident.

Hasan Nuhanović

In 1992, Hasan Nuhanović and his family fled the violence in their hometown of Vlasenica but got only as far as Srebrenica.

United Nations peacekeepers arrived in Srebrenica in 1993, and Nuhanović found a job with them as a translator. When the Bosnian Serb army attacked Srebrenica in 1995, Nuhanović and his family sought shelter at the UN base with some 30,000 other civilians.

The Dutch UN peacekeepers handed the civilians over to the Bosnian Serbs, who separated men from women and children. Nuhanović was allowed to stay on the base because of his job. He desperately sought permission for his family to remain as well.

Nuhanović's parents and brother were forced off the UN base. All three were among the 8,000 Bosniaks killed by the Serbs.

Nuhanović has since learned some details about where and how his family was killed, but their remains have not been found.

Watch his video HERE - from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A child’s biology is not a matter of choice

Barbara Kay 

Last Updated: May 24, 2011 6:00 PM ET – NATIONAL POST

In 1978, a children’s book was published called X: A Fabulous Child’s Story, about a child with no gender. X liked both football and basket-weaving, ignored schoolyard teasing and ended up as the happiest, most well-adjusted child ever examined by “an impartial team of experts.”

What are the odds of two utopians, married to each other and both blinkered enough to find this unrealistic story so “compelling” they would use it as a template for raising their own child?

Meet one-in-a-trillion Toronto couple Kathy Witterick, 38, and David Stocker, 39, parents of Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2 — both acknowledged to be boys — and their four-month-old baby Storm, knowledge of whose sex the parents are withholding because, after reading Lois Gould’s story, “How could we not?”

Their birth announcement to family and friends explains: “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place?).” To their annoyance, they are spending a lot of time defending their decision.

Close observers reportedly are uncomfortable. They are especially troubled that Storm’s two brothers have been co-opted into collusion with the scheme and, well-rehearsed, assiduously self-monitor their own discourse about “Z,” the neutral replacement for “he” or “she.”

Friends are right to feel troubled. The obvious message these children are tasked with transmitting is that it is shameful to identify, let alone take pride in, one’s own sex.

Jazz and Kio will doubtless “out” their baby brother/sister by accident, but perhaps not too soon, because they live in something of a bubble. They are “unschooled,” a variant of home schooling, but without the structured pedagogy. In unschooling, children learn on demand. Reading, math, baking cupcakes, jumping in mudpuddles in whatever time proportions the child decides: It’s all good.

But what seems like complete freedom to express themselves is illusory. Deny it as they will, Witterick and Stocker are ideologically programming their children. It is no accident that Jazz and Kio are “almost exclusively assumed to be girls” by Witterick’s own admission, or that Jazz (wearing hair braids and pink clothes) refuses to answer a reporter’s question as to why the thought of attending school with other children upsets him (there have already been a few teasing incidents with peers), or happens to love a book called 10,000 Dresses, the story of a boy who enjoys dressing up in girls’ clothes. (Has he even been exposed to Bob the Builder?)

Witterick and Stocker are what I call “Ouija board” parents. Ouija board users believe that the planchette is moving of its own accord under their fingers to “answer” their questions. Witterick and Stocker insist that their children’s lives are unfolding spontaneously. But these animated planchettes are merely responding to parental guiding hands virtually pushing them into what some of us might recognize as heterophobia. This is a “progressive” ideology that would happily sacrifice a child’s identity on the altar of bogus social engineering.

Once they emerge from their protected environment, these guinea pigs may end up as social martyrs. But Witterick rejects criticism: “Everyone keeps asking us, ‘When will this end?’ And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?”

Free will has its limitations. One such limitation is human biology. The denial of biological reality by highly educated, but humanly naive “progressives” — and their choice to privilege the “world” over the needs and rights of their own children — speaks more to their narcissism than to their idealism.

The book about X, the child with no gender, is a product of second-wave feminism’s fevered mania for erasing biological essentialism. Its author was apparently convinced that if you merely willed human nature’s demise, a post-gender society was no dream. But to anyone with common sense, the story is a ludicrous fantasy, inspiration fit only for comic exploitation, like the Here’s Pat series on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s.

Up to now, according to a media report, some of Witterick’s and Stocker’s friends and family have chosen to be supportive of the couple’s experiment. They would do those children a greater service if they deferred to their judgmental gut instincts. This misguided couple needs intervention before their adult folie à deux becomes a children’s tragedy à trois.

Marrying up and cheating down

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Last updated Tuesday, May. 24, 2011 8:02AM EDT

 

Forgive my prurient interest, but I can’t help myself. The spectacular implosion of the Sperminator has stoked my curiosity. Why would a man who’s married to a thoroughbred like Maria Shriver cheat on her with a plump Mexican housekeeper? Why would this man think he could keep his love child(ren) a secret? And how could Maria not have known?

The sex antics of the rich and famous are often riveting, and sometimes even consequential. They are the modern version of morality plays. The downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with its shattering impact on European politics and on the smug assumptions of the French political-cultural-media elite, is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimension (or, at the very least, the makings of a great novel). The adulterous adventures of Arnie are more the stuff of farce. But both tales raise uncomfortable questions about class and race, the bad behaviour of powerful men, and the good wives who choose to stand by them (until they don’t).

Imagine the tête-à-tête between DSK and Anne Sinclair, his American-born wife, when she bailed him out of Rikers. She must have wanted to bash his brains out. They must have had one of those upper-class French-style marriages, in which both partners (or, at any rate, the husband) are free to conduct their sex lives as they want, so long as they don’t embarrass the other. (I’ve noticed that this deal invariably works better for men.) But now, he has utterly humiliated her. If I were her, I’d have let him rot in jail for another few weeks.

Is it possible that these two women had no idea what kind of men they were married to? Of course they did. But when the stakes are high enough, you can go to astonishing lengths to deceive yourself. Both Maria Shriver and Anne Sinclair chose powerful and charismatic husbands. Both invested their own position and identity (and, in Ms. Sinclair’s case, her fortune) in the marriage. Maria has four not-quite-adult kids. With that much at stake, denial becomes an extremely attractive option.

As for why Arnie chose the housekeeper to fool around with, let me guess. Because he could. There was a high convenience factor. I bet she didn’t give him too much lip. And she was obviously discreet. If you’re running for governor, that’s a plus. Besides, if you have a high-powered, high-maintenance wife, a low-maintenance mistress might seem rather relaxing – especially when you don’t even have to leave the house.

Both DSK and Arnie married for advantage. DSK married money, and Arnie married royalty. Maria Shriver’s Kennedy connections conferred respectability on the former muscleman. Because she stood by him, he survived the (highly credible) allegations of hitting on unwilling women. That’s why his betrayal is so slimy. She made him. In return, he fooled around in their own house (and even bed, according to the tabloid press). His two sons, one by Maria and one by the housekeeper, were born within weeks of each other. He took the kids on holidays together. How cute.

There’s a world of difference between a consensual affair and an alleged assault on a hotel chambermaid. But both stories meet the disgust test. You can’t help thinking of the bad old days, when the lord of the chateau (or the plantation) just assumed he was entitled to help himself to the dark-skinned woman in the kitchen. Consensual or not, these men were on power trips. In each case the man had unusual power, and the woman relatively none. As for the good wife in the parlour – all her options were rotten.

Adler: Ah-nold feeding frenzy — who's next?

By Charles Adler ,QMI Agency

First posted: Friday, May 20, 2011 2:00:00 EDT AM

It hasn’t been a great week for Arnold Schwarzenegger — a.k.a. the Sperminator.

The man who only weeks ago was commanding big bucks to deliver motivational speeches to Canadian audiences is now seen as a lying, licentious lothario. However, it does force people to ask, are we truly surprised?

May I rudely interrupt your thinking with another question or two? Do we really need more surprises in our lives? Don’t we have enough uncertainty in all the things that really matter to us? In a world where uncertainty is knocking at every door, isn’t it good to know that there are still things of which we can be certain:

1) We can be certain that a guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger has bench-pressed a lot of flesh, pumped a lot of iron and, like many rich and powerful pop-culture celebrities, avoided a lot of responsibility.

2) We can be certain that the Sperminator could have kept on sperminating had it not been for his callowness, callousness and ultimately, his carelessness.

3) We can be certain that in the world of privilege where the Schwarzeneggers live, sperm whales are only brought down by their harpoons.

4) We can be certain that the actor known for the line “I’ll be back” will indeed be back in a matter of months, if not weeks. The world of popular culture has an unquenchable appetite for flawed human beings.

5) We can be certain that Jay Leno will roll out the red carpet the moment the Sperminator wants to sit on the couch and hear Leno utter that famous question he once asked the man who cheated on Elizabeth Hurley, “What were you thinking?”

6) We can be certain that Dr. Phil is just pining for the day he can mount the Sperminator on the secular TV Cross and drive that folksy cornball of a nail into those bulging biceps. “How’s that workin’ out for you?”

7) We can be certain that Maria Shriver will be psychoanalyzed by all the Dr. Phil wannabes who will tell her that growing up in the Kennedy clan she was imprinted with the image of “bad boy” men.

8) We can be certain that Maria will be told there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between a bodybuilder from Austria and a bootlegger from Boston.

9) We can be certain that when we hear the predictable psychobabble, most of us will nod and scratch and yawn and channel surf, hoping to find another story of a big-name somebody behaving like a nobody.

10) We can be certain the 24/7 show-business machine will deliver that person to our computers, smartphones and TV screens and we will feign curiosity for a few hours or a few days because there is one eternal truth that all of us must face: In our so-called busy lives, we are never too busy to offer way too much of our time to people we never really knew, never really cared about and never will.

Rolex Boy turns over the Rolex and becomes a man in Haiti

Our infamous Rolex Boy, a.k.a. Paul Shull, is a changed man after a recent visit to Haiti. And, he wants to go back!

Here's how the experience changed him:

 

Well I'm lying in bed and wondering how I can possibly sum up Haiti on my crappy iPhone, here is a few things that come to mind...

I have truly seen what poverty really is.

I have seen abuse.

I have seen a city that's always on the brink of civil unrest.

I now know what it feels like to be truly unsafe and in a situation you can't buy your way out of.

I have seen UN troops and armored personal carriers protecting a grocery store.

I have seen children that sleep on metal bed frames with no mattress.

I have seen cholera.

I have seen malnutrition.

I have seen 25 kids approach a barbed wire fence hoping to get fed every second day.

I have seen victims of voodoo.

I have paid countless bribes to get building supplies loaded on and then off the same truck.

I have felt useless.

I have felt angry.

I have fallen in love with atleast 50 kids.

And 50 more I haven't met.

I couldn't WAIT to get out of that hole and now...

I CANNOT WAIT TO GO BACK!

 

If you'd like to donate, or help out, click HERE, or email Paul Shull directly at paul@shullmgt.com

Arnold's Baby Mama and Maria Shriver were pregnant at the same time

Maria Shriver and Mildred Patricia Baena were pregnant at the same time, according to website TMZ. And, the kids were born less than a week apart!

 

Today's cartoon from Le Journal de Montreal

 

Baby receives pat-down at Kansas City airport

By Joy Jernigan Senior Travel Editor

msnbc.com 5/11/2011 - MSNBC

A photo posted on Twitter of a baby receiving a pat-down at Kansas City International Airport is the latest in a number of recent highly publicized incidents of airport security screenings involving young children.

The photo taken by Kansas City pastor Jacob Jester on Saturday and posted on Twitter has been viewed nearly 300,000 times.

"I really didn't stop to think about what would happen," Jester told msnbc.com. "I just snapped a picture."

Jester said he was traveling to Albuquerque on Saturday when he noticed the woman behind him was traveling with a baby about the same age as his son. He had just passed through security when he looked back and saw the baby receiving the pat-down.

"My thinking was, this is an extreme measure. I wouldn't want that to happen to my own son," Jester said.

Jester, who said that he doesn't know the woman and her baby, snapped a picture with his phone and posted it on Twitter. "Just saw #tsa agents patting down a little baby at @KCIAirport. Pretty sure that’s extreme.”

The Transportation Security Administration posted a response on its blog: "We reviewed the screening of this family, and found that the child’s stroller alarmed during explosives screening. Our officers followed proper current screening procedures by screening the family after the alarm, who by the way were very cooperative and were on the way to their gate in no time."

TSA screeners are instructed to use a modified pat-down for children 12 and younger, according to the agency's website.

The latest incident follows recent highly publicized complaints over airport security screening procedures, including an 8-year-old boy who received a pat-down at Portland International Airport and parents upset after their six-year-old was frisked in New Orleans. Former Miss USA Susie Castillo also recently filed a complaint with TSA, claiming in a video that went viral that she felt "violated" after her groin area was touched four times during a security screening.

Jester said that he has great respect for the TSA and their efforts to keep the flying public safe.

"I'm not out to embarrass the TSA," Jester said. "But I do believe there has to be a line drawn. I do not believe that an 8-month-old constitutes a security threat."