Category Archives: Medical

The Well of Memory

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This post was a “sticky” feature and was on top throughout fundraising week. Scroll down for the whole week’s worth of more recent items.

Autumn Fundraiser 2019, Day Seven

Sunday’s Update: Madonna and Child

At last! We’ve arrived at the final day of Gates of Vienna’s quarterly fundraising week. After today I’ll stop bugging you for three more months.

Tip jarBut this morning I’ll take this final opportunity to remind everyone what this week is all about: Modest donations from lots and lots of readers provide enough wherewithal to keep this website going. The generosity of our donors has enabled us — and now it’s only me — to get by every quarter. Just barely, but I get by.

I’ll have to postpone indulging my taste for champagne and caviar until one of my relatives gets elected to high office and arranges a place for me on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, with a nice seven-figure annual stipend…

If you’ve only just discovered this fall’s bleg, or if you haven’t already hit the tip cup, please go over to the sidebar and make it clink. Alternatively, you can use this handy link.

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My final installment concerning Memory for this fundraising week will be a few more reminiscences of my time with Dymphna.

The photo at the top of this update shows Dymphna and the future Baron. It was taken in the late 1980s, in the late summer or early fall. That summer had been hot and dry — there was a devastating drought early on, in May and June. In some of the photos from June the grass is utterly withered and brown. But by the time this photo was taken there had obviously been some rain, because plenty of green is visible in the background.

When I came across this photo recently, I looked at Dymphna’s face, and it seemed so recent — there she was! And then I looked at the fB — he obviously wasn’t yet two years old. That means that more than thirty years have passed since that early autumn afternoon.

I can remember a lot about what happened between then and now. A few years after the photo was taken I taught the future Baron to read and write, and made him do his sums. Then Dymphna’s mother came to live with us, and I took care of her for a year until she died.

All through the ’90s we were quite poor. I was painting pictures, and not making any significant money doing it. Dymphna was a social worker, and then later had her own housecleaning business. She kept us afloat, but all those years were pretty lean.

Yet we never lacked for anything. My son had no idea we were poor. He had a VCR and lots of videos. I made sure to take him to the beach at least once every summer. We didn’t get to stay at any high-toned beach accommodations, mind you, but that didn’t matter to him — he was just a kid. Staying in a little cabin and eating at Burger King was fine with him.

Just before Y2K I had to stop home-schooling him, because my skills in chemistry and physics were minimal. We sent him to private school, and I found well-paying work as a programmer so that we could afford it. The Lord provided. It worked out.

Just before he graduated from high school, his sister Shelagh, Dymphna’s daughter, died of a methadone overdose. The fB went off to college, and Dymphna went into a tailspin that she never really recovered from.

The foundation of this blog was my idea: I thought it might help her work through the pain of grieving. And it did. Most of you have seen her early work on this site, either when she originally wrote it twelve or fifteen years ago, or in the reposts I’ve been doing since she died. She was a powerhouse of a writer, and putting her heart into her essays help bring her back to the land of the living. Even as her condition worsened (she suffered from fibromyalgia), she kept at it as much as she could, right up until the end.

And now here I am, maintaining the site by myself and dealing with my own pain of grieving. My wife is gone, but she lives on in her writings, and is ever-present with me in this empty house that we shared for forty years.

I will always remember her, as long as memory remains.

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Keeping an Eye

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I returned a little while ago from the retinologist’s office, where he gave me the latest periodic injection in my left eye, which is being treated for wet macular degeneration.

The good news is that my eyes are doing so well that I don’t have to go in again for three months. Even better: if the condition of my left eye remains stable till then, I may be allowed another hiatus in the ejections. I went almost four years without one in the past (2014-2018), so I remain hopeful.

I’m not back to full functioning yet, so posting will be somewhat light for the rest of the evening. However, I may post a couple of items, and there will be a news feed.

A Return to Normalcy

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This post was a “sticky” feature, first posted last Monday, and was on top throughout fundraising week. Scroll down for more recent items, including the killing of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, a Swedish municipal bus used as a mosque, an essay on Björn Höcke and the AfD, Onan driving a Swedish bus, two reports on the sword murder in Stuttgart, the latest on Matteo Salvini, and last night’s news feed.

Summer Fundraiser 2019, Day Six

Saturday’s update

OK, folks we’ve arrived at the weekend. The Summer fundraiser is almost over, and normal programming will soon resume.

Tip jarThe theme of this week’s bleg is the return to normalcy, that is, to routine. During any given fundraising week, donations from Texas, California, Michigan, Illinois, and Australia are routine. But three of yesterday’s locations definitely are not part of the routine: Israel, New Zealand, and Newfoundland. We get a few donors here and there from the first two — just a few — but as far as I know, we only get one from up there by the Grand Banks.

So here’s to the outliers! Thank you for making the donation statistics that much more variegated and entertaining.

For those of you who are just joining us: this is how I keep this blog alive. When Dymphna was still with us, she would share posting chores with me, regaling potential donors on alternate mornings with her wit and whimsy to persuade them to hit the tip cup on the sidebar (or this link) and contribute to the upkeep of the site — and to keep its proprietors from going hungry for another quarter.

Now there’s just one proprietor, but I still need your help to stay out of the bread line.

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Gates of Vienna has its own weekly rhythm, its own pattern of routine. Or, rather, it used to.

In the early years of this website I was working in Richmond. I would drive down there during the week and come home on weekends. During those few days I spent at home I had the luxury of writing posts and participating in the blog to an extent that I couldn’t match during the week.

Back in those days, I designated Saturday as either Ranting Day or Poetry Day, depending on my mood. If it was time to rant, I could include a graphic of the Ranting Man, as seen here on the left. I love the Ranting Man, and I reserve him for special occasions, not wanting to squander him gratuitously (as I have just now done).

But this Saturday is Poetry Day. And, in honor of the first fundraiser without Dymphna, I’ll feature one of her poems.

Dymphna was an accomplished poet. She only had a few published, in local newspapers and college magazines, but she left behind a rich legacy of unpublished work.

The poem below tells a true story. She wrote it almost a quarter-century ago, shortly after the events it describes. We had somehow acquired a rooster, as a favor to a friend. His harem of hens had been attritted to nothing, and we agreed to give the sorrowful fellow a home. For a while.

He turned out to be an annoyingly violent #$&#!?%! as a guest. Those spurs on his legs were vicious — one time he cut a long slash in my pants leg. So we only kept him for a while; we passed him on to an elderly country woman who had lengthy experience with roosters, and knew how to keep them in line.

I’ll let Dymphna tell the rest of the story:

Rooster Lessons

by Dymphna

He was quintessential pride:
Quick, iridescent and verbose.
His auburn head cocked to look
At me, his comb trembling,
The rumble of his song,
The macho tilt of his tail feathers—
I was enchanted.

Never trust a rooster
Who’s been deposed.
He has problems with attachment,
And the angry edginess
Gives way to bilious melancholy,
As befits a man bereft
Of his women and position.
There is no cure.

How much his chicken brain
Retained of his former life
Is hard to say.
To be unchosen is lonely enough;
To be deposed is a worse fate:
The shame of losing face, place,
With no one to crow for…
An autarch cannot live so.

Our rooster didn’t even try.
He crowed despairingly at odd hours.
He left the cat alone,
But the rest of us were targets
For his rage and loneliness.
Going outside, however stealthily,
Brought him running sideways,
Wings spread, spurs ready.
He gouged a neighbor’s dog.

Held hostage by a rooster.
We eyed each other:
Him on the porch,
Me behind the storm door.
He in rage,
Me in speculation.
How to douse this feathered fire?

Ah, modern medicine:
I waited for him to wander off
And mixed a batch of wheat germ —
His favorite grain —
With a healthy dose of Klonopin
And quickly spread it on the porch floor

Dumb bird ate it all,
Brown and pink fragments
Disappearing down his greedy beak.
Becalmed, he let himself be led
To start another life,
Penned in with guinea fowl.
I hope he finds some solace there.

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Friday’s gifts came in from:

Stateside: Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, and New Hampshire

Far Abroad: Israel, New Zealand, and the UK

Canada: Newfoundland

Australia: New South Wales

Friday’s update

The action in the tip cup (or at this link) really livened up yesterday after Western Rifle Shooters posted a link to this week’s bleg.

Tip jarA WRSA link often causes a sudden, distinct surge of donations. I can sometimes deduce what’s happening even before I see the post over there — I can tell by the fact that most of the new gifts come in from Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, North Dakota, and other locations out there on the Wild Frontier.

So thank you, WRSA. And a special thank-you to WRSA readers who came over here.

The issue of the right to keep and bear arms is looming large in American culture and politics right now, due to the recent mass shootings. Such events always induce a mad rush towards gun control, even among Republicans. When that happens, devotees of the Second Amendment hurry out to buy more guns and ammo before the next anti-gun law is passed.

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The theme of this week’s fundraiser is the return to normalcy. I’ve talked about personal normalcy — that is, my finding a new routine in the midst of grieving — and I’ve talked about the lunacy that passes as the new “normal” in 21st-century politics.

This morning I’ll cover normalcy as it applies to Gates of Vienna. Long-time readers have already heard about the routine workflow at this website, so they can skip this overview if they wish. But newcomers may be interested.

Besides the news feed, there are three principal functions that I strive to perform here: (1) Posting original articles and essays on Counterjihad matters and other topics of interest; (2) Posting translated articles and essays that might otherwise not be available in English; and (3) Creating translated and subtitled videos.

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The Lack of Repose

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As of very early this morning, it has been one month since my wife died.

These have been by far the hardest thirty days of my life, much worse than the time after the death of my father (which was very hard). I don’t know what the experience of divorce is like, since I’ve only been married once. Maybe it’s as bad as this. And I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse about whom one had been ambivalent — I had never been ambivalent about Dymphna. All I know is the depth of how much I miss her.

My goal is to keep this site running in more or less its accustomed form. To some extent the American side of the news will be lacking — Dymphna and I divided our functions more than a decade ago: I specialized in European affairs, and she specialized in the USA. I’ll be looking at American issues in attempt to make up for the lack of my better half, but I won’t be able to watch the number of videos she watched. For the last few years of her life she absorbed her information mostly through videos, since she could watch those on her little tablet while sitting up in bed.

[To see a chilling video that Dymphna would almost certainly have posted if she were around, check out this excerpt from Tucker Carlson’s program (hat tip JLH), which features an interview with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).]

The main problem for me right now is that I don’t really want to do anything. I feel an obligation to keep Gates of Vienna going, obviously, and I know that going to work every day — which is effectively what this is — will eventually enable me to pass through the worst of my grief. The landscape around me looks bleak and uninviting, but I expect that to change gradually as I maintain my routine over the next few months.

Writing about my misery from time to time will probably also be helpful. Putting these things down in words makes me think about them carefully, and thus gain a better understanding of what’s happening.

In a different context Wallace Stevens wrote (in “The Lack of Repose”):

And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.

There’ll be no book from all of this, just a series of occasional jottings.

They say you can get used to anything. Over the past six years I’ve gotten used to the occasional injections that I have to receive in my left eye to prevent a recurrence of wet macular degeneration. It’s a horrible experience, but I got used to it.

I had one of those injections this afternoon, the first one since Dymphna died. That’s why I’m not doing much this evening.

But I don’t know if I can get used to the absence of my wife. I’ll just have to wait and see.

Two Laments

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Years ago I used to assign Saturday as either Ranting Day or Poetry Day, depending on my mood. Yesterday I was busy with other things, so this week Sunday will have to serve as Poetry Day.

The first of the two poems below was written by Dymphna. It is possibly her greatest poem. She wrote it in the mid-1990s, a few months after her mother died.

Some context is in order: Dymphna’s mother married a man from a wealthy Irish family when she was young. For reasons I won’t go into here, he abandoned his wife and their two children when the latter were still infants. Dymphna’s mother became destitute, and there was no welfare in Florida at that time, so she had to go off to work. For several years the children were placed with various foster families, where conditions ranged from awful to severely abusive.

The priest at Dymphna’s mother’s church eventually helped her place her son and daughter at separate orphanages, one for boys and one for girls, where they were to remain until they were ten or eleven — i.e. old enough to be latchkey kids.

Her poem describes the moment she and her brother were separated from their mother and from each other to be taken to the orphanages. At the time she wrote these verses, her brother had been estranged from his mother and sister for many years, and no one knew where he was. She assumed he was dead, probably of heart disease, since all her mother’s brothers had died that way when they were relatively young. But he wasn’t dead: her cousin was able to locate him, and Dymphna and her brother began an intermittent correspondence that continued until his death last year.

This, then, was her lament:

Lament for My Brother

It was so long ago
Those who stopped my tears
Then, who could not countenance
My guttural sorrow,
Are no doubt dead
Or disarmed by age and distance.

It was so long ago.
Yet my tears are the solvent
Melting the time between here
And then. I am five again.
The little brother being forced
From my arms is four.
We are crying, in the moment before
We learn it is not allowed.

It was so long ago.
Yet the wrench of grief
Tightens my throat now
Brings me to my knees here.
The void where my little brother
Was is hollowed out still;
I cannot fill it.

It was so long ago.
Yet the loss is as current
As the moment here before us.
The gods to whom all moments are one
Who do not understand
My linear “long ago”
Cannot hear my plea
To protect him.

It was so long ago.
He’s no doubt dead by now.
The men in my family die young
Whether they stay or flee.
The women in my family don’t teach
Them how to use their hearts.
The men succumb when
Flight is no longer possible
And they are overtaken
By feeling.

It was so long ago.

The second poem was written in the early 17th century by the great metaphysical poet John Donne. Fifty years ago I had to study the metaphysical poets intensively for A-level English Literature. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, but in those days a student was expected to quote at length from the assigned poetry at the exam, working entirely from memory. Thus, in preparation for the exam I memorized reams of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughn, Crashaw, etc.

I memorized three of the five stanzas of the following poem, and they’re still here in my head, intact after half a century. However, we were also required to present them in the original 17th-century spelling, and unfortunately that aspect of the task has largely evaporated (although I do remember that “festival” was spelled “festivall”).

In this poem Donne is mourning the death of his wife, for whom he grieved deeply. The conceit is that he is writing it at midnight on St. Lucy’s Day, the shortest day of the year. Dymphna’s case is the opposite: she, too, died at about midnight, but her death was almost exactly at Midsummer’s.

A technical note: the “Goat” to which the lesser (i.e. weaker) sun has run is the constellation Capricorn, in which the winter solstice falls.

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Thank You, Gates of Vienna Readers

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When I put up the post about Dymphna’s death early last week, I obviously wasn’t begging for money. It wasn’t fundraiser time or anything. I was just notifying readers that there weren’t going to be any posts for a while, and explained why.

When I saw the response over the next couple of days, I was astonished. Almost 400 people commented before I closed the comments on that post, many of them people who never commented before, or did so only rarely. Without my knowledge — and without any urging by me — a regular reader and commenter set up a GoFundMe initiative to cover funeral expenses. Now that he has handed over access to the fund, I can see the list of donors, and I thank you for your generosity.

For those who would like to contribute, the page is here. Between the GoFundMe and individual PayPal donations, a not insignificant portion of the funeral expenses has been covered. If the total amount ever matches my outlays, I’ll tell our readers: “Hey, you can stop now!” Any excess over that amount will be donated to a reputable local charity that assists victims of sexual assault, including children. It’s the same one the family asked people to donate to in lieu of sending flowers.

I always told Dymphna that she had lots of fans, and I think this proves I was right.

Everyone who donated (if I have an email address for them) will get a thank you note, and I’ll eventually reply to all the emailed messages of condolence. But it will take me a while; there were a LOT of them.

In the meantime, I’ll tell all of you here: THANK YOU!

The Ground Has Been Closed

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I buried my wife late yesterday afternoon in the graveyard of our little rural church in Central Virginia. The Episcopalian service was everything that one could have hoped for, and I know that Dymphna was pleased with the liturgy, the music, and the fellowship in the parish hall after the Committal.

A year or two ago, after a discussion about this eventuality, Dymphna gave her assent to the publication of the photo below. It was the only photo of her that she would allow to be posted. It was taken a number of years ago, in happier times.

Discussions about her eventual demise became more and more frequent in recent years, as her condition gradually worsened. She would tell me what she did and didn’t want for her funeral and so on, and I promised to honor her wishes. The most recent such conversation occurred last Thursday, when we were talking about Protestant hymns. Since she was raised a Catholic, she didn’t really know any Protestant hymns until she became an Episcopalian. I asked her which ones she liked. She named a few, and then said, “I really love ‘There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy’. I want that at my funeral.”

I honored her wish.

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Dymphna and I first met forty years ago last month. We had a small celebration for the occasion. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it to our fortieth wedding anniversary.

On our first date we went out to dinner to the Double T Diner in the southern suburbs of Baltimore. I was attracted to her for all the normal reasons, of course; but what really made us fall in love with each other was our intellectual compatibility. Her fields were theology, philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and poetry. Mine were mathematics, art, science, linguistics, literature, history, and poetry. So we had some overlap, but the territory where we had the greatest meeting of minds was in poetry. Both of us loved to read poetry, and both of us wrote it. Sitting there in that diner over dinner, I found out that she knew about Wallace Stevens — amazing! I had never met a woman who had read Wallace Stevens, never mind understood him. In the next few weeks she introduced me to poets I hadn’t read, and I did the same for her.

We were both head-over-heels. In due course she moved down here and we got married. Now that she is gone, I’m allowed to tell you that she was ten years older than I. We agreed that we were fortunate the difference was only ten years. Still, it was anxiety-inducing to contemplate the age gap. I remember thinking about it back in those early days, when I was so happy. I did the actuarial estimate in my head and said to myself, “Well, I think I can expect to get forty years.”

That’s what I got. And I’m so grateful for every one of them.

In the summer of 1979 I suddenly acquired three teenage stepchildren. That was a learning experience like no other, but I won’t go into any details here. Suffice it to say that the two surviving stepchildren were down here in the house all week, along with the future Baron. I can’t tell you how gratified it made me to have them all here.

The extent to which I will miss her is hard to describe. Any time I had some insight or question about current events, politics, history, religion, sociology, or any other general intellectual topic, I knew I could always count on her being interested and engaged in a discussion about it. The future Baron can tell you how interesting (and sometimes heated) our dinner-table conversations were.

That is what I will miss the most. During the past five days, when something important occurred, I found myself thinking, “I must tell her about this.” And then it hit me — the person to whom I could tell all the stories is no longer here.

It’s going to be a hard time for a while.

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Although her condition had been slowly deteriorating for fifteen years, Dymphna’s death was sudden. On Friday she was outside working on the flowerbeds. On Saturday the fever and cough came back. Early Sunday evening I had to take her to the emergency room, and she died just after midnight, before she was even admitted to the hospital. I was with her during her last moments.

Dymphna wrote the following poem in the mid-1990s, a few months after her mother died under similar circumstances. The month and time of day are slightly different, but in other respects the poem is exactly descriptive of last Monday’s events. Two of her sons read it out to the congregation during the eulogy portion of yesterday’s funeral:

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Sad News, and a Blogging Hiatus

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Dymphna died suddenly last night, or more accurately, early this morning. I took her to the emergency room early in the evening; she had a high fever and a terrible cough. But it didn’t seem like anything that could ever be fatal.

I will be pretty much out of action until at least after the funeral, so this blog is officially on hiatus for a while. I’ll be back, though, when I’m ready to handle things again.

Tipsters are advised not to send any more news feed tips until you see another post appear here besides this one.

I’ve been up all night, so that’s all for now.

More Mailbox Woes, and Other News

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I got my bimonthly eye injection this afternoon (to treat my macular degeneration), which put me out of action for most of the evening — that’s why you didn’t see any further posts after the one about Steen that I put up this morning.

I’ll take this opportunity to catch up on a couple of fundraising matters I’ve been dilatory about. The first concerns thank-you emails that bounced. We had some sort of mail server problem for a few days after the spring fundraiser last month, and an unusual number of thank-you notes were returned. I re-sent them all, and some of those got through, but three came back again with permanent failures, from donors in North Carolina, Florida, and Alberta. So if you’re a donor who lives in one of those three places, and didn’t get a note from us, that’s probably why.

Finally, here’s something I should have done almost a month ago, but kept procrastinating about: listing the final roster of places for the people who donated. In a way this is better, because I get to include any places for donations that came in later in April, after fundraising week was over.

Donations for our spring fundraiser came in from:

Stateside: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and the U.S. Military (APO)

Far Abroad: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK

Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland, Ontario, and Saskatchewan

Australia: Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Tasmania, and Victoria

Many thanks to everyone who chipped in!

I Once Was Blind…

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A cautionary tale about centralized medicine:

Thousands of elderly people in Britain are left to go blind because of rationing of eye surgery in the National Health Service (NHS), a report revealed on Saturday (April 6).

The Times newspaper said a survey by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCO) found tens of thousands of elderly people are left struggling to see because of an NHS cost-cutting drive that relies on them dying before they can qualify for cataract surgery.

The survey has found that the NHS has ignored instructions to end cataract treatment rationing in defiance of official guidance two years ago.

The RCO said its survey has found 62 percent of eye units retain policies that require people’s vision to have deteriorated below a certain point before surgery is funded.

With more than 400,000 cataract operations carried out each year, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) concluded that there was no justification for policies that denied patients cataract removal surgery until they could barely see.

The RCO said that refusal to fund surgery was insulting and called into question the entire system through which the NHS approves treatments.

Ms Helen Lee of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) said: “Cataracts can have a dramatic impact on someone’s ability to lead a full and independent life, potentially stopping them from driving and increasing their chance of serious injury by falling. The NICE guidelines make it clear cataract surgery is highly cost-effective and should not be rationed. It is nonsensical for clinical commissioning groups to deny patients this crucial treatment.”

Ms Julie Wood, CEO of NHS Clinical Commissioners, which represents local funding bodies, defended the restrictions.

She told the Times: “NICE guidance is not mandatory and clinical commissioners must have the freedom to make clinically led decisions that are in the best interests of both individual patients and their wider local populations. The NHS does not have unlimited resources.”

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Having just experienced cataract surgery myself, I was curious as to how common it was and what the waiting period entailed. While one is on the operating table, there is time for conversation. So I asked the surgeon how many of these procedures he’d done. He thought for a moment and said, “probably several thousand by now. I have two days of surgery in this suite, and one at another site. I like to keep busy so a good day is between six and twelve patients. And of course, I see my patients the next day in a follow-up visit.” The whole thing, including prep and post, takes a bit more than an hour, and I was given every single phone contact the doctor has; they don’t want complications. And, yes, it is relatively painless. [Keep in mind that I’m comparing it to chronic fibromyalgia so a bit of stinging when the B puts in the multitude of eye drops for two weeks – the sting recedes – is the most tedious part.] Now, ten hours post-op, I am using both eyes to tell you about it.

In my early years of motherhood, I had some experience of “socialized” medical care while my then-husband was in the military. The docs were grumpy – they had to serve six years back then because of the draft. I liked the corpsmen, though. Very nice fellows and responsive to the needs of a young family. The docs? Not so much. When one pediatrician found out I was breastfeeding he gestured toward my infant and harumphed, “So when he grows up to be neurotic, will you blame it on his toilet training?”

Many Indian tribes report the same dissatisfaction with their government medical care, as do our veterans. One of the first things tribes do with their casino-funded bank accounts is to procure private medical care for everyone. The veterans don’t have that luxury.

Maybe Britain could start a lottery for health care. Brits love to bet. Besides, it worked for the Irish for many years.

I found a free Kindle Margaret Thatcher autobiography on Amazon. Haven’t gotten to her views on medical care but she was a true Methodist believer in local planning so I have my suspicions where this is going.

By tne way, the British method of politics seems eminently sane, as least compared to ours…and compared to what Thailand does, per H. Numan’s delightful essays.

Not Just Another April Fools’ Week

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This post was first published on April 1. It was a “sticky” feature for a week; scroll down for more recent items.

Spring Fundraiser 2019, Day Seven

Update from the Baron: Burnout

The theme of this week’s bleg has been the history of Gates of Vienna. My final update, which is somewhat tangential to the main theme, is burnout. Which is a significant concern for those of us who work full-time in this field.

Tip jarBut first the nuts and bolts of what we’ve been doing this week: This is a quarterly week-long begging exercise in which Dymphna and I blather on while asking our readers to drop money in our tip cup (or use this PayPal link). This is how we keep this website alive — we don’t have jobs, no foundation sponsors us, and there are no paid ads on the site. We don’t even get any Russian money, sad to say!

And now a few brief thoughts on burnout.

This is a tough line of work. If you pay close attention to the Great Jihad and related issues, you encounter nasty things that you’d really rather not see or hear about. Add to that the drumbeat of dhimmitude — the constant stream of news reports on the cultural and political submission of the West to Islam — and it gets pretty dispiriting.

To make matters even worse, there’s the vicious opprobrium that awaits anyone whose “Islamophobic” opinions and activities are exposed to public view. We’re fortunate to live out here in the back of beyond where most people are “deplorables” of one sort or another, and hardly anybody even pays attention to this sort of thing. But people who live in big cities, especially on the East or Left Coasts, can really pay a price if their opinions become public knowledge. Their lives can be made a living hell.

All of this is a recipe for burnout. I’ve seen a fair number of Counterjihadists burn out during the past fifteen years. Some of them were actually burned out of the game by flamethrowers directed at them during the Breivik crisis. But most just reached the limit of what they could take — “I really don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

This seems to be especially true of translators. In order to translate articles or videos, they have to pay close attention to the material, and read or listen to it over and over again. If, like most people, they had previously been averting their gaze from all that ugliness, the rush of evil information they take in day after day can really weigh them down. After a while their production starts to tail off, and they gradually retire from translation.

I admire the doughty folks who have stuck to the translation task year after year. They all deserve our gratitude for their persistence.

Vlad and I have been working together for ten years, and we help keep each other from going insane in the face of all the stuff we encounter. When we have to deal with something particularly vile, we get on the phone and discuss all the various aspects of it, which prevents the monstrousness from overwhelming us entirely. I remember how bad it got back during the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State was beheading its way through Syria and North Africa. We had to watch those nightmare-inducing videos all the time. I finally had to quit watching them — “I’ve seen enough, no more for me.” I don’t know how Vlad does it.

Anyway, I haven’t burned out, not yet. I plan to carry on with this work for as long as I possibly can.

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Saturday’s gifts flowed in from:

Stateside: Alaska, Arizona, California, Michigan, and Virginia

Far Abroad: Hungary, Israel, and the UK

Canada: Ontario

The spring fundraiser will be officially over this time tomorrow. I’ll post the wrap-up — including the final list of all the locations — a day or two later.

Dymphna’s Saturday Update:

With historical endeavors, it’s probably a wise thing to start with beginnings, though in this case we just jumped right into the middle. What were we thinking? Maybe it wasn’t thinking but more like enthusiasm — e.g. “Oh, let’s talk about that”. Whatever ‘that’ was… my mind begins to resemble a trackless waste with a few desiccated cacti.

Oh, before I forget again: at the beginning of each fundraiser post I’m supposed to make the plug for donations, please.

Dinero. Shekels. Dollars. [See the Baron for the etymological connections] In other words, money enough to keep us going to the next milestone, which is but a few months away, not counting timeslips. Or times’ lips — whichever touches us first.

Our donors have been a varied bunch. Their living circumstances run the gamut from pensione to mansion, with stops in between. Back when I could function I loved looking up all the places our donors lived. Coon Rapids?? Really? Why haven’t the PC town fathers ditched that one? Traverse City, from whence (I now know) come our cherries in summer. Looking up all those places meant it took me weeks to respond to donors and that would not end well: the B got nervous about the time lag. It still remains the case: give me a new donor to thank and I’m driven to know more about their locality. Betcha don’t know whence come many of the roses (plants) you buy at the nursery, hmm? I know now, or at least my knowledge was current a few years back. And it seems like nearly every American town has a Wikipedia page, no matter how small the hamlet. That’s a good thing.

For most of us, our equilibrium depends upon having a firm sense of place. Or as the nervous airplane passenger said, “the more the firma, the less terror”. [That’s a pun on “terra firma” and no, it can’t be removed.]

Gates of Vienna is now established as a place; a destination for those who read our random News Feed, just for one example. Some correspondents tell us this is where they go with their morning coffee.

For the B and me GoV has become where we live and move and have our being. It’s akin to housing a child who never leaves home, a permanent resident hunkering down in our divers computers, demanding attention. Electric outages and connectivity interruptions are far more freighted than they used to be before the advent of Gates of Vienna.

Many of you already know our beginnings, but I have the freedom of repeating myself at this stage. It’s one of the few privileges of age.

Continue reading →

Eye Contact

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I went in to the retinologist’s office this afternoon to get a bimonthly injection in my left eye, as a treatment for wet macular degeneration. That’s why posting has been light today: my vision has just now recovered to the point where I can look at the screen and type things.

Here in the family these treatments are referred to as “eye pokes”. I’ll say to Dymphna or the future Baron, for example: “Next week I have to go in and get my eye poked.”

As nasty medical procedures go, these treatments are not so bad. It helps that the retinologist’s office is an unusually friendly and efficient environment. The doctor has an excellent staff, several of whom have been there for the whole six years I’ve been going in.

They say that you can get used to anything, and now I can vouch for it. These eye injections have become a routine. A nasty, unpleasant routine, but a routine nevertheless. I know the drill by now: First they sit you down and have you take the eye test for both eyes. Then they give you a pressure test, to check for glaucoma. Then you get two different kinds of eye drops to dilate your pupils.

After that you wait for a while in a dimly-lit anteroom while your pupils dilate. There’s a large-screen TV there where they play DVDs from National Geographic — with the sound turned down, thank goodness. Some of those are very soothing and entertaining to watch.

Next they come to get you for a retinal scan. The equipment and software for that procedure are incredibly advanced now — 3D modeling, different layers, etc.

When that’s done they begin the process of numbing the eye that will get the injection. Four or five different kinds of drops are used for that. Then you sit in a chair in the treatment room and wait for the doctor to come. And then… Well, I don’t feel like describing the next part in detail. The good thing is that it doesn’t last very long. In fact, the entire process, from the moment I walk into the office until I check out, is usually 45 minutes to an hour. Much quicker than a primary care appointment.

If I don’t get a “dancing bubble”, my eye recovers more quickly. That’s a tiny bubble of air that more often than not tends to come in on the tip of the needle, and jiggles around in your visual field when you move your eye. Very unpleasant. But today I didn’t get one, which is why I can sit here and type so soon afterwards.

All in all, not a bad day, considering. On the way home in the car I listened to The Art of the Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080) by Johann Sebastian Bach, played on the pipe organ by Herbert Tachezi.

Keeping an Eye on Things

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I went to the retinologist’s office this afternoon for my bimonthly eye injection to control my condition (wet macular degeneration) and prevent further flare-ups. As a result, I’m kind of running on three cylinders this evening.

I’ll take this opportunity to do something I should have done weeks ago, which is to give a final wrap-up on our winter fundraiser.

The first item of business is that we had just one thank-you note bounce. It was sent to a donor in Alberta. So if you’re out there buried under the snowdrifts on the freezing plains, and never got an acknowledgement of your generosity, that’s the reason.

Here’s the final tally of locations for donors (right up through yesterday):

Stateside: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming

Far Abroad: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK

Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan

Australia: Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria

Getting an Eyeful…

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…Of medicine for macular degeneration — that’s what I’ve been doing today. I had my bi-monthly appointment with the retinologist this afternoon, and received another injection in my left eye.

Today’s injection, unlike the previous two, brought with it the Dancing Air Bubble, which always makes recuperation take a little longer. It’s kind of like “follow the dancing ball”, only you can’t follow it — when your eye moves, the ball goes with it.

That’s why posting has been light today. There will, however, be a news feed before bedtime.

Apropos of nothing: while I was out today, I saw a bumper sticker (pink background, black foreground) with two stylized cats and this text: “The Pussy Whisperer”.