Friday's Odds and Ends

Another week has whizzed by. I was busy all week preparing for the big garage sale at the Winnsboro Center For the Arts, which didn't leave much time for writing, but I did get a few thousand words done on my current work in progress. How was your week? I hope it was productive and, most of all, fun.
 

This is Sammy. He likes to take over my office chair.

 I was dismayed to read about a bridal shop in Akron Ohio that closed because of the fear of Ebola. Apparently, Amber Benson, the Dallas nurse who had Ebola, had been a customer at that store and when news of that was revealed, customer stopped going to the store. The owner, Anna Younker, was quoted as saying, "It's like our store had cooties."

How sad.

The attack on the newspaper in Paris, Charlie Hebdo, was still big news for another week, raising a continuous flurry of news reports and commentary on the Muslim religion and its penchant for violence. Too often the reporting insinuated that all Muslims are terrorists, and it is only the Islam religion that promotes violence. That is simply not true. Throughout history other religions including Christianity have been twisted to support the right to kill in the name of that religion. Just think about the Holocaust. Just think about the battles between Protestants and Catholics that went on for so many years in Ireland. The truth is that none of these religions promote violence. They all teach about love and peace and tolerance. It is people who take those religious beliefs and tenets and twist them to serve their own purposes.

Friday's Funnies starts with this from Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis. In the first panel Goat is talking on cell phone and says, "Hey dad, did you get the Ken Burns Civil War D.V.D. I sent you for your birthday?"

"Yeah what do I do with it?"

"You put it in the D.V.D. player I got you."

"Where?"

"In the little tray."

"What tray?"

"The little tray in the D.V.D. player."

"Which one is the D.V.D. player?"

"On top of the TV set."

Dad says, "Okay okay gimme a minute will ya.....? There okay I got it in and now I'm watching an explosion."

"Good. You're watching the Civil War?"

"No. No. The TV exploded."

Goat walks over to Pig and says, "Never by your parents anything invented in the last 30 years."

(I think my kids say that about me, too.)

This one is from Dustin by Steve Kelly and Jeff Parker. Dustin and his friend, Fitch, are in a convenience store. Fitch is holding a lottery ticket and says, "This is it Dustin. This is the one."

Dustin says, "Seriously Fitch? A lottery ticket?"

"Absolutely, Dude. I've got a feeling about this one."

"Fitch, why do you keep throwing away money on those things?"

"You can't win if you don't play, man."  Then Fitch scratches off the ticket, looks up and says, "Lost again. Man, I wish I had a dollar for every time that happened."
  
Today's Writing Wisdom comes from Xander Bennet from his blog post, How Not to Write a Screenplay that was first posted last spring. Xander is a a screenwriter and author and his blog is all about writing and film. In this post he has an extensive list of things not to do, and amidst the humor are some points we all could take to heart as we write, no matter what form our writing takes. Here are just a few of the things we should not do:

Agonize over your script’s title.
Start a pointless argument on Twitter.
Decide you need to do more research. Fall down a Wikipedia hole and forget what you were doing.
Change your screenwriting software.
Wait for your manager/agent/friend/reader to email you back.
Make more coffee; you need it.
Eat more snacks; you earned them.

At What Cost Do We Treat Dying Patients?

Obviously this is not my usual Friday fare, and before we go any further with this, I want to invite you to hop over to Merrie's Inspired Writers blog and see the terrific interview she did with me. You can find out about my latest work in progress and who I have a crush on.

If you have been stranded for the last few weeks on a desert island somewhere with no access to news, social media, or your mom, you may not know about the Ebola scare. Well, it is more than a scare. It is a horrible disease that is killing hundreds of people, primarily in West Africa. There is no vaccine for Ebola and up to 70% of the people who contract the disease die from it. Of course the media is doing it's part to keep us fully stressed about Ebola, but that is the subject of another rant another time.

This is such a dismal subject, I thought flowers might brighten things up a bit.

Today I want to write about Thomas Eric Duncan, a man from Liberia who was exposed to the bacteria while visiting his home country and returned to the United States incubating the disease. He died this past Wednesday in a Dallas hospital, and I am so sorry for the loss his family and friends are experiencing.

After hearing of the heroic measures being taken since October 4th to keep him alive, dialysis, a ventilator, experimental drugs, I flashed back to heated discussions my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) class had in a series of medical ethics seminars we attended. We were given cases to evaluate and determine when someone should just say, "Stop" for the sake of the patient's dignity, as well as the financial burden to the medical facility, insurance companies, and family. For most of us, these were issues we had never considered before. Who does?

The care given to Mr. Duncan may have cost as much as half a million dollars, a bill Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas is unlikely to ever collect. Wow!

Duncan's could very well be a case to discuss in a medical ethics seminar. Heading the list of factors we were to consider in discussion was the potential outcome of heroic treatment. What are the odds of the patient making a full recovery? With Ebola, those odds are not good, especially once the patient starts on a sharp decline.

Nobody, least of all family, likes to push the "stop" button. It makes us feel like we are somehow abandoning the person we love. But too often we are only prolonging the inevitable, with no quality of life for that person who is actively dying.

Another factor we considered in our debates in class was Stewardship. How is the medical facility using its resources? As cold as it may seem, there are times when money is simply being spent on a case with no hope. I don't know if Presby in Dallas has a medical ethics board. I know we did in Omaha at the hospital where I worked, and I served on that board. When medical staff recognized that a case had crossed over into hopeless, but family was still pushing for extreme measures, we were called in.

Cases like this would be so much easier on all concerned if the patient had an Advanced Directive and a Medical Power of Attorney, and we should all get those. If we don't want to spend the last weeks of our lives in an ICU, hooked to machines, we need to make that known to our families, doctors, and medical facilities near us. That way the burden of those tough decisions are on us, not them.

Now we need some jokes for sure to lighten this blog up. Since we're getting close to Halloween, I thought these from HolidayJokes.com would be fun:

For Halloween I'm going to write "Life" on a plain white T-shirt and hand out lemons to strangers.

Q. Which ghost is the best dancer? A. The Boogie Man!
 
Thank goodness for Halloween, all of a sudden, cobwebs in my house are decorations!

Q. When do ghouls and goblins cook their victims? A. On Fry Day.

Q. What's a monsters favorite desert? A. I-Scream!

Q. What do you call a dancing ghost?  A. Polka-haunt-us

Q: How do you write a book about Halloween? A: With a ghostwriter.

Have you ever thought about medical ethics? Do you think we should go to heroic extremes to save people? Have a favorite Halloween joke?

Monday Morning Musings

I thought I would try a little different format for my Monday offerings. I've been accused of never wanting to change a thing - not even to move a sofa in my living room - so I am just showing some folks how versatile I can be.

WHAT I'M READING: Several books on tap for reviews. First up will be a humorous look at parenting, Mommy A-Z, which is scheduled for next Sunday. Good read so far. After that will come Silent Partner, a mystery that I am resisting the temptation to start reading. Need to do things in order, right? No link to that book as it will be released September 1.


WHAT I'M LAUGHING AT: The cat races that just started at my house. My cats love to chase each other from one end of the house to the other. If they would slow down, I'd try to get a picture.

WHAT I'M DISMAYED ABOUT: I may get lots of boos for this one, but I am really concerned about the doctor infected with Ebola coming to the U.S. Yes, great precautions have been taken as he was transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, but this is a very deadly virus, and according to experts, it is not entirely clear how Ebola is spread. Most commonly it is spread to a human by contact with an infected animal's bodily fluids. Transmission from first human infected can occur  through direct contact with blood or bodily fluids from an infected person. Others can also be infected by contact with contaminated medical equipment, particularly needles and syringes. While direct contact is the most common form of transmission, it is likely that it can also occur through oral exposure and through conjunctiva exposure. That has proven the case with non-human primates.


Dr. Mike Brantly is a 33-year-old father of two young children who works for the North Carolina-based Christian organization Samaritan's Purse. He was in Liberia responding to the worst Ebola outbreak on record when he contracted the disease. Since February, more than 700 people in West Africa have died from Ebola, a hemorrhagic virus with a death rate of up to 90 percent of those infected. The fatality rate in the current epidemic is about 60 percent.


More about Ebola from the World Health Organization. While all of us pledging to remain civil about this, what do you think?

WHAT I'M LUSTING AFTER: BTW, this might not be a regular part of my Monday blog, but I just had to share the picture of this wonderful guitar owned by singer/songwriter, BettySoo. She did a concert this past Saturday at the Winnsboro Center for the Arts, and I fell in love with her guitar. The concert was great, too, but the guitar....

Thanks to the talented Michael Alford for the wonderful picture.

BettySoo said there are only four of these guitars in existence. The possibility of me getting one are so slim, I wish my waistline looked like that. Well, maybe not. I do need some meat between my belly button and my back bone. But am I right about this being a great guitar?
 
AND NOW JUST FOR FUN: This one is from Shoe by Gary Brookins & Susie MacNelly.

Shoe walks into his favorite bar and says to the bartender, "Hi, Fred. What's new?"

"Sigh... Nothing good, Shoe... My divorce from Ethel has been finalized."

"I can sympathze with you. How did the settlement turn out?"

"It became quite the nightmare," Fred says. "Once I realized the decimal point was just a bagel poppyseed."

And this from Mallard Fillmore by Bruce Tinsley.

Mallard is on the news anchor desk and says, "As 'Back-to-School' time nears, we're joined now by our Mediocrity Correspondent, Dylan Custard..."

Custard says, "I'm seeing some really encouraging signes in the mediocrity movememnt. For instance, more school systems are ending the elitist practice of naming a valedictorian!"

Mallard responds, "Woo. You must be excited."

"Guaredely optimistic. But there are still some disturbing statistics like these." He hold up a paper.

"What do they show?"

"Who knows?! They're all fill of numbers! Math-adverse students immediately feel marginalized..."

Sadly, that is not so far removed from what really happens in so many schools across the country.