My brother flew out to visit Maggie on Sunday and Monday, which cheered her enormously. Maggie received a chemotherapy treatment today and will see the oncologist again on Friday. She sounded stronger today. However, she has very little appetite and is too weak to walk. A sister and brother are staying with her. She is very grateful for all the positive thoughts my dear gentle readers are sending her way. Thank you.
Right Network debuts today and includes a gardening column by A Conservative Lesbian
Today is the debut of Right Network, which is a project by Kelsey Grammer, best known as the title character in the TV comedy, “Frasier.” I’ve been recruited to write a gardening column — my first one is headlined, “Gardening: The Delectable Addiction.” (I was tardy with my photos, so the one there is not mine.)
I was just on Twitter and someone linked MSNBC’s post about it and the reporter only worked in one knee-jerk Leftist condemnation of it, which follows Grammer’s description of Right Network’s mission, to wit:
“We’re not out to vilify or accuse or identify anybody as an enemy,” Grammer said. “We’re out there to encourage people to open their minds and take a look at some things that we as a group of people believe is the right direction for the country.”
Jeff Cohen, an Ithaca College journalism professor and liberal activist, questioned whether the kind of audience that likes conservative talk shows want something similar in entertainment, and whether it can be pulled off.
“Comedy requires irony,” Cohen said. “It can’t be frothing with hate or fear. Drama requires complexity. It can’t be all black and white.”
So true, Prof. Cohen, so true. And spoken with so little sense of — what’s the word I’m looking for? — oh, yes: irony.
My sense is that Grammer is taking a similar approach with Right Network that I’m taking with this blog, A Conservative Lesbian. I figured I would be the only lesbian that many of my conservative readers would get to know. So I include personal posts to become a real human being to my gentle readers and un-demonize lesbians and gays. It looks like Grammer is doing the same thing with Right Network — providing common sense, warmth and humor and including a wide array of topics to present conservatism at its very best to show people what there is to love about it. I’m very proud to be included in this noble venture.
Maggie Byrd, cancer and the decision between hospice and acute care
When Maggie was diagnosed with advanced lymphoma about two weeks ago, she was told she had between three and 22 weeks to live. She told her doctors she wanted to live. They came up with a chemotherapy treatment strategy that shrank the tumor. She was discharged. The treatment program included an injection of heparin, a blood thinner. Thursday night she began to vomit blood and was hospitalized again Friday morning. They got the bleeding stopped in the ER Saturday morning and she was admitted.
Here’s the thing about end-of-life care decisions: there really is a point at which no medicine or treatment will make you well. In fact, the body does have a point-of-no-return where it cannot assimilate medicine — or even food or fluids — and trying to make it do so hastens death. This is not an abstract statement to me. I have gone through my own dying process and I am still working my way back from death’s door. I have cared for dying loved ones — I am currently providing my father end-of-life care. I know how to fight Death.
If Maggie had decided on hospice care, she would be at her brother’s home now, holding her little dog, Lightning, and her family would be coming to visit. We could surround her with flowers. The hospice team would be managing her symptoms to ensure her comfort.
Instead, Maggie is in a hospital bed and the admitting doctor is dodging her sister and brother, who have stayed by her bed the last two days. They are exhausted. Maggie’s blood pressure is sky high and she’s tachycardic. In these circumstances, these symptoms can mean the end is very near. Sister and Brother just need an honest conversation with the doctor, so they can tell the rest of the family to show up and say good-bye. Many of them are putting it off.
Maggie refuses to sign a durable healthcare power-of-attorney, which would give ONE person the right to make medical decisions for her in accordance with her wishes. Just as importantly, it would give ONE person the right to talk to the doctor and list the persons the doctor can talk to. Without the legal authority of the healthcare POA, the doctor is violating HIPAA — the patient privacy act — to talk to anyone but Maggie while Maggie can still make her own decisions. Maggie does not have the strength to cope with contending family members. Usually state law governing who gets authority for healthcare decisions when the patient no longer can do so and access to patient information puts spouses first, then parents, then adult children, then siblings. Everyone at each level has the same level of authority. Maggie has several brothers and sisters and end-of-life care decisions create disagreements and intense passion. Doctors and nurses dread this.
I think that’s why the doctor is dodging Maggie’s sister and brother. You’ve been told to rely on doctors to guide you through the end-of-life care decisions. But they have not been trained to do this. And they know that emotions run high and the encounters can be draining, or even get them sued. So the time doctors in the acute care medical system are most likely to abandon you is when you need them the most. In contrast, hospice doctors and nurses help you and your family fight the battle you’re in, rather than the one you wish you had. They will talk to you. They explain what end-of-life symptoms are. They are there for you. Your family and friends get it through their heads that their time with you is limited. When you are gone, the fact that they were able to show up for you will give them comfort and go a long toward lifting the anger and guilt that they would feel over missing their last chance to do little services and say good-bye. It’s the difference between bringing an airplane in for a smooth landing and flying until you run of gas and fall out of the sky.
Business Insider’s cool solution for bloggers and copyright infringement
I clicked a story from Instapundit on bedbugs and noticed that the source of the story, Business Insider, has an extremely useful array of icons under each story. The one titled, “Embed,” intrigued me because we bloggers are accustomed to embedding videos from YouTube, cat photos from icanhazcheeseburger.com and PDFs from Scribd, but embedding a post? Check out Business Insider’s explanation here.
This is a positive development because suing bloggers for copyright infringement for quoting too extensively has become a new stream-of-income for some newspapers. See Little Miss Attila and Laura at Ace of Spades HQ for more — Laura links Clayton Cramer’s instructions on how to use Firefox to blacklist the newspapers doing this.
UPDATED: Maggie Byrd update, ‘O Happy Day’
Sleep deprivation right after finding out that Maggie Byrd has lymphoma made me especially vulnerable to getting overshadowed by fear and sadness and I forgot some important things:
- What you put your attention on grows stronger.
- You are alive until you are dead.
- While you are alive, make the effort — see #1 above — to be happy, cheerful, optimistic, filled with faith and praise, forgiving and grateful.
- In light of #3 above, play cheerful music, be playful, dance, tell jokes and express your love.
So it occurred to me that Maggie is alive, she got to see her photo here last night and was tickled silly, and I am so far away that these posts are something I can do to cheer her up and let her know she is loved. Since Maggie might get to listen to the music I’m posting, I will be choosing happy songs instead of country music and hymns that would be likely to make her cry.
Dear gentle readers, I am taking you along with me on this journey.
The injection Maggie got yesterday was heparin, a blood thinner, and last night she began to vomit blood. She went to the local hospital by ambulance around 6 am. They are transferring her back to the University of Kentucky Hospital in Lexington soon. I got to talk to her just now for a couple of minutes. She sounded woozy but cheerful.
Yes, things look grim, but you would be amazed at how many seemingly hopeless situations you can get through victoriously with those four rules above.
Update, 9/3/2010, Fri.: The endoscopy showed a lot of erosions in Maggie’s esophagus and duodenum but the doctor couldn’t tell whether they were caused by the cancer or the chemo. They can’t do anything to treat the erosions because the blood thinner means her blood wouldn’t clot and the chemo has lowered her ability to fight infection. Family members are staying with her tonight and she’s waiting for a bed so she can be admitted to the hospital.
Countering NOM’s lies about the decision overturning Prop 8
The Mormon Church is the primary source of funds for the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage equality and frames the issues surrounding according to the doctrines of the Mormon Church. Remember that the Mormon Church defines what YOU probably think of as “traditional marriage” as spiritually dead and inferior to the Mormon re-definition of marriage, “celestial marriage,” which is only available to Mormons who have a “temple recommend.” The requirements for obtaining a temple recommend give the church hierarchy almost absolute power over every aspect of every Mormon’s life, including their payment of tithes to the church and their access to heaven, the “spirit realm” and the very ability of their souls to exist. This is why Mormons are fighting so hard to define marriage for everyone — it is their path to wealth and absolute power.
Just a closer walk with Thee
Maggie was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday, Aug. 31, and is being cared for at the home of one of her brothers in Kentucky. The chemotherapy shrank the tumor from the size of a cantaloupe to the size of a baseball in just a few days. Her doctor was happy with her progress. She had a rough night and sounded tired this morning, but she was optimistic. I don’t know if she has Internet access to see these posts, but my plan is to pair posts about her with hymns and songs by country singers from the Fifties and Sixties. Her family’s farm was near my mother’s family’s farm, so we share that old-time country heritage.
Blind optimism and impulsivity ….
I’ll write about the Restoring Honor rally tomorrow
I was so shaken by the news of Maggie’s illness on Friday evening that I didn’t start on all the chores I wanted done before Awesome Nephew came to take care of Dad yesterday until midnight. By the time I was finished, I just had time to shower and dress before leaving for the Restoring Honor rally so I could help GOProud pass out stickers from 8:30 to 9:30 am at the Smithsonian Metro stop. When I got home I couldn’t sleep until after seeing Dad to bed, so I was up for around 36 hours. Instead of napping this afternoon, I’m taking Dad to an Ironbirds game, so I won’t write about the Restoring Honor rally until tomorrow when I’ve had more sleep and I feel better. All I will say about it right now is that it is a surreal experience to hear speaker after speaker talk about liberty, equality, justice for all and unalienable rights when they are passionately committed to ensuring that I don’t have any of those things because I am a lesbian. I left early after Alveda King worked a shot at gay equality into her speech. The exceptions to this were Gov. Palin and Glenn Beck, who both seem to find the high road — especially Gov. Palin. I am more grateful to her for that than ever.
Prayer request for Maggie Byrd
Maggie Byrd lived with or near my family for most of my life. She will turn 71 on Nov. 18. Without her, I would not have been able to keep my late life partner, Margaret, at home with me instead of in a nursing home after she became paralyzed due to multiple sclerosis in 1992. Maggie took care of my parents until my mother died in April 2006. I moved back home so she could move to Kentucky to take care of her father. Maggie is a 15-year survivor of breast cancer. But on Friday evening, one of her sisters called to tell me that Maggie was in the hospital and was about to start chemotherapy for lymphoma.
This morning Maggie admitted that when the doctors first discussed this with her last week, they told her she had about three weeks to live. A couple of hours later I got an e-mail from her sister that the doctors are happy with her progress because the tumor is shrinking. Maggie is a fighter and optimistic. I have her permission to tell my dear gentle readers about her and ask for your prayers for her healing. I have told Maggie and her sister that if Maggie needs more care than her family can manage after she’s discharged, she can come here and I will care for her, either back to health or to the end.
By the way, I took the photo above in November 2004 when Margaret was dying. Maggie is sitting next to Margaret’s bed holding a cup of juice and water thickened so that Margaret could swallow it. It’s characteristic of Maggie that she’s caring for someone and would not hold still for a good photo. I cropped the photo so that for once in her life, the spotlight is on her.