Archive for October, 2015
Migraine log – Botox round 3 edition
The first time I got Botox, I was in high school. I was part of a clinical trial, but I don’t remember what stage. I got very woozy and asked to lie down for a few minutes after the injections. My neurologist told me there was no need for that and audibly scoffed when I […]
Who would I be if I were not sick?
We like to think of ourselves as separate from our illness. We like to blame an outside source, whether it’s evil spirits or microbes, anything foreign, anything outside ourselves. We love to pinpoint the cause, to point to that tumor, that gene, that trauma, and say, Aha! There’s your problem! It’s comforting, because it reminds […]
Double bind, medical edition
If I look bad at the doctor’s, they think I’m exaggerating. If I look good at the doctor’s, they think I’m coping well enough that I don’t need treatment.
Well that sounds familiar
What’ll you live on? You can’t work in a factory now.” “They’ve promised me a disability rating. I don’t know if it’ll be Group 2 or Group 3. “Which one is Group 3, then?” asked Kostoglotov. He didn’t understand these disability groups, or any other civil regulations for that matter. “It’s one of these groups […]
Freebies
What if instead of burning 4 to 6 trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d given every poor person in America $85,000 – 128,000? Or every person period $12,000 – 18,000? Or added 4-7 years of funding to the Social Security pool? Or paid off everyone’s (non-mortgage) debt? Or gave every homeless person a nice […]
Industry employers are pushing training costs onto universities and devaluing degrees
And universities are bragging about it. This is a flyer for a heavily advertised co-op program within my university.