07:38 – Congratulations to the FBI and Boston Police. It took them only three days to identify and track down the two terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. As I write this, one of the terrorists is dead, killed in a shootout last night, and the other is the subject of a massive manhunt. Unfortunately, a police officer was also killed last night and another seriously injured. Let’s hope the cops track down and kill the other terrorist before he hurts anyone else. In what comes as no great surprise, it appears that the two terrorists are brothers from Turkey or Chechnya, which means they’re almost certainly islamic.
08:31 – When I was adding money to Barbara’s PlatinumTel prepaid cell-phone account the other day, I checked their phone offerings. Barbara’s phone used to be my phone, so when hers died I just gave her mine. I’d intended to order another of the same model, but they didn’t have any in stock at the time. So I’ve been checking periodically to find that or a similar model. I wanted a clamshell phone with no gimmicks. All I wanted was a simple four-banger phone to make and receive calls, something that folded so that I could just put it in my pocket without worry about cracking the screen or whatever. But for several months PlatinumTel had nothing on offer other than models with slide-out keyboards and various smartphones. The other day they had $30 Alcatel One-Touch 665 phones in stock, so I ordered one for myself. I so seldom need a cell phone that this one is ideal. No contract, $0.05/minute, and very simple to operate.
11:09 – I’m hoping they don’t capture the second terrorist. That just means a trial and prison. That’s too good for him. Ideally, I’d take him alive and feed him, slowly and feet-first, into a wood chipper. But we all know that’s not going to happen. They haven’t even cut off the first terrorist’s head and posted it on a pike. So about the best we can hope for is that the cops shoot the second one and that he dies in agony before he gets to the hospital. The hospital! Why on earth did they even bother to transport the first terrorist to a hospital instead of letting him bleed to death on the street?
I’ve been reading The Grass Crown, the second in Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome series. Last night, I was reading a section covering the Social (Marsic) War. The Roman commander besieged an Italian town held by the rebels, who thought their water supply was secure. It wasn’t, but only because the Romans undertook a massive engineering feat to stop the flow of the river from which the town got its water. Eventually, they surrendered. The Roman commander proceeded to order the slaughter every adult male in town, and then turned out the women and children without food into the war-torn landscape to starve and freeze to death. Another Roman commander took another besieged rebel town, whereupon he set up an assembly line with 100 of his legionaries flogging all of the rebel men. After the flogging, they moved down the assembly line to another section, where 100 more of his legionaries beheaded those who’d already been flogged. The commander then turned the women of the town over to his legionaries to be raped and then killed. And, at that, the Roman commander was being merciful because these were Italians, who’d until recently been friends and allies of Rome. If he had wanted to, the Roman commander could have ordered all of the rebels to be crucified instead of being put to the sword.
This was during the late Republic. From Julius Caesar’s time onward, Rome had even less of a sense of humor about rebellion and particularly killing Roman citizens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people thought long and hard before doing anything to piss off Rome. I think it’s time we considered emulating Rome in that respect. Crucifying muslim terrorists would be a good start.
21:17 – As of mid-afternoon, Barbara was planning to leave work at 3:30 and head home. We were planning to take Colin to the vet for his annual checkup. Then the USWS issued a tornado watch for the afternoon through 9:00 p.m., so Barbara called to reschedule the vet appointment for next Friday. At that point, she planned to stop at the supermarket on the way home and have a relaxing evening, assuming the hospital would release her dad tomorrow.
Relaxing evening. Some joke. The hospital decided to release Barbara’s dad this afternoon with almost no notice. So she went over there to pick him up and take him back to their apartment. But Dutch needs to be on IV antibiotics for a week or ten days longer, so the hospital was supposed to send a supply home with them. Barbara or Frances would have to change the supply container once a day. I wasn’t crazy about that idea. Someone who’s on IV antibiotics should be in the hospital, with qualified medical staff administering the drugs. The last time this happened, Barbara called in tears because she’d made one minor mistake in the procedure. She thought she’d killed her dad. I told her then that she or her sister shouldn’t be doing this; a nurse should be doing it.
That was bad enough, but it got worse. The hospital was supposed to send over a supply of the drug to Dutch and Sankie’s apartment, and then have a nurse come to teach them how to administer it. Well, the nurse showed up, but the supply of drugs didn’t. And to make matters even worse, the drug supply container has to be changed every 24 hours, at 8:00 p.m. Not during the day when the visiting nurse could do it, or at least Barbara or Frances could do it with less inconvenience, but specifically at 8:00 p.m., which means that Barbara or Frances would have to drive over there specially every evening at 8:00 p.m.
So of course my first thought was that they should just discard the first container before it was empty and substitute a full one, which would allow them to change the daily time from 8:00 p.m. back to something a bit more convenient. No dice, Barbara said. The hospital would provide only the number of containers needed to do things on the schedule they mandated.
Not that that turns out to matter much, because the hospital released Dutch knowing that he couldn’t even stand with his walker, let alone walk or even get out of a chair. Barbara assumed, of course, that they’d had him up and walking every day. They hadn’t. He’d been in bed constantly for the entire week. He’s completely helpless, and needs someone who’s able to physically manhandle him into and out of his chair and so on.
But of course the hospital never did bother sending over the drugs that Barbara and Frances are supposed to adminster. So I got a call from Barbara about 8:35, saying she was at the hospital emergency room with her dad, pleading with them to give him the drug that they say is so important he get at 8:00 every evening.
Then, adding insult to injury, the hospital tells Barbara that they wanted to release Dutch to a nursing home, but Barbara refused to allow them to do so. She told them that she’d done no such thing. When the social worker called earlier in the week, she said the hospital planned to release Dutch to a nursing home so that he could get physical therapy. Barbara told the social worker that the physical therapy, and occupational therapy as well, could be done at her parents’ apartment.
What concerned me the most was that Barbara said as soon as the emergency room gave her dad the IV antibiotic, she was going to drive him home. Presumably she intends to stay the night, since Dutch sure can’t be there on his own or with just Sankie. I told her she should tell the hospital to keep her father until he’s actually in a fit state to be discharged, and that doesn’t include being on IV antibiotics or being unable to rise from a chair. She said the hospital told her they couldn’t refuse treatment, but Dutch would have to pay for it. Bastards. They had no business discharging him in the first place.