MEDICAL MALPRACTICE

https://www.cccattorneys.com/law-blog 

IN DURHAM: NEGLIGENCE AND MALPRACTICE

The Year 2020. ---- WHAT IS WORTH REMEMBERING?

 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201217-time-capsule-2020-the-37-objects-that-defined-the-year

ARTHRITIS ----- AVOID THESE FOODS

 FROM THE New York Times:

https://www.arthritis-health.com/blog/kitchen-arthritis-foods-avoid

Two Hundred Things I'm Grateful For

2020 has been a shitty year, one most of us would like to forget.  Gratitude helps us get out of the "shittiness" -- that "day after Groundhog Day" feeling that has marked this year.  I love to do Gratitude Lists.  It's been scientifically proven that gratitude makes us feel better!  I missed the one for October, so here's 200 things for October AND November.

1. Maude

2, Margot 

3. Not needing cataract surgery this year

4. Netflix

5. Humana Insurance

6.  Getting computer glasses soon

7. Durham Access

8. Not too cold out today

9. Decaff

10.Essential oils

11.A desk by a window

12.Trump lost

13.A Pilgrim documentary to watch later

14.Red wine (good for arthritis?)

15.Resting

16.Walking

17.The Alaska I Knew

18.Apple support

19.Squash

20.Machu Pichu and other natural wonders

21.The Indians at Plymouth

22.Having lived in Alaska

23.Phone meetings

24.Meet-ups

25.Big computer screens

26.Online learning

27.Silver Bay

28.Caffeine

29.Creativity

30.Writing poems for my granddaughters

31.My friends the birds

32.The fact that cardinals mate for life

33.Biden won!!!

34.Getting thru Covid well and not contracting it

35.The sun's coming out

36.I invited a guy to go hiking with me

37.The Al Bueler Trail perhaps?

38.The mayor of Durham in the 60's

39.The book "F**k Anxiety

40.I have a tree outside my patio

41.My poetry group

42.Deep breaths

43.Sestinas

44.Elderberry tea

45.Laura Nyro b/c i love her music

46.Billie Feather who played baroque music on her guitar

47.My doctors

48.Not having to work

49.Having enough

50.Chicken (for now)

51.The Carolina Theatre

52.I need a podium

53.Ali Coleman

54.Access Bus

55.Neighbors

56.Birds outside my window.

57.Glad I lived in Tennessee

58.Our Cades Cove trip

59.Memories of Alaska and wanting to write my memoir about it

60.Faith

61.Poetry

62.My desire for a car.

63.Getting back home safely

64.Duke Hospital

65.The Plymouth Indians

66.Seeing Plymouth Rock on my high school trip

67.

EXERCISE FOR NUTRITION

 Just had a chat with Francis Lawrence, my exercise teacher.  Former principal dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem.  He recommends the following for exercise and how to avoid soreness:

1.  Amino acids are real important.  I think I'll use eggs, miso, quinoia, legumes and maybe some animal protein.  Don't forget about beans.

2.  Magnesium tablets every morning.  I forget to take those sometimes...might want to consider a magnesium/potassium tablet...

3.  Epsom salts bath afterward.

4.  Find out what foods have potassium.

5.  AVOID SWEETS LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!

Consider a Chinese massage (cheaper than regular)...

and my advice ---

💖 avoid whining about your pain -- if someone asks how you're doing, just say "ok".

💖 remember it's ok to be slow and take it a little easier

💖 relax with Zen music from YouTube

💖 think about the rewards of exercise:  toning up and getting stronger

💖 consider getting a Chinese massage (they're cheaper, usually)

💖 watching dance is therapeutic also

https://www.mdlinx.com/article/don-t-miss-out-on-these-9-essential-amino-acids/3gzk3GhhR158YkdXabF762

THANKSGIVING --- NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING

 Article from Time Magazine on the Indian tribe at Plymouth Rock that started the National Day of Mourning to honor those who perished as a result of illnesses and injustices brought over by the Pilgrims.

https://time.com/5911943/thanksgiving-wampanoag/

----------------------------------------------------------------

Link to the National Day of Mourning by the Indians at Plymouth Rock:

http://www.uaine.org

Cussin' Is Good for You

 Cussin' is good for you.  Article from "Science of People."

https://www.scienceofpeople.com/saying-f-word-benefits/?unapproved=59259&moderation-hash=429b0a2e4e1abdd7aa600c93a6125ce3#comment-59259

REYNOLDS PRICE AND HIS EXPERIENCE OF BEING HEALED

" I woke at daylight alone in my house, propped on pillows against the head of my old brass bed. No lights were on but I was completely conscious—I'm an easy riser, clearheaded from the moment my eyes click open. I was thinking naturally of the massive violence done to my body, and of all the unknowns that might lie ahead.

Without warning, I was suddenly no longer in my brass bed or even contained in my familiar house. It was barely dawn, and I was lying in modern street clothes by a lake I knew at once. It was the lake of Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, in the north of Israel—the scene of Jesus' first teaching and healing. It was the same lake I'd visited the previous October, a 13-mile-long body of fish-stocked water lined with beautiful hills, trees and small family farms.

Still sleeping around me on the misty ground were a number of men in the tunics and cloaks of first-century Palestine. I soon understood with no sense of surprise that the men were Jesus' 12 disciples and that he was nearby, asleep among them. So I lay on awhile in the early chill, looking west across the lake to Tiberias, a small low town, and north to the fishing villages of Capernaum and Bethsaida. I saw them as they must have been in the first century—stone huts with thatch-and-mud roofs, low towers, the rising smoke of breakfast fires. The early light was a fine mix of tan and rose. It would be a fair day.

Then one of the sleeping men woke and stood.

I saw it was Jesus, bound toward me. He looked much like the lean Jesus of Flemish paintings—tall with dark hair, unblemished skin and a self-possession both natural and imposing.

Again I felt no shock or fear. All this was a normal human event; it was utterly clear and was happening as surely as any experience of my previous life. I lay and watched him walk nearer.

Jesus bent and silently beckoned me to follow.

I knew to shuck off my trousers and jacket, then my shirt and shorts. I followed him.

He was wearing a twisted white cloth round his loins; otherwise he was bare and the color of ivory.

We waded out into cool lake water till we stood waist-deep.

I was in my body but was also watching myself from slightly above and behind. I could see the purple dye on my back, the long rectangle that boxed my thriving tumor.

Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over my head and back till water ran down my puckered scar. Then he spoke once—"Your sins are forgiven"—and turned to shore again.

I came on behind him, thinking in my standard greedy fashion, It's not my sins I'm worried about. So to Jesus' receding back I had the gall to say, "Am I also cured?"

He turned to face me, no sign of a smile, and finally said two words—"That too." He climbed from the water, not looking round, really done with me.

I followed him out and then, with no palpable seam in the texture of time or place, I was home again in my wide bed.

Was it a dream I gave myself in the midst of a catnap, thinking I was awake? Was it a vision of the sort accorded to mystics through human history? From the moment my mind was back in my own room, no more than seconds after I'd left it, I've believed that the event was a gift, a shifting to an alternate time and space in which to live through an act crucial to my survival.

For me the clearest support for my conclusion survives on paper in my handwriting. My calendar notes are sparse—hard happenings only, not thoughts or speculations. And on my calendar for '84, at the top of the space for Tuesday, July 3, I had drawn a small star and written:

6 a.m.—By Kinneret, the bath, "Your sins are forgiven"—"Am I cured?"—"That too."

It is the record of an event that had a concrete visual and tactile reality unlike any sleeping or waking dream I've known or heard of, and it betrayed none of the surreal logic or the jerked-about plot of an actual dream. The plain fact is that I've never since had a remotely similar experience; nor again, had I ever before known anything similar in five decades of a life rich in fantasy.

Over the next five weeks of daily radiation I lay facedown in my body cast while the technician aimed the beam precisely at the target range of my spine; and with my eyes shut I imagined intensely a curative hand laid over my wound, that same hand that had bathed me in Lake Kinneret.

My friend Leontyne Price called. "You'll be all right," she said. That was the first arrival, from outside my immediate circle, of a message that came seven more times in the months ahead—the explicit and confident-sounding news that I wouldn't die, not of this ordeal. Each person wrote or called with no prior collusion—most of them still don't know each other. One of the strongest assurances came from a woman I hadn't seen for years, who herself had been stricken with cancer. She phoned and, with no preface, calmly said, "I've called to tell you you're not going to die of this." Then she quoted the famous talisman lines from Psalm 91: He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

Weakened by the treatments, I went to stay with my cousin Marcia and her husband, Paul. I told Marcia about my morning experience in Kinneret. To please her I sketched a rough likeness of Jesus cupping the water to my head. As I did so, I realized I was suddenly concentrating for more than 10 seconds on something better than the pain that roared down my spine.

The fact of regaining just that much on paper triggered the dozens of drawings I'd make in the next two years. All meditations on the face of Jesus, these drawings became my main new means of prayer. If they asked for anything, I suppose it was what I still ask God for daily—for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

In the spring and fall of 1986 I had more surgeries, to remove tumor tissue that had spread up my back and into my neck. There were times each day, for hours at a stretch, when my whole body felt white-hot pain, scalding and all-pervasive. For three years I took the drugs prescribed to me; and then at Duke Hospital I was taught techniques of biofeedback and self-hypnosis that helped incredibly to ease the searing pain, as well as the self-focus and self-pity that pain eventually clutches to itself.

There have been many moments over these past years when I all but quit and begged to die. Even then, though, I'd try to recall the passage of daunting eloquence in the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy: I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: that thou mayest love the Lord thy God....

Choose life. In my case, life has meant steady work, work sent by God but borne on my own back and on the wide shoulders of friends who want me to go on living and have helped me with a minimum of tears and no signs of pity.

Ten years have passed. Though I make no forecast beyond today, annual scans have gone on showing my spine clear of cancer—clear of visible growing cells at least (few cancer veterans will boast of a cure).

I'm in a wheelchair—I may always be—but I write six days a week, long days that often run till bedtime; and the books are different from what came before. Even my handwriting looks very little like the script of the ravaged man I was in June of '84. Cranky as it is, it's taller, more legible, with more air and stride. It comes down the arm of a grateful man."

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My Pastor's Essay on Halloween

 Durham Church,

In just a few hours, at 2:00am, we'll "fall back" an hour when daylight savings ends. The sun will set tomorrow in Durham at 5:19pm. I don't know anyone who is looking forward to this. It feels cruel in a year when politicians are talking (responsibly) about a "dark winter" of isolation and sickness, to say nothing of the growing anxiety that might be the only thing "both sides" have in common as we draw closer to November 3. 

For centuries, people have marked a turn to darkness at this time of the year. The origins of Halloween go back to an ancient Celtic tradition called Samhain ("sow-win"). Beginning on the last day of October, for three days, Samhain celebrated the fall harvest with huge fires. When the crops came in, home fires would die out. At Samhain neighbors would take a flame from the shared fire to relight their hearth.) This is how they welcomed the beginning of "the dark half of the year." 

The Celts believed that at Samhain the barrier between the material and spiritual grew very thin. This could mean a visit from their ancestors, but it could also mean less-friendly Sidhs (fairies) could cross over...so the Celts dressed up as animals and monsters to make them less attractive to any faeries set on kidnapping them!

When Christianity spread across Europe, the church generally decided to work with established traditions like Samhain rather than try to abolish them. From the 5th century, at least, the church sought to reframe Celtic traditions in a way that incorporated Christian beliefs. So, 1,000 years ago, when Pope Gregory declared November 1 to be "All Saints' Day," the fires of Samhain kept burning! In fact, they are still burning...

The first Jack-o-lanterns appeared during Samhain in the middle ages. They were made from carved turnips. In Ireland, on the nights before Samhain, people went door to door in costumes, singing songs of the dead to their neighbors, who rewarded them with little cakes! (People who handed out Mounds/Almond Joys were handed over to the fairies...) 

In Ireland, the jack-o-lanterns around the bonfires were made from pumpkins - and when Irish immigrants came to the United States in the 1800s they brought their jack-o-lanterns with them! Then and now, everything kicked off on October 31 with All Hallows Eve - Halloween. (It's a 3-day feast. Tomorrow we will celebrate All Saints' Day. Monday is All Souls' Day, which I had forgotten was a thing. It's the Jan Bradyof the short Hallowmas season.)

So...today we start a three-day Christian feast to remember the (little "s") saints of the church by keeping the pagan death-feast traditions of the ancient Celts!

I think this is wonderful. When the Celts turned to the "dark half of the year" they gathered around a fire to give thanks for the harvest. They shared meals, sang songs, wore costumes, and had fun. The faeries had nothing on them. They were alive to the world of the spirit and the memory of their loved ones who had died. (There was one tradition that said if you didn't participate, you would die!) 

Looking beyond even the anxious, fearful moment we are in - how do we respond to the inevitable darkness of life? Do we rage against the dying of the light? It's tempting, even necessary. I wouldn't dare try to stop anybody. But there's also an ancient option the church was wise to latch onto - make a fire of our own and remember the saints before us who see face-to-face what we only see dimly - 

        The light shines in the darkness. 

        The one who is the true light, 

        who gives light to everyone, 

        was coming into the world. (John 1)

       Those who die in the Lord will live;
           their bodies will rise again!
      Those who sleep in the earth
          will rise up and sing for joy!

      For your life-giving light will fall like dew
         on your people in the place of the dead! (Isaiah 26:19)

The only one who can save us already has. 

(Big "S") Saint Paul offered the Philippians (and us) an alternative to anxiety that has probably infuriated as much as comforted: in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 

I'm giving thanks for each of you tonight and hope to see you in the morning. 

Love,

Franklin 

[Worship link.]

The 100

 1. Friday noon poets.

2.  Lisa Tomey

3.  Mali

4.  Aruna

5.  Doug

6.  little kids playing outside

7.  Preston'

]8. Networking with NC Biotech people

9.  Prayer

10.  Monday Best Buy geeks

The Science of Happiness:

11.  Monday afternoon with Francis

11.  DTH Friday night live

12.  Doing an oral history on Faye Bryant Mayo

13.  Nice warm baths at night

14.  Walt Whitman

15.  Forests

16.  Natasha Treathaway

17.  Earl Hubbarb

18.  Zero risk tomorrow

19.  feeling safe

20.  Vizshlas

21.  Franklin

22.  Morgan

23.  Archives

24.  UNC digital Archives course

25.  Biden's statement on Nigeria

26.  Scotland

27.  Ireland

28.  The Red Clay Review

29.  Lynn Unger's poem on the pandemic

30.  Silent settings

31.  not taking phone calls

32.  Lavender oil.

33.  Inhaling the scent of a longleaf pine

34.  My mother.

35.  Living in Alaska

37.  Want to go back.

38.  Juli

30.  Ferries.

32.  Biographies.

40.  Finished one on Churchill

34.  Being driven.

35.  You can create books on a Mac 

36.  not. having to hassle with a car.

36.  Sycamore trees.

38.  Bach

39.  Mozart

40.  Netflix

42.  Sophia

43.  Durham Hist. Museum.

44.  Faye Mayo

45.  Gotta call her.

46.  Adam

47.  Jeff Nichols

58.  Jeff Nichols

49.  Sending well wishes

50.  UT archive courses

51.  teddy bears I can rest under my arms

52.  Rubenstein Library

53.  Alice Osborne.

54.  glass containers

55.  Silence

56.  Comfort

57.  getting stronger

58.  all my Duke doctors

59.  my physical therapist

60/. Throwing papers away.

61.  Thay

62. Mindfulness

63.  not eating anything after 8 pm

64.  tolerating discomfort

65.  the Eiffel Tower

66.  the Royal St. Germaine Hotal

67.  Dutch chocolate

68.  Dutch coffee

69.  living here

70.  being a grandma

71.  frances

72.  lavender oil

73.  notebooks

74/. Whitman

75.  Harold Bloom

76.  Emerson

77.  Poe

78.  my voice

79.  audio books

80.  the f word

81.  Therapists

82.  Deliveries

83.  Having enough

84.  Being enough

85.  Bennett

86.  Gregory Porter

87.  Mike Tyus

88.  Renee Jaworski

89.  ADF

90.  Dancing on pointe

91.  warm water pools

92.  La Jolla

93.  Steamboat Springs

94.  Norway

95.  France

96.  Holland

97.  being comfortable

98.  curbing my enthusiasm

99.  Frances' leap

100.  having 3 black babies to take care of, one with curly hair, one who giggles, and one falls asleep easily and lets me rock her