Look! An Update!

[ase]

Dear Mr. Bush, I hope health care providers refuse to treat you on moral grounds. If you don't believe in treating patients, don't go into medicine. Super headdesk FAIL!

This is probably a really harsh judgment, but it's the head-on collision of two people's rights to hold a moral position. Someone has to give; I'm inclined to force the doctor to make way, especially in regions or health care programs where there isn't a choice to see someone else. Who should enforce "morality"? What is morality? I'm inclined to sacrifice codes of should and should-not to compassion for the currently living.

I don't care what the pedants say, it's winter. Cold, dark winter. The day starts late with gray clouds. Sometimes they don't completely cover the sky. By lunch, they've thinned enough that the sun is only masked by gauzy clouds. After midday, the sun falls back into clouds; the difference between indoors and outdoors is temperature (sometimes) and how high the "ceiling" is. Tuesday night I hitched a ride home with two of my coworkers; we saw two accidents on the road, and then the drizzle tapping on the roof shifted to ice.

Took today and tomorrow off work to kill use-or-lose. Finished 90% of my holiday shopping last night. Today I have spoken less than five sentences to other people all day, finished The Fellowship of the Ring, and made dents in two other books. Fabulous, fabulous introvert paradise.

Monday I got to participate in cool bonus offsite training, and ultimately put in a ten hour day plus dinner after work. Call it twelve hours of coworker interaction. It was good, but a lot of face time. So I am super glad I'm not at work for the the rest of the week. Besides all that holiday stuff to do.

This will be my holiday present to me. There is a strong possibility I will scream like a little girl and take a day off work when Regenesis ships to me. I got bored and made a playlist for this book! Okay, so it's getting redone now that I have Dresden Dolls and Coin-Operated Boy in my life (and by the way, is it just me, or is the Dresden Dolls discography tend to the really creepy?). But the point is, I have inappropriate love for Cherryh's novels. If I finish the other books I'm in the middle of, I'm going to reread Cyteen before Regenesis. I haven't been this excited about a book in a while.

Comments

[yi-sen.livejournal.com]

An excellent blog entry by a doctor (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/18/13479/090/683/674615) on the health care ruling.

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about this morality clause: doesn't it just equate to a paid sinecure for Christian Scientists?

"Yes I'm a pharmacist, but I won't prescribe _anything_ for you because prayer should suffice...and I won't tell you where else you can go either."

...and now just a hypothetical person couldn't even be dismissed.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Dresden Dolls: Creepy, yes. But given where they get their names (and maybe part of their shtick) it's only appropriate.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I don't care what the pedants say, it's winter.

Those particular pedants would be wrong. The solstice is midwinter, in other words, when you break that word apart and apply advanced language skills, you find it means the middle of the freaking winter. The idea that the end of December is the start of winter is a recent fad, as far as I can tell.

Those same pedants probably tell you not to end a sentence with a preposition either, or use singular they.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I dunno. On one hand I think that in general it's probably a bad idea to pressure doctors to do something they don't want to do (see also doctor's resistance to notifying parents about an abortion or illegal immigration). Also, it seems rather harsh to say that someone who would otherwise make a completely awesome ob/gyn shouldn't go into the field because of one procedure they're not comfortable with performing in all cases. At least, I have no idea how my gynecologist feels about abortions, but I would whine and scream if he left the field :)

On the other hand, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the pharmacists. Dude, your job is to dispense drugs, not to judge whether you should withhold them or not. I don't want you asking me questions about my thyroid medication either. Period.

(I realize this is not terribly consistent. I don't know what the difference is-- I think it comes down to that I have more trust in doctors, which may be naive and misplaced, and also that I imagine abortions are a small part of what doctors usually do.)

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

We've been fighting the pharmacists over the Plan B pill here in Washington for quite some time now. Court ruling after court ruling, seesawing back and forth like, well, a seesaw. I don't even know where the courts stand on it at the moment.

It's a mess.