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Ongoing Thoughts Two:
By William E. Steinman:
Last week I said I had encountered two interesting people
while I was hospitalize. These were in fact fellow patients at
First, let me tell you about George. I was put in a room
with George on the second day of my stay. I always hate it when I have to share
space with someone I don’t know. There are questions in my mind. Is this
guy going to have a television blaring all day and night? Is he going to babble
at me when I want to rest or read? Is he so ill that he will shit himself and
stink up the place? That once happened to me.
None of those things happened and I got to know and like
George. He was about my age and twice as big as I was. He ate everything in
sight and complained that the food did not stay with him. That was true enough
and was the fault of the hospital. The stuff they sent up to the rooms was
garbage. No matter how much George ate of it, it was not filling or satisfying.
That was true for both of us.
George had been everywhere and done a great deal. He was in
I discovered George could not read when I noticed the floor
nurse filling out his daily menu for him. He explained that he had gone to work
in the mines when he was about eight years old and never did go to school. That
was the good old days in
That as it may be, George could not read.
He said, “When I had kids I was going to make sure
they got educated.”
He explained it to me.
He said, “My boys were not too keen on school. I had
to leave work one day when I found one was not in school.
“Well, I found him alright. I found him in his buddies
parlor. They were laying on the floor with a couple of girls stark naked.
“I handled that alright. I took off my belt and went
in there and whopped their asses good and told them to get their red asses back
to school.”
“One of the girls said, ‘I’m going to tell
my daddy on you.’”
“I said, ‘Go and tell your daddy and when he
comes to me, I’ll tell him how I found you.’”
The girl never did tell her daddy but the other boy did.
I suppose he expected his daddy to come over and whip
George’s butt. It did not happen.
George said, “He came over, shook my hand, and thanked
me for doing what he should have done.”
So that was George. He is a good man. My other roommate came
after George went home. I never did get his name, but he was a very cheerful
man considering his condition. He was stricken with Multiple Sclerosis. That is
a chronic degenerative disease of the nervous system. It will ultimately end in
death. We keep hoping for a cure, but that is not yet.
What shocked me was when we discover his marital status.
While the nurses were getting him situate they asked about his wife. He
explained that his wife had divorced him when she first discovered he had MS. I
was stunned. Mrs. Gaffer was outraged. I have never in my life seen her so
outraged. This bimbo took all that a man had to offer in the good times. Then,
when the crisis came, she hit the road and left him swinging in the breeze. How
awful! How can she live with herself?
We all have fear and sometimes suffer from cowardice. We all
suffer from that on occasion and we struggle through. Then there is betrayal.
That is another situation entirely. I call it abject cowardice. It is not
excusable under any conditions.
When I was getting ready to go home the next day, this
gentleman told me how lucky I was. I have a wife who looks after me no matter
what. I plead guilty. I was poop creek lucky. I fell in love with and secured
the hand of a true caregiver without a clue as to what I was getting. A true
caregiver would never abandon their charge, no matter what. Thank about it.
Wars, floods, famines, plagues, and whatever, the caregiver stays through it
all. Think Florence Nightingale etc all. Am I lucky? You bet!
Now let us discuss George’s complaint about the food.
What we got was institution food at its worse. The people who run the kitchens
in this place call themselves nutritionists. In my opinion, they should be charged
with fraud when the make that claim. They are no more nutritionists than my
dog. In fact, he at least has sense enough to eat what’s good for him if
he has a choice. The victims of these nutritionists have no choice.
These fools sit back and pretend they are providing good
nutrition when all they do is provide empty calories. That is a fact. Their
menu offers a range of choices, but none of them is stand out nutritious and
none of it has good flavor. For example, they buy the very cheapest things
called hamburger patties. In an attempt to give them some flavor, the outfits
who make these things add a lot of sugar, then they lace them with sodium. That
does not do much for the flavor, but it makes them almost deadly from a
nutritional standpoint. The hospital buys these by the hundreds in huge
packages. Yes, I have seen where they shop and what they buy. This particular
place is called Gordon’s Food Supply. They are a food wholesaler.
Okay, for the record, there is nothing wrong with
Gordon’s. We shop there ourselves on occasion. What’s wrong is
their business is to sell you what you want. They are not, nor should they be,
in the business of setting nutritional standards. So to this hospital, they
sell them what they want. The people who do the buying have three criterion by
which the select food. Those are price, cost, and price, as in low, low, and
low.
For these burger patties, they pretend to be creative. They
serve them about eight different ways. The will plop one of these tasteless
flat burgers on a plate, slop a little beef stock on it and call it a chopped
steak. Another way is to put some kind of tomato sauce on it and call it
Italian steak, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What can the patient expect to get
with this stuff? A salad of just lettuce and high calorie dressing with some
limp cheap bread or a dinner role. For dessert, they can get a fruit cup. It is
a bit of chopped fruit in a sealed cup with juice. I read the label. It is 50%
sugar by weight. George got five of these cups a day and complained they did
not satisfy him. Of course! There is no food value in them. They went through
him like poop through a tin horn.
One problem I had was the drugs I was getting were pushing
my natural body chemistry way out of whack. My blood sugar was sky high and my
potassium and sodium were too low. So all I could order form the menu was sugar
and more sugar. Great! A banana contains a huge amount of digestible
potassium. I looked every day for a
banana on the menu. I never found one in six days. Mrs. Gaffer went down to the
cafeteria to look. No bananas! There were no bananas anywhere in that hospital,
but there were high sugar fruit cups always there. I could get five a day if I
wished, but not one banana. A banana would cost perhaps a dime. I checked out
these fruit cups. They go for less than a nickel in cartons of 500. That is
institution food at its worst.
In six days, I managed to get one piece of fresh fruit. One
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