I share my living situation with some illegals. These 18 and 19 year old kids have lived in California since their parents came here right after they were born. They grew up here, went to local schools speak "American" English but they have no legal standing.
They were shopping with their little brother who was born here and is thus a citizen when the younger 14 year old boy shoplifted a small item. The older girls were all charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and then one of the three girls was deported to TJ Mexico. She was back here the same day she was deported. She has lived her entire life in California. Why was one deported but not the rest of them? Who knows? The fact that she had a five month old son that is an American citizen made no difference to immigration or maybe that is why they deported her and not her other two friends that also got arrested with her. Did they know the 14 year old was shoplifting? They tell me they did not. Even if they did know he was shoplifting why is their treatment so arbitrary?
Lots of teenagers shoplift and then become fine citizens later on in life. It seems to be a stage of development many teens need to go through. I don't think it is fair or cost effective to do this deportation shuffle. It costs the State a lot of money and gets nothing in return. It is time the U.S. did another amnesty program for these unfortunate kids to make them legal tax paying immigrants instead of wasting so much money on the current merry go round system. One day other countries are going to start treating American citizens traveling abroad the same unfair way their citizens get treated here. Brazil is already doing that to travelers going there. I think that is fair. Be careful traveling abroad so that it doesn't get you in big trouble. Enjoy your travels. PURAVIDA
Monday, May 16, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Long haired hippy freaks
So about a year and a half ago I decided to grow my hair long. The reason I did was because when it hits eight inches I am donating it to a charity that I like. It has been growing quickly and I now have long flowing locks like in the old hippy days.
It has been interesting to note how people started to treat me differently as my hair started to get longer and longer. Doctors treat me totally different now as a long hair. Most but not all of them immediately assume I am a drug addict just because my hair is longer and then they treat me with outright contempt often times. That never happened when I had short hair. Suddenly the drugs I need for my chronic pain were getting harder and harder to obtain. I have not changed anything else except the length of my hair. I still behave in exactly the same way as I did before and the doctors treated me with respect then but with disdain now. Why is this? My politics are the same. My speech has not changed. I am still polite and soft spoken. I will admit that once the doctors start treating me with disdain I respond and start pushing their buttons right back which is something I never had to do before.
At Stanford Hospital Emergency room I ran into a particularly rude doctor. He first started to tell me I should not be coming to a classy hospital like Stanford but I should be going to one of those specialty clinics over in Oakland. When I asked him what he was talking about he just repeatedly said the same things over and over again about how there were no doctors at Stanford that were trained to treat people like me but that there were forty or fifty clinics over in Oakland that were specially trained to treat people like me. He was referring to methadone clinics and other drug abuse clinics but he would not say it directly. I pushed him on it to give a name of a clinic and asked him how could there possibly not be any doctors at Stanford Hospital that treat chronic pain. I asked what he meant by "people like you." But he refused to elaborate on his meaning. He intentionally tried to provoke me so that he could call security and have me thrown out but I did not bite on his baiting provocations. I knew for a fact that there was a specialty clinic for pain in the Stanford system but he denied that there was. He ranted and raved at me that only the clinics in Oakland were trained to treat people like me. Then he discharged me with a contemptuous attitude and told me to never return. I should have pressed charges against him but I chose not to. I did file a complaint with the administration over his behavior. They took my complaint seriously.
I only bring this up because earlier this month I had my prescription meds stolen out of my backpack while I was traveling and I had to replace them. That meant going to a new doctor and asking for morphine which I understand can look like a drug addict's behavior. I got my prescriptions but I was treated very rudely by the doctor. So when traveling carry meds in a safe way and don't keep them all in the same place because sometimes it takes a long time to replace them when you are on the road.
Why do humans have such a strong need or even compulsion to have to place everybody they come into contact with into some sort of pigeon hole based on some random criteria like the length of hair or the color of skin or their dress etc? Please take the time to treat people respectfully when you meet them whether you are traveling or just around your daily life. Don't assume things about the character and intentions of others until you have enough facts to actually make an informed decision. Enjoy life.
It has been interesting to note how people started to treat me differently as my hair started to get longer and longer. Doctors treat me totally different now as a long hair. Most but not all of them immediately assume I am a drug addict just because my hair is longer and then they treat me with outright contempt often times. That never happened when I had short hair. Suddenly the drugs I need for my chronic pain were getting harder and harder to obtain. I have not changed anything else except the length of my hair. I still behave in exactly the same way as I did before and the doctors treated me with respect then but with disdain now. Why is this? My politics are the same. My speech has not changed. I am still polite and soft spoken. I will admit that once the doctors start treating me with disdain I respond and start pushing their buttons right back which is something I never had to do before.
At Stanford Hospital Emergency room I ran into a particularly rude doctor. He first started to tell me I should not be coming to a classy hospital like Stanford but I should be going to one of those specialty clinics over in Oakland. When I asked him what he was talking about he just repeatedly said the same things over and over again about how there were no doctors at Stanford that were trained to treat people like me but that there were forty or fifty clinics over in Oakland that were specially trained to treat people like me. He was referring to methadone clinics and other drug abuse clinics but he would not say it directly. I pushed him on it to give a name of a clinic and asked him how could there possibly not be any doctors at Stanford Hospital that treat chronic pain. I asked what he meant by "people like you." But he refused to elaborate on his meaning. He intentionally tried to provoke me so that he could call security and have me thrown out but I did not bite on his baiting provocations. I knew for a fact that there was a specialty clinic for pain in the Stanford system but he denied that there was. He ranted and raved at me that only the clinics in Oakland were trained to treat people like me. Then he discharged me with a contemptuous attitude and told me to never return. I should have pressed charges against him but I chose not to. I did file a complaint with the administration over his behavior. They took my complaint seriously.
I only bring this up because earlier this month I had my prescription meds stolen out of my backpack while I was traveling and I had to replace them. That meant going to a new doctor and asking for morphine which I understand can look like a drug addict's behavior. I got my prescriptions but I was treated very rudely by the doctor. So when traveling carry meds in a safe way and don't keep them all in the same place because sometimes it takes a long time to replace them when you are on the road.
Why do humans have such a strong need or even compulsion to have to place everybody they come into contact with into some sort of pigeon hole based on some random criteria like the length of hair or the color of skin or their dress etc? Please take the time to treat people respectfully when you meet them whether you are traveling or just around your daily life. Don't assume things about the character and intentions of others until you have enough facts to actually make an informed decision. Enjoy life.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Rambling on
Well today I have very high pain and I am starting to go a bit crazy. My blog about traveling is seriously interrupted by my health right now. I spent most of the morning wondering if it was worth it to go to the emergency room but I have not gone yet. I have had to make four emergency room visits in the last few months and they never work out very well. The doctors usually just overload me with morphine or dilaudid or some other pain meds in combination. That does not improve my health it just gives me a couple of hours with less pain then I am right back in my current condition again. I have my own drugs here at home I just can't take such large quantities without some medical monitoring.
I am seriously tired of this ongoing medical problem. I have had pain for almost twenty years now but lately I am having a difficult time coping with it. In the past I have had even worse pain that I tolerated much better than I can tolerate this now. I moved out to the hot climate in the California San Joaquin Valley to see if I felt better in the heat. It has helped me somewhat compared to the cold wet San Francisco Bay area but it is still not enough. I feel like a prisoner. I force myself to go out and ride my bike everyday to get some activity in and frequently do fifty miles on the bike. The last few days I can barely swing my leg over the bike to get started though. When I am no longer able to ride which might be soon I will totally and finally go insane from this. Then the blog will be officially over even though it will remain online missing an ending point. I should just give up on it now since I haven't been able to write for so long I seriously doubt if I will ever recover enough to start it up again. If only hope did spring eternally maybe I could get back to it one day. I am having some more surgery in a couple of weeks over at the Stanford cancer center but I am not expecting it to help me much, if at all. I guess I have just lost all faith in doctors and the American medical industry.
There are still lots of good pages of reading in the archives if you have not read them yet. Start at the beginning , April 2010, and enjoy your reading. Reading will soon be obsolete according to a story I read on the net yesterday. Younger people are reading less and less as time goes by. They seem to have the 140 character limit to their attention span. I still read a book or more a day and without that I would already be gone. I live vicariously through those books now to escape my tormented body. This week I have been reading Jon Krakauer's books, Into Thin Air, Where Men Win Glory, Into the Wild, Eiger Dreams and next up Under the Banner of Heaven will keep me busy. It doesn't always work, but it is all I have right now. So enjoy life while you still can. PURAVIDA paparoach
I am seriously tired of this ongoing medical problem. I have had pain for almost twenty years now but lately I am having a difficult time coping with it. In the past I have had even worse pain that I tolerated much better than I can tolerate this now. I moved out to the hot climate in the California San Joaquin Valley to see if I felt better in the heat. It has helped me somewhat compared to the cold wet San Francisco Bay area but it is still not enough. I feel like a prisoner. I force myself to go out and ride my bike everyday to get some activity in and frequently do fifty miles on the bike. The last few days I can barely swing my leg over the bike to get started though. When I am no longer able to ride which might be soon I will totally and finally go insane from this. Then the blog will be officially over even though it will remain online missing an ending point. I should just give up on it now since I haven't been able to write for so long I seriously doubt if I will ever recover enough to start it up again. If only hope did spring eternally maybe I could get back to it one day. I am having some more surgery in a couple of weeks over at the Stanford cancer center but I am not expecting it to help me much, if at all. I guess I have just lost all faith in doctors and the American medical industry.
There are still lots of good pages of reading in the archives if you have not read them yet. Start at the beginning , April 2010, and enjoy your reading. Reading will soon be obsolete according to a story I read on the net yesterday. Younger people are reading less and less as time goes by. They seem to have the 140 character limit to their attention span. I still read a book or more a day and without that I would already be gone. I live vicariously through those books now to escape my tormented body. This week I have been reading Jon Krakauer's books, Into Thin Air, Where Men Win Glory, Into the Wild, Eiger Dreams and next up Under the Banner of Heaven will keep me busy. It doesn't always work, but it is all I have right now. So enjoy life while you still can. PURAVIDA paparoach
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