Mazurland Blog

My Take On The Future Of US Healthcare

Just look at public education as an analogy:

Everyone is forced to pay for it (through taxes), even if they don't use it. Only the rich (who have after-tax money to pay for private school) can avoid it. And they do.

The politicians who enact the system almost universally avoid the public option.

It's hugely inefficient; we spend more and more per student with diminishing results.

Over time (decades, mind you) we have come to accept mediocrity as the norm. It's a slow process. Nobody notices. Most don't know any better.

Innovative improvement is squashed through lobbying from the entrenched public employees (who benefit from the system), and through the absence of any vibrant "private" element. No one knows how good it "could have been" (if there was real competition/innovation in a private sector), so no one knows what they're missing. Being "no worse than last year" becomes a good thing.

Over time, the profession draws weaker and weaker college students to enter the field.

Add rationing (and don't kid yourself, there MUST eventually be rationing in some manner), and you have the future of American medical care.

Mazurland In Europe - Installment I

Your European correspondent is back from a whirlwind trip to Spain and France that was full of adventures, some intended and some not, some good and some not. I hope to have a couple more posts on the trip in the next several days, and those will have the good parts of the trip. But lets get the bad out of the way first. Actually, my daughter Christina has already done that much better, and in more detail, than I have energy for. She has nailed it in a long post on her travel blog today entitled "Barcelona/The Apocalypse". The only comment I have on her post, aside from it being a very entertaining read, is that she was a little unfair in her title to Barcelona. It was, after all, upon leaving Spain that our troubles really began. (Aside on Barcelona: My wife and I have often daydreamed about the places abroad that we'd like to visit, most of them in Europe. And I've wondered, given that most people in America can go to Europe at most a few times in their lives, where I might like to go more than once. Of course, this can only be determined with certainty after you visit a place once. Barcelona is now one of those places. Though my first impression was brief, it was very favorable. Barcelona is already one of my favorite cities!)

Before you read Christina's post, I'll give you the Reader's Digest version: We were stranded on a train for over 24 hours on the Mediterranean coast at the border of Spain and France due to a freak snow storm. Though this storm happened in a place that seldom has to deal with any snow at all, it was not just a matter of a warm weather locale being paralyzed by a few snowflakes. The storm delivered between 6 and 16 inches (it varied widely from place to place) of heavy, "heart attack" snow over a wide area, with strong winds and lightning. It caused wide-spread power outages. And it caused our train to be stuck for over a day. The morning after the storm, a French TV news crew made its way to our stranded train (the roads were nearly impassable). We got on French news. Here's a story on the storm from the European media.

A few days later, we traveled through the same small coastal town where we had been stranded. We told tales of the storm to the passengers who were on our return trip. Most of the snow was gone. I'm including a few before/after photos here to give you an idea.

The train station at Cerbère, France. Things were looking bleak.

Just outside the station at Cerbère. The snow continued to fall all night after this gray scene was captured.

The morning after the storm. The snow doesn't look too deep here. It was very wet snow that had already been packed down by strong winds.

Five days after the storm. Almost like it never happened.

After the storm, our trip was mostly uneventful until the return home. Then Mother Nature turned capricious again and caused our puddle jumper from Newark to Harrisburg to be canceled (windy rain storms this time). I rented a car and we drove the last leg home.

Across The Pond

Tomorrow, my wife, son, and I are headed to France via Spain to visit my world-traveling daughter. We plan to have a whirlwind tour of Barcelona, then a more leisurely 5 days in southern France. We'll visit Montpellier (where my daughter is studying), the Pope's old digs in Avignon, a favorite hideout of van Gogh, a medieval walled city, an old Roman aqueduct, and perhaps some ruined fortresses and a cave whose walls were painted by Frenchmen millennia ago. We'll sample the wines of the Rhône, taste bouillabaisse in Provence, and eat cassoulet in Languedoc. My wife and I are scurrying around getting some last minute packing done. So why am I writing this? Just to let you know that blogging, by me, will be light-to-non-existent until we get back a week from Sunday. Rest assured, we'll give you the Mazurland perspective on Transpondian Culture. To entertain you in our absence, catch up on my daughter's travel blog. She spent her weeklong break in London and Dublin and has written quite a bit since you last checked.

No Civet Poo! Guaranteed!

Who doesn't love a good cup of coffee? Oh, I'll drink mud from a Styrofoam cup or clunky truck stop china, or brew some Folger's bilge to take with me in a plastic travel mug. But I'm a bit of a coffee snob when I have my druthers. That means beans from a premium roaster spirited to my door by a runner (me!) or via UPS, and ground and consumed before the freshness wanes. No burnt coffee (i.e. Starbucks) for me. I buy online from Barrington's, Gillies, or Zabar's, or from one of the better local coffee shops (Saints). I use an Aeropress coffee maker and it takes less than five minutes to make a cup of excellent coffee, including grinding the beans, pressing the brew, and cleaning the equipment.

But though I love good coffee, I'm not nuts. While I might spend a few extra bucks on some exotic beans, I've only ever had Jamaican Blue Mountain on somebody else's dime. And tasting something that came from a cat's ass? Please. I throw a shoe at my cat whenever it cleans its keister in my presence. It strained belief that Jack Nicholson's character in The Bucket List, a supposed coffee connoisseur, did not know that his favorite brew, kopi luwak, is made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of an Asian Palm Civet.

Here's a coffee merchant with a distinctive take on selling beans: be as wacky and self-deprecating as possible. Amber Bean Coffee's web site has been called "Starbucks meets The Onion". The site is so relentlessly tongue-in-cheek that you wonder if they really want to sell their brew. But sell they do, and with no civet poo. Guaranteed!

[HT - R. Kruger]

Chemo Day One

Went to chemo today for the loading dose of erbitux. A double slug.  50 mg of Benadryl IV and 650mg of Tylenol and 2 hours getting the juice.

Then to Radiation Oncology to get my mask fitted for my rad treatments. No tattoos anymore. Rads will start next Wednesday.

Spiked a 102.0 fever when I got home, knocked me lower than whale shit. It's coming down now.  The Oncologist on Call said "welcome to chemotherapy, the fever should abate overnight, just take some tylenol and ibuprofen". Beats puking my guts out.

5 More treatments to go. One day at a time.

A Stirring Second Birthday

Today is Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin's "other" 200th birthday. It's fitting that such a great composer should get two. Last week, we got the birthday ball rolling with a piece played by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, one of the great Polish interpreters of Chopin from the early days of recorded music. To help us celebrate this birthday is Rafał Blechacz playing Chopin's great "Heroic" Polonaise in A flat major (Opus 53). Blechacz, another Pole, is a rising star. Here is the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on this impressive young man:

On October 21, 2005, he became the sole recipient of all five first prizes at the 15th International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, taking First Prize and the polonaise, mazurka, sonata, and concerto prizes. According to ABC News, one of the judges, Professor Piotr Paleczny, said that Blechacz "so outclassed the remaining finalists that no second prize could actually be awarded." Another judge, the distinguished Irish pianist John O'Conor, said "He is one of the greatest artists I have had a chance to hear in my entire life," according to PBS. Blechacz was the first Pole to win the prize (given every five years) since 1975, when Krystian Zimerman won.

The video of Blechacz playing is well worth sitting through the over two minutes of introduction (in Polish) and of Blechacz adjusting his seat.

I Crucified Thee

Here is one of my favorite Lenten hymns. It is a fine old Lutheran hymn, Herzliebster Jesu, text by Johann Heermann and melody by Johannn Crüger. My church choir performs this piece in English at least once each Lent. The arrangement we do, a very nice four part harmony, is a little different from the one on the video. We did a bang-up job on it, one of my choir's best performances since Christmas, though I think I'd rather we would sing it in German. It's tough reading the English words and not getting a little tight in the throat thinking about the indictment the song makes.



About a century after Crüger, Johann Sebastian Bach reworked one verse of the piece as a hymn within his St. Matthew's Passion. It's a much more complex harmony, and stunningly beautiful, as is the music from all of Bach's Passions.

Hank's Update

Overall, the news could have been a lot worse.

The cancer is concentrated in the right side of my neck. PET shows 3 more lymph nodes involved, 2 small ones which scored a 2 and a 5 for cancer involvement, and a slightly larger one that scored a 16.  The one they took out originally would have scored a 90.

No primary tumor has been found.  However, there has been no spread of the cancer cells to any other part or vital organ.

Treatment will be a 6-8 week course of combined daily radiation therapy with chemotherapy.  I will be seeing both oncologists tomorrow, and treatment will probably begin next week.  It's going to be 8 weeks in the cancer sausage making machine at 2 different hospitals, and a descent into the 7th level of hell. Constant nausea, radiation burns and accompanied nausea and vomiting from it as well as the chemo, my throat will become very sore and will make both eating and swallowing difficult.

However, as I told many cancer patients when I delivered their chemo when I was in the Navy----"Better to be in hell for 2 months than to be dead forever".

As Marty once put it in school, to the Ajax Cleanser Jingle: Death---Death is imminent---it comes at any time and it's indiscriminate.

However, reports of my demise will have to be put on hold.  The treatment should eradicate all the cancer cells.  With this particular cancer, if it does not reoccur in 2 years, it is considered a cure.

The only down side is once you've had cancer, you have a 40% chance of getting cancer again.

One day at a time.

Back In The Fold

I've spent about 35 years of my life away from the Catholic faith that I was born into. In the last few years, I have grown increasingly remorseful about having abandoned my Church. 

 In my county of 40K residents, we have only 2 Catholic Churches. 

 Lincoln County was originally settled by German Lutherans in colonial times. And the influx of Baptists and other Protestant denominations in the Southern US has kept the Catholic population a serious minority over our nation's history.  As late as the 1920's, Catholics in the South were seen as infidels, who gave their allegiance to a ruler in Rome.  Harassment and terror was applied to Catholics by the Ku Klux Klan, who believed that Dixie was for Protestants only.

So needless to say, being a Catholic in NC means you're a serious minority.

One of the Catholic Churches is St. Dorothy's, which lies on the main highway headed west out of Lincolnton.

For the last 10 years, I've had to drive by the church building at least 10 times a week, perhaps more. Other than a Saturday night Palm Sunday Mass in 2002, I'd never been in the place.

I also noticed that my fluent and direct use of profanity, honed by my years in the military and working in a correctional environment, has also given me cause to feel remorse: remembering that profanity is truly the dialect of those who don't have the vocabulary to properly express themselves, or in my case, too lazy to use the vocabulary that I have.

Every wayward Catholic has their reasons for walking away from the Church and the practice of our faith. I know I had mine.  I witnessed molestation of one of my cousins by a priest when I was 9 years old. When the Pastor of my church who had known me most of my life refused to baptize my son because I was not "living by the form", I told him if he didn't want to save my son's soul for the Holy Mother Church and Jesus Christ, then somone else would get the 50 bucks,  he did it.  When I was in Louisiana, one of my employers wanted to get married in the church, but he had gotten divorced.  A Priest who was a family friend plead his case to the Archbishop of New Orleans, who was happy to give a dispensation---for FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. In the early part of the decade, when it seemed that a good 40% of the Priesthood appeared to be homosexual pedophilacs,  It only made me want to stay away all the more.

My diagnosis of cancer this month opened my eyes.  My issue wasn't with God, or our Saviour.  It was with the Church structure itself, which like any institution, has its flaws.  It was a watershed moment for me, as it is with most people.

I now see the Church as a means to get closer to God, and get my life straight with Him.  I've never denied being a Catholic.  I've never derided my faith. I can't let these man-made flaws keep me from getting my life in line with my faith.  We never know how much time we have left, and I thank God daily that my disease opened my eyes and acknowledged the hunger my soul has been feeling for decades. 

My parish priest has told me that many people turn away from God when their lives are in crisis: Loss of a family member, marital betrayal, catastrophic disease, etc. They get angry with God, in many instances because they have practiced their faith for many years, and cannot understand, in their minds, why God has forsaken them. 

I think faith is something you have in varying degrees.  Many Catholics go through the motions, as most of us did as children. You were forced to be there, forced to particpate, and it set us up for failure as adults. 

My old friend Navy Chaplain Bob Burt, now a Rear Admiral and the Chief of Navy Chaplains, has been an advisor to me for over 25 years, also had a close brush with death from cancer a few years back.  As an evangelical, we never discussed my faith and my issues with the Church.  He always stressed that your personal relationship with God through Jesus was paramount.  Of course we Catholics have the Blessed Mother and the Saints to also intercede in our behalf.

It's not going to be a short road back to full practice of the faith, but I have started down the road, and I take heart and strength in my faith. 

Regardless of what I find out today about my PET scan, I will continue to do God's work through the Marine Corps League to our brother and sister veterans and our fellow citizens.  I will not turn away from God, the Church or my faith.  I know that my fate lies in God's hands, but I will fight with everything I have to live.

Separation Anxiety

Brother Hank may not be the farthest separated in distance from the other Brothers (that distinction belongs to Brother Chris), but he's the Brother with the least contact with the others. I see Ben nearly every day at work, and see Chris and Paul at least once a year at the Mazur Family Campout, Wilderness Exercises, and Quilting Bee. But I haven't laid eyes on Hank in nearly 35 years, and nor have my two blood brothers. And Ben has never met him.

Brother Hank turned 53 on Sunday, and Mazurland dropped the ball. We forgot the birthday post. Maybe it has something to do with the age, both ours, and particularly, his. The number 53 is a prime number and has the distinction of being the first prime number to be separated on either side from other primes by a difference of at least 6. So, although 53 is not strictly a "lonely prime", you can hardly blame it for feeling a little separation anxiety.

Here's wishing Brother Hank a belated Happy Birthday. Hank has run into a rough spot lately. Time to pay him a visit with some birthday wishes. Here's a wish for you, Hank: Sto Lat!