Life

If you are like most people, when you were a kid you went to a public school.  And during that thirteen years or so, you probably had to be absent for one reason or another, and to avoid censure and punishment by the school authorities, you had to take in a written excuse for that absence.  Maybe it was from a parent or guardian, maybe it was from a doctor.  And in some work environments now, especially in the more menial labor situations, absence from work requires a doctor's note or other documentation.  It's often true in the carpet and other textile mills that are numerous in this part of Georgia.

Readers of my blog probably know that my wife is an ICU charge nurse, and (without violating HIPAA regulations) that she often comes home with interesting stories to tell.  Some are sad, some are funny, some are sadly funny.  Here's one of the latter.

A couple of nights ago, in the middle of the night, a patient was admitted for overdose.  He was a young man, in his early twenties, and had been with a couple of his friends, chewing on fentanyl patches.  Yes, that's right--chewing on fentanyl (synthetic morphine) patches. I guess it has become a common form of abuse when those patches are available, but whoa!  Dangerous, very dangerous.

His buddies who were doing this with him noticed that he was not in good shape and panicked, going for a ride and dumping him on someone's lawn.  He was found there by a stranger, 9-1-1 was called and he was transported to the Emergency Room.

Anyway, this young man was hospitalized and in the ICU.  Last night, he had some visitors... I would assume NOT the "friends" who decided that the best course of action when he overdosed was to drop him off in someone's front yard.

When visiting hours were over, one of the young man's visitors came 'round to my wife at the nurses' station and asked, "Will you write a note that says I have been here visiting my cousin?  It's for my employer."  My wife, not wishing the young fellow to get into trouble for an act of kindness, gladly wrote that VISITOR had spent time that night visiting with PATIENT, and she signed it. The visitor was thankful, and left.

Today someone from the hospital administration called to ask Lara some questions.  It seems that a probation officer called about someone at the hospital in the county's Electronic Monitoring Program. The admin person and Lara were both puzzled, as they knew of no patient in the ICU who was in the program (no electronic bracelet was on any patient.)  Then the admin person mentioned that the probation officer had received a note with my wife's signature on it, from one of his "clients" who is on EMP.  Light shone through the darkness!

The young visitor had been embarrassed to admit that he was on the monitoring program, but to cover his derriere he asked for a note to explain his absence from his "workplace." (I guess he was not supposed to be absent from his home while wearing the ankle bracelet, which was covered by the jeans he was wearing.)

I guess everyone needs a good excuse now and then. 

I guess what makes them so doggone frightening to me is that my wife is a long-time ER and ICU nurse who is also a CNP, and I hear the horror stories of medicine all too often.  It may seem like fiction to you to hear of some of the horrible things that can happen in a hospital: sponges left in patients, doctors operating while intoxicated, nurses failing to connect telemetry so patients die without anyone knowing.  The problem is, these things really do happen, so that makes the medical thriller a bit too close to home for me.

How's this for a thriller concept?  Doctors discover an antibiotic-resistant infection that spreads easily and is very, very deadly. 

"Ha!" you may say. "That's been done, and besides, it's a reality.  They call it MRSA, or 'mersa' in the nurse's lingo."

True.  All too true.  So, let's put a kink in it.  Classic MRSA typically is transferred through a wound and/or mucous membrane, by exposure to a person sick with MRSA or his/her body fluids.  It is contracted over ninety percent of the time when a person is in a hospital, nursing home, dialysis center or other such place.

So let's make it more suspenseful: the new "bug" is spread through casual contact with physical objects that other infected persons have touched.  Remember wa-a-a-ay back when people worried about catching AIDS or VD from a doorknob?  Well, would it up the suspense ante if the new bug could literally be caught from a doorknob... or by touching the handle of the shopping cart at WalMart... or from the toilet in the public restroom... or by picking up the hymnal at church?

And would it make it even more horrifying if this new version of the bug often causes necrotization of the tissue (necrotizing fascitis)?  (That means that the skin and underlying flesh starts to die and rot--similarly to what happens from the bite of a brown recluse.  (Warning: NASTY pictures after that jump!)

Guess what: it is not fiction.  This relatively new version of MRSA is called Community Acquired Methicillin-Resistant Staphyloccus Aureus.  CA-MRSA, for short.

The nurses at the hospital were warned about this a few months ago, but the warning was emphasized again in today's training.  Here's a kicker, too: Purell and other alcohol-based "hand sanitizers" don't do squat to fight this.  You know those little dispensers you may have seen near the entrance of your local grocery store (ours have them, anyway) that have what look like baby wipes in them?  Those things have a mild form of bleach in them, and that's the only thing that kills the CA-MRSA on surfaces.  Standard germicidal wipes with alcohol are useless against CA-MRSA.

Now, for some reason people are worried silly over H1N1 influenza. 

Why? Because the pharmaceutical companies have pushed this as a big risk. 

Why did they do this?  Because they have HUGE stockpiles of influenza vaccine and TamiFlu that they need to sell before it goes out of date. 

There are about 290 confirmed cases of H1N1 influenza in the U.S. right now.  There has been one death: a Mexican toddler whose immune system was compromised.  To me, this is not a pandemic, as sad as the death of a child may be. One death in 286 is a mortality rate of about one-third of one percent

Here are some facts on deaths from MRSA: "In 2005 in the United States alone, 368,600 hospital admissions for MRSA—including 94,000 invasive infections—resulted in 18,650 deaths. The number of MRSA fatalities in 2005 surpassed the number of fatalities from hurricane Katrina and AIDS combined and is substantially higher than fatalities at the peak of the U. S. polio epidemic."  (Taken from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons News.)  That is a FIVE percent mortality rate in 2005.  The CA-MRSA has developed since that time, so the infection rate is increasing because people are contracting CA-MRSA outside the hospital. 

By this point you're probably wondering why in the WORLD I am blogging about this.  Well, it does tie to writing and fiction in a number of ways.

1. Medical thrillers and medical suspense novels are a big part of the crime fiction scene, and this sort of information is great background info for such novels.
2. Reality is often stranger than fiction, and it actually makes the fiction scarier if people face up to the fact that such things can really happen.  (For example, don't you think people would find zombie stories scarier if they really believed that they could find a horde of brain-hungry walking corpses in their front yard one night?)
3. The scare tactics about the swine flu (H1N1 influenza) are, in my not-so-humble opinion, blown-out-of-proportion statistics and largely fictionalized, and designed to help the pharmaceutical companies rather than help individuals.  If the number of cases and mortality rate were any indicators, they would be falling all over themselves to inform people about MRSA and CA-MRSA... oh, but wait!  People can use simple antisepsis (washing with bleach water) to avoid MRSA and CA-MRSA, so the pharmaceutical companies wouldn't make much money from that, would they?
4. Lastly--if it IS or if it is NOT a scheme to sell flu meds and clear out stockpiles--well, it makes a heck of a story, don't you think?

The last few days have been very busy.  We are building a new home, as you already know if you have read much of this blog at all.  And when a few days of lousy weather are followed by clear and sunny days, you can bet we take advantage of that to try to get as much done on the construction as we can.

Ultimately, the house is intended to look like a sort of medieval European manor house.  We've been searching for an appropriate door, and finally we found a company near Alpharetta, Georgia, that makes the kind of door we want in a very low-maintenance version.  We visited their showroom this past week to see firsthand what their products look like, and we were very pleased.  We'll be getting our front doors from there, and they look VERY Middle Ages European.  So much so, in fact, that I'm thinking of hiring a few serfs to hang about the place when it's done, just to give it color and so forth.

The drive back was through some beautiful mountain countryside, along Georgia Highway 140 through Canton and Waleska.  It's one of my favorite drives at this time of year--actually, just about any time of year--and we stopped at one of our favorite spots to soak up a bit of the lovely scenery.

There it was: a clear and rushing mountain stream, cascading and tumbling over boulders, making beautiful watery music.  The steep sides of the rocky gorge the stream had cut over thousands of years, were covered with rhododendron (alas, not in bloom) and mountain laurel.  But there was a new element in the picture, a somewhat forbidding one.

Every fifty feet on the trees beside the roadway were signs.  The signs read:

POSTED
NO TRESPASSING
Warning: This area infected with
Liquidambar styraciflua.

Keep Out!

Now, I could see that there were poison ivy plants growing along the edge of the defile, but there was no warning about the poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans).  My wife and I, both interested in plants, looked at each other with puzzlement.  She is more acquainted with the scientific names of plants than I, but this one seemed to be familiar to me even though I could not immediately place it.

"Do you remember what this is?" I asked her. "Is it a plant or a plant disease?"

Lara shook her head. "It sounds familiar, though." She shrugged. "We'll look it up when we get home."

After arriving at the homestead, we took one of the tree books from the shelf (yes, we did that instead of using Google!) and we found the answer immediately.

The area is infected with the (GASP!) Sweetgum trees!

Now, there is no danger from the sweetgum tree, unless you happen to step on one of its seed pods when barefoot.  That would probably result in a little bit of an impromptu dance and perhaps some colorful language, but no lasting damage unless you happened to fall down while prancing about while holding one foot.  Here is a picture of several of the seed pods, which are about the size of golf balls.

Lara and I discussed this, and the only conclusion to which we could come, was that the owners of the land had tired of people holding picnics on their lovely stream, afterward leaving behind lots of trash.  So, they came up with this way of playing on the ignorance of most folks.  And they weren't lying--there were several sweetgum trees growing all along the roadway.  In fact, in the essence of irony, some of the signs were themselves tacked firmly to sweetgum trees. 

But the warning of possibly contracting the dangerous "virus" Liquidambar styraciflua would probably discourage most people from traipsing through the woods to the stream. I can see it now...

Him: "Hey, honey, let's stop here and eat those sandwiches we brought along.  The kids would love to wade in that creek."

Kids in chorus: "Yeah!  Yeah!  Wade in the creek!"

Her: "Oh, okay George.  Pull over."  She opens the door.  "Oh, Lord!  Honey, let's get out of here!  That sign says this area is infected with some sort of disease or something!"

Him:  "Huh?!?"

Her:  "Get moving!  We don't want the kids to get that... that... styrack flu or whatever it is!  Lester just got over the chicken pox last week!"

They roar away in their minivan.

Nature can be a dangerous place, you know.

Karen lived in Georgia, fairly close to my parents, while I lived in Florida.  (I was a sailor at the time.)  My seven-year-old daughter was spending a couple of weeks with my parents in June of 1987 when Karen died, and for some time after that we had to deal with her fears of further loss because Aunt Kay (her name for Karen) had promised to come back the next day and go out for ice cream.  We learned not to say to her, "I promise I'll be back."

Why am I saying all this?  It's not to engender any tears or sympathy.  It is to help raise awareness of the dangers lurking in persistent or recurring pain.

When my sister died, she had been suffering with a wretchedly painful headache for almost a week. Nevertheless, she started for work that Saturday morning, to catch up on some work she had not finished during the week.  On the way to work, while driving on a little country road, a blood vessel in her head catastrophically burst.  Karen had an undiagnosed brain aneurysm that ruptured, causing almost immediate death.  Her foot remained on the accelerator and the car ran along the road in a straight line until the road curved.  There was an embankment and the car rolled, throwing her now-dead body out and pinning it underneath.

Her horrible, persistent headache was the primary symptom for her fatal condition.  Some people have small aneurysms that never rupture, but Karen was not lucky enough for that.  Karen was young--only 23--and healthy, or so we thought.  The aneurysm was hidden within her, waiting to strike like some random time bomb, though it had been warning her with its pain for about a week.

So often we humans, especially the younger and healthier ones or the more macho ones, will dismiss even a persistent  or recurring pain out of hand. "Oh, it's nothing! Don't worry about it; it will go away.  I'm always having these..." headaches, bouts of heartburn, stomach pains--you provide the medical issue.

It's easy to get busy, or to think, "It's such a little thing--I'm sure it's nothing."  I have spoken with people who were in their thirties or forties when someone finally persuaded them to go to a doctor about this or that persistent problem, and often they said, "I've always had it.  I just figured everyone did, and I was like everybody else."  Persistent or recurring medical issues are not normal.  We don't all have them. 

Men: it's not being strong or masculine to ignore persistent pain. It's being stupid.  Go to a doctor!  Coach was wrong when he told you to just "suck it up!"

Women: the world will not fall apart if you take time to take care of yourself by having your health checked by a doctor.  And when the doctor asks if there is any health issue you have had lately, it's perfectly all right to tell him about it!

Anyone: If you have an unusual pain or condition that persists for more than a couple of days, or that keeps coming back, it is probably a good idea to see a doctor.  Maybe you will be lucky and you will catch that little problem before it becomes a much bigger one.  Or, maybe you will be even luckier, and you will have spent the insurance co-pay for nothing but peace of mind.

Aneurysms are treatable.  My sister would probably be alive now, and her kid(s) would have grown up with mine--but she didn't think she needed to go to the doctor.  She just toughed it out.

I miss her, and I wish she had not tried to tough it out. I'd rather be singing Happy Birthday to her tomorrow, than visiting her grave.

Don't tough it out.  Have that pain checked out.

Do it for the ones who love you, OK? 

Am I a magnet for the druggies, freaks and sexual deviants of the blog-spam world??

In the last three days I have removed well over 120 spam comments from this blog, for topics ranging from bestiality and porn with both extremely old women and very young women, to erectile dysfunction aids, prescription painkillers and prescription sleep meds. 

Now, I have to confess, if I were to visit some of the sites in the sexual side of the blog equation, I'd probably need some sort of sleep meds to get any rest afterward.  Somehow the idea of bestiality... well, let's just leave that where it belongs: in the garbage. 

And aren't prescription sleep medications and drugs like Levitra or Cialis sort of diametrically opposed to one another?  "Oh, crap!  Hank, wake up!  You fell asleep in the middle of things again!"

For a while I had open comments to my blog, simply because (1) I like to trust people when I can, and (2) it's sort of bothersome to have to come here and "Approve" everything that anyone leaves as a comment.  That went away after a few months, and now I have to approve every comment, no matter who writes it.  I suffered a rash of this sort of thing, unwanted comments, many of them nonsense or gibberish but with trackbacks attached.  The most recent spate of blog-spam all had trackbacks attached, too, and that's their primary reason for doing this, I suppose, as there are no links directly in the comments themselves. I guess it helps with SEO scoring or something for them to have trackback URLs listed on as many blogs as possible, so they play this stupid game. 

And it IS stupid, too! After all, do they really think I'll approve these silly things?

However, don't think that I mind approving the REAL comments!  I welcome those, and hope you leave one.

One thing that really annoyed me is how MacLife magazine played a part in this onslaught.  It's true, they did!  I happened to look at one of the trackback URLs for Meridia sales, and it went back to a MacLife web site forum page!  Someone had opened a free forum account there, and had made this huge long post advertising Meridia for sale, with lots of keywords.  

I complained to MacLife (hey, I'm a subscriber--I can complain!) but I don't see that they have done anything about it yet.

This is one of those times when I'd like to go Medieval and draconian on someone. People who spam like this, as well as the people who write virii and worms, should be taken to an appropriate place and staked out, naked, over a fire ant mound.  Leave for a couple of hours, then release them with a warning. (We have had fire ant mounds on our property. I've been stung by them, so I know the pain thereof!)

Two-time losers should be left there for a few days.  {Insert evil chuckle here...}

(Parenthetical note: I suppose there would be some who read this, who would declare with horror that my proposed punishment would be worse than any pornography or drug abuse that the spammer might encourage. To those people I say, "I certainly hope so! How else would it be a truly effective deterrent?? Besides, it would only happen to the initiator, not to those whom he/she had ensnared.")

Have you gotten the news about how the Federal government's stimulus package will affect your local economy yet?  Our local paper (The Calhoun Times) had a story about our share of the Federal largesse, and I just read it today.

Gordon County released the information about our stimulus project.  Yes, project. Singular. We ended up with one stimulus project from all that money.

A quote from the local paper: "A bridge replacement over Polecat Creek on County Line road was the only Gordon County project to end up on a list of eligible projects for the federally funded Georgia Department of Transportation highway and bridge stimulus.

The road is "remote and rural" and not very well traveled, the County Manager said, but also added that the bridge "is old and needs to be replaced..." and the project is "shovel ready!"

This is being posted on April 3, so no, it's not an April Fool's day joke.  We really do have a bridge over Polecat Creek, on County Line road, and it really was the only Federal stimulus project for which we received stimulus money.

The county manager was hopeful that the county could see another project or two in later phases.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

That is, unless I'm crossing Polecat Creek.

FOR SALE - Crime and Suspense ezine (http://www.crimeandsuspense.com/).  Established 2005.

Contact me for details!  tburton@crimeandsuspense.com

Yep, it's true.  Other things in my life have become much more pressing, and I decided to give up the Crime and Suspense ezine.  It's not because I don't like the ezine--heck, many of my friends and business contacts are because of the ezine. But sometimes, when there are a lot of things on the table, something has to be sent back.  "Sorry... I'm  full, really.  Nope, can't eat another bite, seriously!"  <belch> "Oh, pardon me."

The Crime and Suspense ezine has been around since October 2005, and was established then almost as a lark. "Hey, why don't I do my own online magazine??  Cool!"  And behold, it was cool.  But it also is time-consuming. Stories have to be read, selected or rejected, edited, formatted and placed on the site. Interviews have to be made.  Appropriate graphics have to be selected and/or created to illustrate the stories. Reviews have to be coordinated. The ezine has grown. We even had Warner Brothers contact us twice, out of the blue, to help with promoting two of their new movie releases.  And we are a paying market, unlike many online magazines.

Now, it's not that this is a terrible lot of work on its own, but when you couple it with a growing book publishing business, trying to write my OWN stuff, and building our new home, it has become more than I can easily handle.

I really like to do a GOOD job at what I do, not a slipshod job, and when I don't have the time to focus on the ezine or on the publishing business, it bothers me. 

In the past, one of the things I have decried is the dwindling of the markets for short fiction.  (See this post.)  And as I have begun to talk about the possible impending demise of Crime and Suspense, I've received many emails and contacts from people saying, "Don't do it! We need the short story markets!"

Well, they're right--we DO need them.  But we also need someone who has time to do it right.  I have to make choices about what is the best investment of my time and right now, the new home, my own writing, and my book publishing business take precedence.  So, I asked some of these people who begged me not to let it die, whether they might be interested in running the ezine.

"Oh.  No, no, I don't have time."

"I don't have the background/experience/knowledge to do that!"

"No, no... I just couldn't!"

Now, I will confess that a couple of people have volunteered to take on the screening of stories for me, and that does give me some breathing room.  In fact, that's probably the only thing that will allow me to keep the ezine going for a few more months this year. But what I'd really like to do is to find someone who is willing to take the helm, to use a nautical turn of phrase, and steer the Crime and Suspense ezine into new waters.

One thing, though: I'm not going to give it away. The ezine comes with a background and history, with subscribers, with a domain name! And from past experience, I've found that giving something away often carries with it the notion that the gift is worth exactly what was paid for it: NOTHING.  The cost will not be exorbitant, but just enough to assure that the buyer will appreciate what they now have.

So, if you have an interest in taking over the editorship of an established short crime fiction ezine, drop by the Crime and Suspense site and take a look around. If it still interests you after that, contact me for more details.  (See the email address above.)

The last couple of days have been wet... in fact, the entire late winter has been pretty wet here in NW Georgia.  But the daffodils and jonquils are blooming, and the Bradford pears are glorious displays of white blossoms.  (Just don't try sniffing them--YUK!!)

Today, dear wife Lara and I went up onto the property where we are building our new house, and we spent some time putting pepper seeds into starting trays.  Sometimes I think she is a little bit TOO scavengey, but I have to admit her saved toilet-tissue and paper towel rollers cut into short pieces, make great starters for seeds when filled with potting soil.  They protect the little plants from cutworms and eventually the cardboard just becomes part of the soil!

While there, I took a few pics of the flowering young peach and pear trees we have.  A nectarine tree is just starting to flower, too, but I didn't get pics of it.  Here are a couple of pics of the peach and pear tree blossoms.

The pink ones are peach blossoms, if you are not into flowering fruit trees.

Why am I telling you about flowering fruit trees and such?  

Well, first of all, they are just too beautiful to ignore. You should never go through life ignoring such beauties as these, presented to you by Nature. But there is more.

When you start your story, sometimes you don't have the whole story in your mind. Sometimes, all you have is the seed of the story, or perhaps the sapling. People who are not writers sometimes think that stories spring into life fully formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Maybe you are lucky enough for that to happen, but more often (for most of us, anyway) writing a story is more like gardening. 

We get that idea and we plant it in our fertile imagination. We water it, we watch it grow. Sometimes it branches out in ways we simply don't expect. And sadly, sometimes it fails to bear fruit at all.

Often, the idea takes a bit of stormy weather and rain to grow to full stature. Not every plant likes full sun--some require shade or partial sun. Some take a lot of water and some very little. Some fruit require days of frost before they can fully ripen.  

I have had days where I was so happy that I could not focus on my writing.  Things were too joyous.  But a few days later, when things seemed gloomy and dark, I was able to settle down and live in the world of my story for a while, and finish it.

Forgive my philosophizing. It happens to me when I get out in nature, sometimes.  My muse gets a little drunk on fresh air because she is unaccustomed to it!