Category: Health care

In Memoriam: William F. White Jr.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Heather and Bill White in 1996.

She was set to retire in a couple of weeks. He was going to buy her a grill and show her how to use it.

But then what seemed to be a minor bout with some seasonal bug — fatigue, shortness of breath, surely nothing to fret about — became something else altogether.

They went to the ER instead of Home Depot. And seven days later, he was gone.

• • •

William F. White Jr. of Smyrna, Tenn., died May 17 of complications from bone cancer. He was 77.

Bill met my sister-in-law Heather F. Pigeon nearly four decades earlier, when a mutual friend introduced them at a Ruby Tuesday in Antioch, Tenn. He and Heather hit it off, and would’ve gone out together the very next night. But that was Bill’s birthday, and he had plans with his parents. So their first date got pushed back a week.

Two years later, on Aug. 4, 1990, they were married in Oak Ridge, a couple of months after Herself and I tied the knot at Hyde State Park near Santa Fe.

Bill was a Nashville boy. He was born there on March 4, 1949, and graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1967. Then Uncle Sam sent him on a road trip. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to ’72, including a year in Vietnam with the 1st Signal Brigade, 1st Infantry Division (The Big Red One). He was based first in Saigon as a typist before being sent to the field to disassemble signal towers.

“Wild Man.”

Back in the States with an honorable discharge, Bill attended Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, graduating in 1977 with a business degree and the nickname “Wild Man.”

In 1985 he joined Horizon Wine and Spirits, going on to win many sales awards over a 30-year career. The owner of one store on his route said he always looked forward to Bill’s calls because he was the only sales rep he liked.

It saddens me to say that Bill and I didn’t really get to know each other well — Herself and I saw more of Heather than Bill, even after he retired in 2015. But I can see why that store owner enjoyed visiting with him. For a wild man and a sales rep, Bill was remarkably laid back.

We did have some things in common. More hair than was deemed respectable Back in the Day®. Nicknames. And nicotine. Bill kicked the habit after taking a work-sponsored smoking-cessation class — the only one of the 20 men in the class to finish it and kick those butts to the curb.

But his sport of choice was golf. Bill originally played in the men’s league at the Old Fort Golf Course in Murfreesboro, but finally shifted to the senior league, quipping that he “couldn’t hang with the young boys.”

An Eagle Scout (Troop 121, BSA, 1964), Bill also enjoyed hiking Tennessee’s state parks, visiting local farmers’ markets, and cooking. In recent years he’d tried his hand at baking, and cinnamon muffins became one of his faves. Heather loved them too.

• • •

Maggie.

Bill is survived by his wife of 35 years, Heather F. White of Smyrna; a brother, Donald White, and sister, Linda White, both of Nashville; in-laws Beth and Darren Morgan of Woodsboro, Md., the two of us here in Albuquerque; and Magdalene, an 18-year-old tabby cat. Bill and Heather parented eight cats in the years together and fostered many more.

He was preceded in death by his parents, William F. White Sr., and Nannie (Nan) Louise Whitfield White.

Funeral arrangements are pending. In lieu of flowers the family suggests donations to Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee or WMOT Roots Radio.

But don’t anyone start a GoFundMe for the grill. Heather will buy that herself.

‘We are not amused’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Hey, I may be a Russian Blue, but I was born here, so lemme out!”

Nothing to see here, move along, move along. The ICEholes didn’t get Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

However, she was plucked from beneath the rumpled comforter in our bed, unceremoniously stuffed into a carrier, and whisked away via Scary Noisy Rattlebox to the vet yesterday for a vaccination, a mani-pedi, and a quick looksee because — like so many of us — Miss Mia is Of a Certain Age. In this case, 19, which means she’s pushing 90 in our years.

Ninety. Holy hell. I’m neither half as spry nor a quarter as cute as she is, and I’m barely 72. She’s got more hair, too, though our whiskers are about the same shade of white.

Mia’s no longer the champion jumper she once was, but then neither am I. Since breaking that second ankle I hop onto and off of things about as well as Mr. Hilltop in “Young Frankenstein.”

But she’s only on the one medication — methimazole, for an overactive thyroid — whereas I would be on an even half-dozen if I could get any of the fun ones without risking a longish stretch in the cage myself.

As we rolled into the parking lot I noticed one vehicle with a Trump sticker, and once inside I glanced around, trying to I.D. the owner. But I didn’t see anyone with an ailing turkey buzzard, desert warthog, or vampire bat, so I couldn’t in good conscience slip the doc a double sawski and recommend a candidate for euthanasia.

“Oh, sure, you’re all about a rabies vaccination for your three-legged pit bull but the rest of us should be ‘free’ to croak of the COVID Measles,” I mumbled to no one in particular.

Miss Mia just rolled her lovely green eyes, which is her way of saying: “Can we get on with it, please? You may win the war of words in here, but you’re gonna lose the fight in the parking lot afterwards, and I want to get home to finish my nap without a side trip to the ER and/or jail.”

Oh, mama …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
It’s money that he loves.

They say that money 
Can’t buy love in this world 
But it’ll get you a half-pound of cocaine 
And a 16-year old girl 
And a great big long limousine 
On a hot September night 
Now that may not be love 
But it is all right. — Randy Newman, ‘It’s Money That I Love’

The Toddler-in-Chief wants to fire Jerome Powell again. Or still. Whatevs.

I guess a diet rich in Mickey D’s shitburgers, Adderall and defeat just doesn’t tighten the ol’ focus the way it once did.

Is this a pivot back to Making America Great Again? Like he did with grocery prices, gas prices, and the whole no-more-wars thing?

So. Much. Winning.

Take a nap, fuckface. We could all do with a little peace and quiet around here for a change.

‘Genocide’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
“What’s in a name? that which we call a hose / By any other name would smell as sour.” Apologies to The Bard.

Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.

This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:

“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”

This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.

But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.

And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.

Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.

Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”

So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:

Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.

It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.

In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.

A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.

And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.

Winter shows its teeth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Where my cross-country skis at?

The bad thing about snow is it keeps me indoors, where the news is.

The good thing about snow is it gives me something else to shovel.

We got a couple-three inches of the white stuff here yesterday, about double the official tally at the airport (which is stupid, because I don’t know anybody who lives at the airport).

It started falling overnight. This I know because the Cold Moon reflecting off the accumulation in the back yard blasted me out of a sound sleep around 2 a.m. I howled at it, briefly, then drifted back into a fitful drowse that ended at stupid-thirty, when I had to drag ass out of the sack and shovel the Driveway of Doom for Herself, who had an early appointment with the dentist and a 2WD Honda to get her there.

I got her half of the drive cleared without breaking a hip or throwing out my back, and she navigated the descent without incident, so, winning, etc. Then I went back indoors, microwaved my half-finished second cup of coffee, slammed it, and went back out to shovel my half, as I too had an appointment with the very same dentist, but at a reasonable hour.

Or what would’ve been a reasonable hour, had I not already burned some critical daylight freeing the driveway of Itztlacoliuhqui’s icy booger-snots. There was no time left for my traditional X-rays-and-cleaning breakfast of sardines in mustard sauce sprinkled with chopped anchovies, red onions, and feta, which keeps these visits short and to the point.

So instead, as the hygienist chiseled, scraped, sanded, power-washed, and polished, I was compelled to listen as she prattled on and on — backed by a soundtrack of treacly holiday ditties clearly penned by Satan Himself — about how lovely Herself is and how she was sure someone had made a mistake when listing her birthdate on the paperwork, with nary a word about the striking male beauty of Your Humble Narrator, his wrinkly old Irish-American apple cheeks aglow from an hour’s snow-shoveling in the frosty high-desert air.

Oh, well. At least it wasn’t news. Not to me, anyway.