Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Since people said to start a blog on the subject, I fired one up. So say hello to DamnDirtyDoctors.com. I need your help getting content for the site of course, so please pass it on to anyone who you think can help, or take some “spy photos” of your own. If there’s an interest, I’ll gladly maintain the site and keep it going (and make it look a bit nicer than it does now).
DAMN DIRTY DOCTORS . COM
All submissions are anonymous of course. I would hate to see someone lose their medical care because a pissed off doctor gets angry when their negligence gets pointed out. Let’s hope I don’t get sued BTW… Doctors — and their insurance companies especially — have deep pockets when it comes to legal bills.
Oh, and I added some “ducks” yesterday as well. Both sites could use your help of course, as both are reader-written… you decide which is more important to you!
Nefarious, Caitlin, Saira, Michael, and I rented a car for the long weekend and went “park hopping” (the rental was a funny experience because Discount, where I had the reservation, unexpectedly had all their cars locked up in the body shop next door, with the owner of said body shop out of town for the weekend, and they had to drive me and their other customers down to Enterprise to rent there instead).
On the first day of our trip, Sunday, we hit Presqu’ile (near Brighton), which was a little mucky and murky green but had great waves. We spent the night in Belleville, which meant more swimming at the hotel pool, and better yet, it had an indoor two or three story high spiralling water slide — Nefarious and I got lots of exercise running up and down the stairs to it for about an hour before going back to the room and watching a movie (The Land of the Lost — meh) before bedtime.
After having the treat of room service breakfast in bed the next morning — which was the tenth anniversary of the drowning death of our mutual friends Todd and Scott Fox — we first went to one of the beaches on the road to Salmon Point (roughly where they drowned), and then drove down to the Black River Cheese Company for ice cream (which is where we bumped into a family of four touring The County on their awesome Russian Ural motorcycle with sidecar). Next was the Little Bluff Conservation Area, just down the street, which is a wonderful and historically under-appreciated beach (although there are more visitors every time I go). Finally, we went to the “Outlet” section of Sandbanks, a giant sand dune beach that is very shallow and warm, so you can walk out quite far.
Oh, and we ate at the Milford Bistro. The meal was nice but nothing that really blew me away (the place in the area that I particularly recommend if you find yourself in the Picton area is Michael Potters’ Harvest which is really amazing) — the meal’s thrill was saved for desert, where Nefarious and I split cheesecake and a fresh blueberry icecream that they made there that was incredible… Anyway, here are some pictures, in the order that I’ve mentioned the beaches above. Tomorrow is back to flight school, so hopefully all the exercise (and driving) will earn me a good night’s sleep.
Nefarious called me outside earlier today to show me that our neighbours had gotten a new toy and were washing it in the laneway. It’s dark out so the picture doesn’t really show how terrifying this hang glider is… I would be so scared to fly it. The only person I know that hang glides is Blair (as in the scarification artist) but I don’t think he’s done it for a decade…
I mentioned in the previous entry that when I was at the hospital last I was disturbed that the hyfrecator tool was covered in blood. The doctor blamed this on the residents who do a poor job (it’s not the first time I’ve seen stray blood at this particular hospital), but I wanted to mention that it bothered me that their clean tools are kept in a bin that pretty much overlaps with their overflowing container of dirty tools. It’s my feeling that the two — contaminated tools and clean/sterile tools — need to be kept completely separate and everything possible should be done to minimize the risk of cross contamination…
Is this going to cause a problem? Probably not, but it easily could, and really, it just reeks of low standards and a sloppy thought process. It bothers me to no end that tattoo studios and to a lesser extent estheticians’ studios are beaten to death with high standards in these areas, but that hospitals, doctors, and dentists — who should know better by virtue of their educations — don’t seem to give a damn.
The paranoid or conspiracy minded would suggest that the sicker the public gets, the more money doctors get. The realists would say that a critical mass of medical staff are lazy, ignorant, and have low standards about how they do their jobs…
I had a consultation today for a surgery that’s happening in mid-August, adding another nice hefty scar to my legs. I’m happy that they’ve got me in so quickly, and it shouldn’t be a big deal and I won’t be out of commission long. I said to the doctor, “just don’t do use that hyfrecator over there, because it seems to be covered in blood.” Here’s a picture. Oops.
I’ve done my share of so-called dangerous things on the road… I’ve driven my Porsche at well over 250kph on the highway, I’ve driven my dubiously street legal offroad trucks daily, driven kit cars that are not much more than racing go karts, and so on. But when I posted about the crazy old lady that almost ran me over, a bunch of people commented about people driving while texting on their phones. It’s nuts, isn’t it? It really blows me away that people think it’s OK to do something like that… and I see it every single time I go out. I mean, it’s basically “normal”. Like I said, I’ve done plenty of things that aren’t considered acceptable on the road, but I’ve always been an alert driver that pays attention to the road and vehicles and people around me. It’s shocking that drivers don’t realize the extent to which they endanger both themselves and others by reading and typing while driving. I don’t get it at all.
(Snapped this photo on the way home)
