Vete

Vaya con Dios, Pendejos

Trump spends $3 million American tax dollars to golf in Florida every weekend. We American taxpayers house his wife in a gold tower in New York City at a cost of $500,000 per day. That's $27 million dollars we American taxpayers spend on the Trump family--not including Secret Service and travel expenses for his grown adult children--per MONTH. 

Now Trump wants to cut funding for programs that include Meals on Wheels. Yes, the program that provides food and a home visit to poor, home-bound senior citizens. And you know who will be most hit by that? Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, where the poorest people are and which overwhelmingly went for Trump in the last election. Good. I want all those people who voted for this idiot to suffer. Let them lose their insurance, their Medicaid. Let them starve. Let them die alone in their sad digs. Let their children's schools be defunded so they grow up even more ignorant. They voted for it. So if Trump and his treasonous cabinet want to make them pay, then let them pay.

The $27 million dollars we spend per month on maintaining the rich Trump family's lifestyle is just a drop in the bucket. (Sure, we could use it to feed senior citizens, but why bother? I mean, do senior citizens deserve that money any more than Trump and his family?) It's a small cost in such a rich country, right? But the true cost is to the schoolchildren and the seniors citizens, the poorest and least protected among us. Who cares, right? Who cares about those people? If they're poor, it's their own fault, right?

Clinical

My first clinical rotation began this week. I'm working in a nursing home, where I am caring for people who survive overwhelmingly on Medicaid/Medicare dollars. These are men and women who are too old and too frail to care for themselves, or people who are still relatively young but who have suffered debilitating injuries or accidents or who have diseases that make it impossible for them to work or to live on their own. They've had strokes or have been in car accidents or have Parkinson's or MS or cerebral palsy or dementia. Not a single one of them would have wished for it, but there they are, suffering from it. These are the people who have the least voice in this country, the people who are going to be hardest hit by Trump cutting funding to the Department of Health and Human Services, the organization that oversees Medicaid and Medicare.

The patient I'm assigned to is relatively young--mid-60s--and worked a manual labor job until he suffered a stroke when he was younger than I am now. He survived it, but not without severe consequences to his health, both physical and mental. He spends most of his time in his room, in bed, alone. He sleeps a lot. I suspect he's pretty severely depressed, but when I talk to him, he is sweet and kind. He never married and has no children. He keeps a small black-and-white photograph of his mother, a very beautiful woman, by his bed. She is long gone. Someone gave him a stuffed teddy bear at Christmas, probably a donation. He keeps it by his bed, too. He is not outwardly bitter or angry about his fate, as I might be. He'll spend the rest of his life in a nursing home. What happens to him if his Medicaid is cut? I suppose we'll soon find out.

As nursing homes go, this one is definitely not the bottom of the barrel. It's not the top of the line, either--far from it. But the patients are adequately cared for and I have yet to witness any overt abuse. Caregivers are underpaid and they burn out, I'm sure, from overwork--but it's fine as long as the corporation that owns the nursing home continues to turn a profit, right? That's what it means when we allow free-market capitalism to control healthcare, a system republicans are fighting tooth and nail to maintain.

Here's an example of how little money goes toward caring for these patients: On the ward where I am, they have two thermometers for perhaps eighty patients. They have a single blood pressure cuff. Today the clinical instructor asked one of the LPNs for a Doppler (an ultrasonic pulse probe) to find a pulse on a patient and the LPN just laughed, like, oh yeah, do you really think we have one of those. The supply room looks like the place closed down a year ago. No money is put into maintaining the facility beyond a handful of cleaners who work to keep the worst of it at bay.

They have three nurses (one RN, two LPNs) on the ward at any given time--a nurse to patient ratio of about 27 to 1--and a handful of nursing assistants. Each nursing assistant is responsible for 15 patients. A single nursing assistant has to give baths and showers and dress and change diapers and brush teeth (or put in dentures) and brush or comb hair and change bed linens and feed fifteen people, some of whom are tube fed, many of whom can't bathe or dress or go to the toilet or feed themselves. That's in the morning when I work. In the afternoon, they have to give them lunch, change diapers, help the more mobile patients with showers. In the evening, they have to give everyone dinner and get them ready for bed. The nurses don't help with that. The two LPNs start their medication rounds and work at that for several hours in the morning. Then they do it all again a few hours later, then again, and again, circling the floor, handing out medication for hours on end. The RN tends to disappear for hours at at time.

At the end of our first day, one of the more tender-hearted women in my clinical group sent out a group text saying she could never send a relative to a place like the one we're working in. And my response was: I could. I wouldn't sacrifice my life to take care of someone who wouldn't make the same sacrifice for me.

But I don't have the same sentimental values, I suppose.

Thank god.

[Edited to add this comment I found at the end of an online article about Trump's proposed budget cuts:

"I did homemaking for the elderly a few years ago. Meals on Wheels is a vital program for many who can no longer prepare a nutritional meal for themselves. It also provides a watchful eye to alert officials if an elderly person may be in danger or worse. If the recipient doesn't answer the door the Meals on Wheels volunteer will notify the authorities to check on the status of the individual to make sure that they're okay. It also brings a friendly face to their door. So many of the elderly are shut-ins. Many have no family or family lives a distance away. When I was employed as a home-maker, many of my clients didn't want their laundry done, their floors washed, their chores done. They wanted someone to talk to, someone to laugh with, someone to ease a bit of their loneliness. Each passing day of trump's presidency brings ever more hateful treatment to the most vulnerable of our society. I feel nothing but despair for the country I love and utter disgust for trump and the voters who elected him to office. Now we also have the threat of nuclear war with NK, the insult of the British government and the draconian cuts to all social programs to fund a bloated defense department and the military industrial complex. Guns for butter on the backs of the elderly, the sickly, the children, the poor and the working man. Disgust and loathing can't begin to describe what I feel towards this despicable creature and his hateful supporters. Only money and power are sacred. Despicable."

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