Geraldine was warmly opinionated and, along with her husband, she'd raised her four daughters to be the same.
When work settled and time allowed, she melted into the couch next to any of her children who were home and turned on the Hallmark channel. If a movie showed people who couldn't care for themselves, she would remark, "I don't want to live like that," or "if that's me, don't bother doing all that."
On May 25, a clot blocked a blood vessel in Geraldine's heart. Her husband performed CPR. She was whisked to the hospital, where her heart survived, but lack of oxygen launched her brain into uncontrollable seizures. At age 56, her melodic Irish accent was silenced.
Her lips sagged around a breathing tube when I met her three weeks later. Her limbs lay wherever we put them. Kinked gray hair stood in all directions from her scalp, pushed aside by electrodes that recorded brain activity.
In the small conference room in our neuro intensive care unit, we discussed Geraldine's prognosis with her family.
More ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/well/live/the-symptoms-of-protracted-dying.html
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Why opioids are such an American problem - BBC News
For every one million Americans, almost 50,000 doses of opioids are taken every day. That's four times the rate in the UK.
There are often good reasons for taking opioids. Cancer patients use them for pain relief, as do patients recovering from surgery (codeine and morphine are opioids, for example).
But take too many and you have a problem. And America certainly has a problem.
More ...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41701718
There are often good reasons for taking opioids. Cancer patients use them for pain relief, as do patients recovering from surgery (codeine and morphine are opioids, for example).
But take too many and you have a problem. And America certainly has a problem.
More ...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41701718
Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Big — And You Pay for… — ProPublica
If you've ever put in an eyedrop, some of it has almost certainly spilled onto your eyelid or cheek.
The good news is the mess doesn't necessarily mean you missed. The bad news is that medicine you wiped off your face is wasted by design — and it's well-known to the drug companies that make the drops.
Eyedrops overflow our eyes because drug companies make the typical drop — from pricey glaucoma drugs to a cheap bottle of Visine — larger than a human eye can hold. Some are so large that if they were pills, every time you swallowed one, you'd toss another in the garbage.
The waste frustrates glaucoma experts like Dr. Alan Robin, whose patients struggle to make pricey bottles of drops last. He has urged drug companies to move to smaller drops — to no avail.
"They had no interest in people, their pocketbooks or what the cost of drugs meant," said Robin, a Baltimore ophthalmologist, researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Michigan Medical School.
ProPublica has been documenting the many ways health care dollars are being wasted. We've shown how hospitals throw out brand new supplies, nursing homes flush tons of unexpired medication and drug companies concoct costly combinations of cheap medication. Recently we described how arbitrary drug expiration dates cause us to toss safe and potent medicine.
More ...
https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-companies-make-eyedrops-too-big-and-you-pay-for-the-waste?
The good news is the mess doesn't necessarily mean you missed. The bad news is that medicine you wiped off your face is wasted by design — and it's well-known to the drug companies that make the drops.
Eyedrops overflow our eyes because drug companies make the typical drop — from pricey glaucoma drugs to a cheap bottle of Visine — larger than a human eye can hold. Some are so large that if they were pills, every time you swallowed one, you'd toss another in the garbage.
The waste frustrates glaucoma experts like Dr. Alan Robin, whose patients struggle to make pricey bottles of drops last. He has urged drug companies to move to smaller drops — to no avail.
"They had no interest in people, their pocketbooks or what the cost of drugs meant," said Robin, a Baltimore ophthalmologist, researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Michigan Medical School.
ProPublica has been documenting the many ways health care dollars are being wasted. We've shown how hospitals throw out brand new supplies, nursing homes flush tons of unexpired medication and drug companies concoct costly combinations of cheap medication. Recently we described how arbitrary drug expiration dates cause us to toss safe and potent medicine.
More ...
https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-companies-make-eyedrops-too-big-and-you-pay-for-the-waste?
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