Saturday, June 21, 2014

Good Karma.....PS: don't do drugs


Still waiting for my first batch of soap to cure. This is worse than waiting for a kiln to cool! It will be neutralized next Saturday, but for a good firm bar I really should wait two more weeks.
Coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil, sweet orange and good karma fragrance oil with patchouli...... you can smell this all over the house...
I have it sitting in the kitchen and every time I pass it by, I pick it up for a sniff. Yum!

I ordered soap supplies this week and hope to start making more soon. I'm not sure if I want to sell them, although I am thinking about it. But there are about a gazillion soap makers out there, worse than pottery. Do I really want to get into this again?! Maybe soap and bowls, who knows, just wandering aimlessly at this point, enjoying the process. Just wanting to put less harmful ingredients on and in my body these days. The world has gone mad with chemicals and drugs and I want off, I've had enough!

Speaking of the world of drugs and health care..... More parent medical stuff for us next week. Gerry's dad is still in the rehab facility. He has been moved into the same room with Gerry's mom, so that is nice for them. But he may be coming home next week, and she will be lost and confused, I'm afraid. I guess we will have to go down and help out. Gerry spent the day with them yesterday, it's hard, watching all of this. Wesley is getting a hard core reality check, standing on the sidelines, watching.

There is a story here and as Wes is leaning towards documentary work, I wouldn't be surprised to see this whole elder care issue become a topic for her one day. It is getting deeply embedded in her mind  I think.

The nursing home care and pharmaceutical drug industries are out of f*ing control in this country. If you have any money at all, the vultures will come swooping down to get you when you are elderly, and will pick your poor old bones clean. The doctors will fill you with so many drugs you won't have a mind left. Yesterday, Gerry called me... furious. He found a cabinet full of drugs they are giving his mom, and then I told him to look for the TWO grocery bags full of pills bottles that I found. He looked up the drugs they are giving her. His siblings and dad have been concerned with the constant diarrhea his mom has had. Well, guess what the side effects of the SIX drugs that they are giving her are? Yep, diarrhea! And the doctor can't figure out what is wrong.... I'll tell you what is fucking wrong, doctors giving six pills a day to an 80 year old woman!!!!!! This is down from the TEN or TWELVE they were giving her. Everyone was so happy when the doc said "we need to get her off of some of this medication". Jesus Christ!  If I took ten different medications a day, I wouldn't know how to find the front door!!!!!

10 years ago, Gerry's mom was suffering from severe back pain due to arthritis. The docs filled her with pain meds, she had a back surgery that did nothing but cause more pain, they gave her more drugs, then they gave her drugs to alleviate the symptoms caused by the first drugs, and before you know it, Gerry's mom doesn't even know who the hell she is.

In 10 short years, we watched as this vibrant, strong woman became a shell of herself, and I swear to you, I believe it was the drugs, they fried her brain. Isn't it ironic that hers was the generation that tried so hard to tell us to stay off of drugs (pot, cocaine, LSD) that drugs were bad, and yet it is the same generation that the pharmaceutical industry is making billions of dollars on. Do you know that "legal" prescribed drugs have killed more people than heroin and cocaine and pot combined? And yet doctors keep prescribing these drugs, the TV keeps throwing ads at us, magazines fill their pages with drug ads instead of informative and interesting information, and the internet intrudes on us with drug pushing. The drug industry owns our government. Rich bastards...... I don't know how these people sleep at night under their down comforters on their Egyptian cotton sheets. All I know is Karma can be a bitch, they better watch out!

I took my mother-in -law to Walmart last week to get her drugs. I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to go buy them, and then give them to her. But would it be worse to not give them to her? What happens when someone this addicted to drugs at her age just comes off all of that medication? Anyway, we stood in line behind a dozen other old folks, waiting for their pills. The walls in the prescription area were full, top to bottom with bags of drugs. I have never seen such a booming business in all my life. Do you remember a time when you went to the pharmacy for an antibiotic or a flu med and you were the only one there? and there was a little basket with a few other bags in it? I do. But I don't take drugs, so it's been awhile since I have seen the drug pushers our pharmacies have become.

Nexium, Cymbalta, Lyrica, Previcid, Ambien..... they have become words in our daily lives. Eat whatever the hell bad food you want, just take a purple pill to make it go down better and alter your stomach acid synthetically. Never mind the side affects, you can still eat all that fat and grease! Just take a pill to help you sleep and you won't think about it! Got dry eye? there's a med for that. Get your shingles vaccine, get your teen girls vaccinated so they don't get cervical cancer, hey maybe the boys might get it too, get a shot for them. Got an erection problem? There's a pill for that. This industry has become HUGE and powerful and it is killing our friends and our family members and I feel incredibly helpless to do anything about it. All I can do is be very certain of the doctor if I ever go to one, and check out the drug he pushes at me very carefully before I put it in my mouth. I realize that sometimes a pill can be a good thing, but I haven't taken one in years and years. Maybe once in ahwile for an infection. I find it so ironic that the pot I smoked and the cocaine I did in my twenties have affected me less than the legal drugs a preachers wife has taken for ten years.

All we really need to do is eat whole foods, turn down those processed chemical filled grocery store poisons, stop using all of those chemical filled products on our bodies (have you read a sunscreen label? put cancer causing ingredients on your body to prevent skin cancer, brilliant!), get out and walk, do some yoga, meditate.... it's very simple. Educate yourself, read. Take care of the body and mind you have been blessed with. Enjoy your life while you are here, it's a short visit.......

9 comments:

littlemancat said...

Amen! As is so obvious - all the drug ads come on with the evening news that probably are mostly watched by older folks - like me! Car ads cover the earlier news.
And it takes them five minutes to rattle off the side effects! Makes me crazy just watching them. Now there's the newest ads for women's lack of sexual desire.
So very sorry about your beloved mom in law. We need to take better care of each other...
and ourselves.
Best wishes to all
Mary

Tracey Broome said...

Hi Mary, funny how they time those ads on TV, right?! We don't even watch TV any more we got so sick of it all. We dropped our cable and only watch PBS or netflix movies, and I dropped several magazines because they had more ads for medication than real informative articles. Interesting that the very ads they want to charm us with have turned off our TV and dropped our magazine ads.....

Dennis Allen said...

I don't think you should ever ask your doctor to put you on a new drug.If you have a problem and there is a miracle solution with no side effects out there, your doctor will know about it.If not you need a new doctor.Big Pharma is not a health machine, it's a money machine.If all that crap is that good, why do they need to spend billions to market them?

oldgreymareprimitives said...

went through this with three family members. Check to see if they are giving her sleeping medication which they routinely do. In the elderly none should be taking these types of meds and it causes confusion and the appearance of dementia.
We had to physically remove my grandmother from a hospital and ambulance her close to our home where we found a physician who systematically removed all but necessary meds, for heart and blood pressure. Our drooling, slouched in a chair, grandmother returned to us for several more years living a quiet but aware life.
Another major drug routinely given is Haldol spelling?which has been given to 2 family members which caused them to be literally out of their minds, biting people and scratching their arms till they bled. I almost had to get a court order to get my Mom off it.
I NEVER ASK A DOCTOR ABOUT MEDS ..always a trusted pharmacist. A good one can steer you away from trouble and in the elderly they usually see several physicians and none seem to cross check.
It should be a criminal;offense to treat the elderly this way..it doesn't happen like this in other industrialized nations ya know...

littlemancat said...

Tracey - just thought of another issue mostly with elderly women in nursing care situations - Urinary tract infections, UTIs. These are unfortunately a frequent health problem and can cause the person to have hallucinations and act quite wacky, to be blunt. Saw this with both my poor mom and aunt - just something more to look at when their behavior is out of character.
Mary

cookingwithgas said...

You need a trained nurse to tell you what is what. My mil had onset dementia for being overdosed on drugs. Yes, they brought her back to life, but she was sentenced to a long slow painful life. It was crazy sad. Then the money she worked hard for went to lawyers......It is stupid, crazy.
Rant is over.

Lori Watts said...

Re: soap - I started selling my soap, but mostly because I wanted to make more. I make such small batches that I really don't make any money at it, even at a good retail price.

Tracey Broome said...

Hi all: I realize I was preaching to the choir here, I figured most of you had similar experiences and/or views on this topic. Really sad, isn't it?!
Lori re: soap- if I do decide to sell soap it will definitely be to pay for supplies, like pottery and other crafts in general, you mostly do it for the love of it, not to make money, also really sad!

Michèle Hastings said...

I read with interest Mary's comment about UTI's in nursing home patients and hallucinations.. a couple of years ago my sister had an episode of transient global amnesia. Scared the crap out of everyone. Luckily the ER doc had worked with nursing home patients. He immediately tested her for a UTI.... sure enough that's what it was. He did say it was unusual for someone in their fifties, but not unheard of. She recovered completely with a round of antibiotics.
I wonder how many patients with this get misdiagnosed.