rogerholeman.com

We are admonished to be brave…while we trust our beloved officals and their appointees to literally take over our lives. It’ll require more than bravery to fix the horrible mess they’re proposing, unless they just drop it altogether. Overall heath services work better in the US than anywhere else, to wit:

1) Americans are much more satisfied with the quality of their health care than citizens in countries with government-run care. This is born out by poll after poll after poll, and it’s why you see millions of people of all ages–the government-described “angry mobs”–confronting their representatives to stop the madness that’s overcome them in Washington DC.

2) The vast majority (to the tune of 70+%) of those poor souls living under government care complain that their system needs fundamental change or a complete rebuilding.

3) Don’t get breast cancer in Britain or Canada where your chances of dying are 88% and 9% higher, respectively, than in the US. Or prostate cancer, where your more likely to die by 604% (that’s 6 times) and 184%, respectively. Bear in mind, these are the countries that are held out by the government health care promoters as being “models” that we should admire. Admire? Those unfortunate people are literally being killed by their system…except for the ones who come to the USA and spend their own money to save their lives.

4) Here, 90% of middle-age women have had mammograms versus 72% of Canadian women. 54% of US men have had a PSA check for prostate cancer detection versus 16% of Canadian men. 6 times as many Americans have had colonoscopies as Canadians. Why the difference? Our facilities are far more capitalized by the free enterprise system and its built-in incentives to serve others. We have 34 CT scanners per million citizens versus 12 in Canada. MRI machines? 27 per mil versus 6. Where do you want to get sick…here or there?

5) Canadians & Britons wait twice as long to see a specialist than we do–often up to a year. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in March, saw 4 specialists in the field besides my urologist, made the radiation decision and was all done with it by July 1. Try that in any other country. I have achieved what is hopefully a 25-yr cure and from start to finish it took less than 4 months including my own research and decision time. Had I waited a year, my chances of survival would be far lower–more like in Canada or Britain. On top of that, it was easy and routine to get in to see any my urologist or even my GP to obtain the PSA checks that I was getting periodically and which saved my life. My private insurance covered these, otherwise they’d've cost a measly $100 or so.

5) Our medical system is far more developed than anywhere else in the world. We have more facilities available, with shorter waiting times. Since 1970 we’ve earned more Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology than all other countries combined.

The record of government health care is abysmal everywhere it’s been tried. It is not the answer, the Dems don’t have the answer, and now we’re seeing that their program being reviled across the nation, and for good reason. American’s main problem is self doubt about how good we have it. 85% of us are covered by insurance and almost the same percentage are quite happy with it. That’s about as optimal as you can practically get. The other 15% should not expect the rest of us to socialize 1/7th of our economy so that they can have free access. Besides, most of those 15% are without insurance because they’re between jobs or simply choose not to buy it because they’ve decided they don’t want it. I made that choice myself for several years when I was younger.

Perhaps half of those 15% could be identified as being “unfairly” without health insurance. For somewhere around $20-25B they could be covered by a minimalist policy. If they wish more, they should be able to upgrade. This is miniscule compared to the cost of the Rube Goldberg system being proposed and it wouldn’t have to wreck our existing excellent system. But while discussing this, you still have to ask yourself whether or not subsidized health insurance is or should be some kind of “right” that is worth compelling the rest of us to pay for. It’s not in the constitution as such.

Personally, I wouldn’t want a single solitary health care decision made by people appointed by elected officials. It’s been a formula for disaster everywhere. Besides, a lot of the draw for the politicians is simply to gather more power to themselves. So far, they’ve gotten control of our banking & mortgage systems and our automobile industry. They want the rest of our energy industry, and now all of health care. When they’re done, we will be far beyond socialism and well on our way to serfdom.

Roger Holeman

…and when you do, it doesn’t have to be killer although that is the default. I was aware of my rising PSA score but hearing the news about the 2nd biopsy coming back positive for this disease was still chilling.
But it doesn’t need to be the end of life as we know it. Of all the serious cancers, this one is about the easiest to handle. First off, it never really comes as a surprise, because as a guy you’re getting your PSA checked every year once you’re 50 anyway. You ARE, aren’t you? If not, make the appointment today and start tracking it.  It’s best if you start in your 40’s, especially if you have relatives who’ve had prostate cancer, as I do.

Listen up now:  YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO LET THIS GO UNTIL IT BITES YOU.

As far as I know, this is the only cancer that has an easy-to-detect signal like this. If your PSA is in the 2+ range, then you gotta watch it and should get it checked more often, say every 6-9 months. When mine went over 4, I had a biopsy done and it came back negative, but a year or so later it was over 4 again and this time the biopsy was positive so I started visiting oncologists who specialize in dealing with prostate cancer. I talked to 4 of them, read a book and researched on the internet before settling on a decision to attack it by one of the common methods:
Surgery:  You can have the offending organ removed, either in the traditional way or by hiring a surgeon who can run the new DaVinci robot.  I wanted to go with DaVinci but due to a ‘73 wreck caused by a drunk driver I have too much scar tissue down there for good odds via surgery.
Radiation:  There’s HDR (high dose radiation) dual therapy which involves needles inserted into the prostate to hit it with iridium 192, after which you get 5 weeks of external beam radiation.  You can also do HDR monotherapy, where they just do HDR needles with iridium/gamma radiation a 2nd time.  This is what I did.  You can also have radioactive seeds implanted permanently, and finally you can do all-external beam radiation for 9 weeks.  All of the radiation results are pretty good, generally being in the 90% success range which is about as good as the surgery option.
Hormone and other therapies:  These are generally used when the others cannot be and so they’re usually not the first choices.

One of the major determinants of success in tackling prostate cancer is the “earliness” of detection, and in this regard as men we are fortunate to have such an easy way of detecting the disease, namely, by the simple blood test to determine your PSA score.  So go get it done once or twice in you 40’s and then annually in your 50’s and up. 
   Some types of prostate cancer can be pretty fast moving, so this means catching it early might be the only thing that saves you.

Right now, I’m supine on the couch after completion of my 2 HDR treatments which involves two 36 hour stays at Swedish in Seattle a week apart.  I’m not going to sugar coat the process:  It’s uncomfortable and involves a minute or two (cumulative) of pain.  Too, it looks like I’m going to be on this darn couch a lot for the next week, or 2, or 3, I don’t know.  It’s uncomfortable for me to walk or sit, so I lie here and read, and type.  Guess what though.  This beats dyin’ by any amount you can say and once you’ve got this problem then death or treatment are pretty much the only alternatives.

Prostate cancer has a high cure rate, but you must play an active role in the process.  Don’t put it off, and do stay on it.  Life’s worth it.

Every once in a while this guy Danny Westneat surprises me with a nice less-than-liberal insight into a problem, and this is one of those articles.  It’s about Seattle’s big-spending activist mayor who bought a fleet of 14 Toyota Priuses and then spent $12k each on them to have them converted to “plug-in.”  The program was advertised as being capable of producing 150+ mpg and the bumper stickers on the car even say they’re getting 100+.  “It will use no more energy to drive a plug-in Prius for a year than your water heater does in 3 months.” is what they promised.

Except one problem:  The don’t get any better mileage than my friend Keith’s Prius, which is 51 mpg.  The program is a complete & utter failure.  But hey, it wasn’t their money.  It was yours, Seattleites.

The fact emerges that much of the green promise is not just hot air & hype, but is actually a cover for our government to spend huge money on pet projects that will not produce, while at the same time taking a bite out of our own freedom thru higher taxes, robbing from our children & grandchildren, and doing nothing to solve our nation’s energy problem because they are at the same time shunning traditional energy development that would actually free us from our foreign oil addiction.

Seattle’s plug-in hybrid program has said it all.  Looked at it a certain way, we could be thankful that their half-million $ program has revealed these flaws–if we just use the results to avoid further mistakes but it would appear that WA DC is bound & determined to prove all of the same things using hundreds of billions of dollars.

By the way, Seattle has 330 Priuses.  What happened to the days when governments would by inexpensive cars from Chevy and Ford for their fleets?  330 import cars instead of buying from Detroit…multiplied by thousands of US cities…is it any wonder that we’re now bailing out our auto industry?  At least the Seattle police are still riding mostly Harley-Davidsons.  They’ve tried BMW’s & Kawasaki’s and just keep coming back to the right answer, namely, Milwaukee motorcycles.

I love hybrid vehicles, I really do, they amaze me, I have friends who own them, I’ve driven them, and I wish I had one of the new Suburban/Tahoe hybrids (aside from the fact that you can’t any longer fit an 8’ board into them even though that was a feature of these SUV’s for the last 75 years which might partially explain GM’s problems).

But a lot of green programs are Trojan horses built so that the government can take greater control of our lives.  Watch out for another Kyoto coming your way only this time your elected reps might just pull the trigger and crash our entire economy.  It’s sad, because going green shouldn’t have to be an attack on our freedom.

Here’s the Danny Westneat Seattle Times link:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2008771363_danny22.html?syndication=rss

And here was the Seattle Prius Promise:
http://www.seattle.gov/mayor/newsdetail.asp?ID=8496&dept=40

OK, you may think I’m bored, or being overly thrifty, or even trying to show off.  The truth is that I have no idea what I am but this is the recent yield of idle hands in the workshop here.

So, I’m looking at the 4-drawer file cabinet in my office and there general filing in the top drawer, cars & taxes and some other stuff in the 2nd drawer, and then it starts to get a little muddled in the bottom 2 drawers.  Ergo I decide I’ll buy some dividers and put things into categories that make it easier to find things.  Office Depot, right?  Wrong.  Here’s what I wanted, but I only had the one single solitary green cardboard divider:

Not only do the office supply joints not have these, but they’re expensive to order and you have to get lots of them.  I didn’t feel like spending $50 or $75, I just wanted a few measly dividers onto which I could stick a category label and have better organization.  Figure $10 or so, right?  Wasn’t going to happen, at least not commercially.

A few days go by and I decide that this must be a use for my woodshop and so I scrounged 3 different scraps of useless plywood, made a prototype modeled after the green divider shown above, and then cut out 12 more of them.

The 220 volt table saw makes quick work of little plywood scraps like these.  These pics were taken after the job was partially completed, so you see the shellac finish on the boards.

After the table saw yielded the basic plan form of the new file dividers, I jigged up the router table to cut out the relieved areas on each side of the up-sticking tab on each panel.  Rout one side, flip, rout the other.  Every piece comes out symmetrical & identical.

A little sanding…I used mostly the belt sander (not shown here) and a little handheld knobby plastic thing that holds a round sheet via hook & loop, plus a little sandpaper held in the fingers magic.  This gets rid of all the “feathers” left by the 2 power cutting tools.

Shellac is a great coating and we keep finding more applications for it.  It’s available as a clear or amber-tinted finish, or as a white primer that can be tinted for easier coverage by your top coat.  It dries fast.  As you can see I used the amber, this writer’s usual choice due to the warmth of the wood’s color that is rendered along with exquisite grain emphasis.     (Belt sander partially visible in corner.)

Each piece was shellacked, then sanded by use of the knobby hand sander and a little manual sanding for the curve by the tab.  The first coat always raises fur, thus requiring the sanding exercise.  I used the 220 grit recommended on the Zinsser Shellac can and it seemed to be a perfect choice, needing no further sanding after the 2nd coat.  [For a thoroughly professional job, one would do a lot more sanding before, during & after the application of various coats of finishes, but c’mon, I mean…these are freakin’ FILE DIVIDERS, OK??!!]  The various different woods–mahogany, oak & birch veneers–each create a unique look…

Stack ‘em up, outta the shop, take ‘em to the office…

What would we do without the Avery Label company?

Not being displeased with the results, the new file dividers were deployed into all 4 drawers:

Granted, this seems like low-level stuff, and it is.  But it is satisfying to do this kind of thing, in one’s own shop, for almost no cost, and have a result that will be pleasing every single time the file drawers are opened, which is usually a few times each day.  The total cost was about a nickel for the shellac and maybe a dime for the labels.  It took a couple of hours and will save a little time and frustration at the file cabinet.

As I get older, I find that it is easier to achieve fulfillment.

Roger