Medical Personnel Quotes

The Hippocratic oath prevents doctors and medical personnel from participating in executions, so Alabama officials planned for untrained correctional staff to take a knife and make a two-inch incision in Mr. Nelson’s arm or groin so that they could find a vein in which to inject him with toxins and kill him. We argued that without anesthesia, the procedure would be needlessly painful and cruel.

This is the story of one deployment of one medical officer—a mother and the wife of a Marine—who also happened to be a Navy psychologist. She was deployed to Iraq to care for the Marines and the medical personnel.

The reality was that all manner of instructions could be given, but people needed to eat and they needed supplies. Some considered feeding the soul as important as feeding the body, so they, too, disregarded the order to not attend Mass. Father Pedro himself had refused to accept that the illness was capable of entering the church, much less spread and grow during the sacred ceremony. But this disease did not respect holy places, rituals, or people, as the pig-headed and dead Father Pedro must now know, wherever he was. Nor did the disease respect medical personnel. The town’s already limited hospital, founded by the ladies of high society, had closed its doors after the death or desertion of its nurses and the rest of its staff. Now Linares’s doctors and any surviving medical staff who dared do so roamed the town, like Cantú, visiting houses where they were not welcome.

(Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)

For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or “gross lab,” as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part.

From 2002 to 2008, the United States was fighting bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; among active military personnel, there were an average 1,643 fatalities per year. But over the same stretch of time in the early 1980s, with the United States fighting no major wars, there were more than 2,100 military deaths per year. How can this possibly be? For one, the military used to be much larger: 2.1 million on active duty in 1988 versus 1.4 million in 2008. But even the rate of death in 2008 was lower than in certain peacetime years. Some of this improvement is likely due to better medical care. But a surprising fact is that the accidental death rate for soldiers in the early 1980s was higher than the death rate by hostile fire for every year the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that practicing to fight a war can be just about as dangerous as really fighting one. And,

raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’. In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.

The most extraordinary story of appendectomy survival that I know of occurred aboard the U.S. submarine Seadragon in Japanese-controlled waters in the South China Sea during World War II when a sailor named Dean Rector from Kansas developed an acute and obvious case of appendicitis. With no qualified medical personnel on board, the commander ordered the ship’s pharmacist’s assistant, one Wheeler Bryson Lipes (of no known relation to the present author), to perform the surgery. Lipes protested that he had no medical training, did not know what an appendix looked like or where it was to be found, and had no surgical equipment to work with. The commander instructed him to do what he could anyway as the senior medical person aboard. Lipes’s bedside manner was not perhaps the most reassuring. His pep talk to Rector was this: “Look, Dean, I never did anything like this before, but you don’t have much chance

In 1938 the biological warfare establishment Unit 731 had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners. They also carried out anthrax, mustard-gas and frostbite experiments on their victims, whom they referred to as maruta or ‘logs’.

Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel. The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere. The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,

The dissection of Hawkeye will begin in ten minutes. All necessary personnel please report to the medical lab.

We’ve got an officer down. I repeat, officer down. Dispatch, please alert medical personnel that officer is whipped.

TRAP laws constitute governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine. Singling out abortion providers, these laws dictate medically unnecessary standards, building features, and personnel requirements. Often, the laws direct State health departments to revise existing licensing requirements and to hold clinics to the irrelevant standards of general hospitals or ambulatory surgery centers. The particulars may include wider hallways, awnings over entrances, showers for physicians, closets for janitors, and pest control in the front yard. No woman in the U.S. has ever died from inadequate door width or lack of an awning at an abortion clinic.19

The gauze masks Capps was so proud of, the masks Welch had praised, were no longer being made; Capps ran out of material and personnel to make them. The medical staff itself was collapsing from overwork—and disease. Five days into the epidemic five physicians, thirty-five nurses, and fifty orderlies were sick. That number would grow, and the medical staff would have its own death toll. Seven days into the epidemic soldiers still capable of work converted nine more barracks into hospitals. There were shortages of aspirin, atropine, digitalis, glacial acetic acid (a disinfectant), paper bags, sputum cups, and thermometers—and thermometers that were available were being broken by men in delirium.

So the police weren’t just silencing the whistleblowers. They were creating their own, alternative version of the medical truth. “After investigation and verification by the public security organs, eight illegal personnel have been summoned and handled according to law.” So it wasn’t even a medical investigation. It was a police investigation. This is the authority the WHO relied on; that Theresa Tam then relied on; that Patty Hajdu relied on; and that Justin Trudeau relied on.

Unfortunately, the vaccination campaign failed to achieve the desired results. One reason was technical. Haffkine’s vaccine required multiple doses, all administered by medically trained personnel, who were in short supply.

Some people have even had a chip implanted in their arm to provide personal and medical information to doctors and emergency personnel when needed.36 Human microchip implantation took a leap forward in July 2007 when the American Medical Association (AMA) announced

Warfare effectively brought the antimalarial campaign to a halt as medical personnel were conscripted and as the collapse of the international supply of quinine deprived the movement of its chief tool.

Australia had escaped. It had escaped because of a stringent quarantine of incoming ships. Some ships arrived there with attack rates as high as 43 percent and fatality rates among all passengers as high as 7 percent. But the quarantine kept the virus out, kept the continent safe, until late December 1918 when, with influenza having receded around the world, a troopship carrying ninety ill soldiers arrived. Although they too were quarantined, the disease penetrated—apparently through medical personnel treating troops. By then the strain had lost much of its lethality. In Australia the death rates from influenza were far less than in any other Westernized nation on earth, barely one-third that of the United States, not even one-quarter that of Italy. But it was lethal enough.

Mercy took in the amount of blood loss evident on the officer’s clothing. The khaki uniform she recognized as belonging to the Powell County Sheriff’s Department had been shredded by bullet holes, then ripped by the shears of the first-responder medical personnel in order to minister to him.

There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press. So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was flooded by desperate patients and abandoned by personnel fearful of being infected.

The protracted failure to provide or permit any medical attention at all ensured that the wound he had received had been fatal. It would be this culpable negligence that would be the final straw of repeated aggressive incidents toward Allied missions (one estimate had them numbered at least four to six times a year). It froze American-Soviet relations, as President Reagan’s administration castigated Moscow. Although it wasn’t known at the time how serious Nicholson’s injuries were, just as serious was the repeated firing on Allied personnel by Soviet troops.

Dr. Edland and his assistant, Dr. Abbott, got to work immediately. First, they had to hose down each body because of their “heavy contamination with pepper gas,” and then, before starting on any autopsy, the doctors made sure that the medical photographer, Ed Riley, took X-rays of the body.11 Meanwhile, the fact that state troopers kept milling around and trying to oversee everything was unnerving to the morgue personnel. From the moment Riley turned on the X-ray machine, and they could clearly see the many bullets and buckshot pellets lodged deep in the prisoners’ bodies, both Abbott and Edland understood why the troopers were so concerned. By 4:30 a.m. it was patently obvious that “the hostages had all been shot, and that there were no slashed throats or genital mutilations.”12 This, of course, was not at all what state officials had told the media and the doctors were aware of this. With more than forty troopers crowding the hallways, hovering over them and mumbling under their breath, the two pathologists continued to search dutifully for any signs of slashed throats as cause of death. But all that they could find were two knife cuts near hostage throats, and “the wounds [were]…on the back of the neck,” and “less than a tenth-of-an-inch deep.”13 As both doctors knew, if someone is going to try “to seriously harm or kill somebody with a knife wound to the throat, he’s going to do it from the front.”14 Perhaps even more alarming to the troopers than the fact that none of the men had died from knife wounds was that everyone was well aware that the only people at Attica who had guns on the 13th of September were members of law enforcement. Even

Améry’s On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1999) spans two events: his first and failed suicidal attempt and the second and successful one in Salzburg on October 17, 1978 (Lorenz 1991: 115). Améry wrote that the “rescue” from the first attempt was one of the “worse [acts of violence] that had ever been done” to him (1999: 79). This was partly related to the experience of being reduced by the medical personnel to the “object of rescue.

In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.

I met Dr. Freeman in 1991 when he came to Harvard to talk to my fellowship program about his New England Journal of Medicine article. With calm deliberation, this tall, elegant physician disrupted my vision of Harlem and other Black communities throughout the United States. He detailed a cascade of health conditions triggered by inadequate facilities, lack of access to health insurance, and a shortage of medical personnel, healthy food, safe neighborhoods, and basic education. He called the problem a national tragedy, an emergency analogous to a hurricane, flood, or other ruinous natural disaster, yet one for which no one was sounding the alarm.

But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command—a massive, cumbersome organization organized strictly to conduct combat operations—was lacking in relevance in the twenty-first century. Both believed that for both Latin America and Africa, it was highly unlikely that we would be engaged in state-on-state combat operations. So the idea was to push the two combatant commands responsible for those regions to try to adapt with a vision that included combat readiness but with a very heavy dose of “soft power” capability—humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, rule of law, personnel exchanges, counternarcotics, strategic communications, interagency cooperation, and so forth. Given this mandate, I plunged in with enthusiasm—perhaps too much enthusiasm. I underestimated the strong desire of many within the massive command to continue on its current, traditional war-fighting trajectory. When I completely reorganized the staff, getting rid of the Napoleonic traditional military staff system, it created real confusion and resentment. While most of the team went along, cooperation was grudging and halfhearted in many cases. While I continue to believe we had outlined the right mission for the command, I pushed too hard, creating antibodies, and the project crumbled after my departure—effectively negating three years of demanding work. The lesson I took away is that innovation matters deeply, but even if you have the right answer, you must be capable of bringing along the nonbelievers.

But then, today, one sees these zombie-like Christian fundamentalists at abortion clinics, wrapping themselves in the Bible, accusing the women who have abortions and the medical personnel who perform them of being “baby-killers”—distorting what actually happens with an abortion, obscuring the reality that more than 90% of abortions take place during the first three months of pregnancy when the fetus is very small and not highly developed, and is far from being capable of life on its own. These Christian fundamentalist fanatics try to portray things as if fully developed and independent little children are being killed when fetuses are aborted. But, along with the gross ignorance that they are expressing and promoting, there is the profound hypocrisy and irony that the very Bible which they are wielding as a weapon against women with unwanted pregnancies—that very same Bible calls over and over again for slaughtering actual babies and infants.

Senior Wal-Mart officials concentrated on setting goals, measuring progress, and maintaining communication lines with employees at the front lines and with official agencies when they could. In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked. Wal-Mart’s emergency operations team even included a member of the Red Cross. (The federal government declined Wal-Mart’s invitation to participate.) The team also opened a twenty-four-hour call center for employees, which started with eight operators but rapidly expanded to eighty to cope with the load. Along the way, the team discovered that, given common goals to do what they could to help and to coordinate with one another, Wal-Mart’s employees were able to fashion some extraordinary solutions. They set up three temporary mobile pharmacies in the city and adopted a plan to provide medications for free at all of their stores for evacuees with emergency needs—even without a prescription. They set up free check cashing for payroll and other checks in disaster-area stores. They opened temporary clinics to provide emergency personnel with inoculations against flood-borne illnesses. And most prominently, within just two days of Katrina’s landfall, the company’s logistics teams managed to contrive ways to get tractor trailers with food, water, and emergency equipment past roadblocks and into the dying city. They were able to supply water and food to refugees and even to the National Guard a day before the government appeared on the scene. By the end Wal-Mart had sent in a total of 2,498 trailer loads of emergency supplies and donated $3.5 million in merchandise to area shelters and command centers. “If the American government had responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” Jefferson Parish’s top official, Aaron Broussard, said in a network television interview at the time.

While Cutler was tinkering with his castor oil, his roommate began feeling ill. Fearing it might be ricin poisoning, the roommate went to the emergency room. It was just flu, but at the mention of ricin, medical personnel called in a potential terrorist situation and a Phoenix SWAT team descended upon the apartment. Cutler served three years for, essentially, possession of a laxative with criminal intent.

been designed to research the spread of the Spanish flu. Comparing that disease with YARS was a fascinating exercise, as was comparing the world it devastated to the one that existed today. The very name “Spanish flu” was just another lie foisted on the world by America. The truth was that the disease had first taken hold in Kansas City military outposts. It killed more U.S. troops during World War I than combat, spreading easily in the cramped conditions that prevailed on ships, battlegrounds, and bases. The initial reaction of the medical community had been slowed by its focus on the war, but when the scope of the threat was recognized, the country had pulled together. Surgical masks were worn in public to slow the spread of the disease. Stores were prohibited from having sales to prevent the congregation of people in confined spaces. Some cities demanded that passengers’ health be certified before they boarded trains. There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press. So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was flooded by desperate patients and abandoned by personnel fearful of being infected. And during all this, America’s politicians and media would use the burgeoning epidemic to augment their own power and wealth. That is, until the magnitude of the crisis became clear. Then they would flee. The sound of a truck engine pulled him from his contemplation and he turned. His people, disinfected and wearing clean clothing, climbed into the vehicle and set off into the darkness. Halabi bowed respectfully in their direction, acknowledging their sacrifice and the enormity of the journey ahead of them. After the long drive to Mogadishu, they would board a private jet that would take them to Mexico. From there they would be smuggled across the northern border.

Traditional diagnostic results are the foundation for AI diagnostic systems. AI diagnostics is a fast-growing sector because there is a lot of enthusiasm about potentially using AI in the future. Sometimes this takes the form of claiming to make diagnosis more accurate. Sometimes people are open about their goal of replacing doctors and medical personnel, usually as a cost-cutting measure. The way you figure out what is going on in state-of-the-art computational science is by looking at open-source science. All of the people developing proprietary AI methods look at what’s happening in open science, and most use it for inspiration. Microsoft’s GitHub, the most popular code-sharing website, hosts most of the available code.

In the harbor beyond Kimmel’s window, a flotilla of motor launches and small boats spread out across the water like frenzied water spiders. They carried the wounded first to the hospital ship Solace and then, after its hastily enlarged trauma space overflowed, to the main medical facilities on Hospital Point and a triage area set up on 1010 Dock adjacent to the Argonne. Some of the wounded were carried aboard the Argonne, where the warrant officers’ mess was converted into an emergency operating room. By midmorning, personnel from the Argonne and other ships had also set up a field hospital at the nearby Officers’ Club. On Hospital Point, Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor was a state-of-the-art facility with about 250 beds, but the carnage quickly taxed it well beyond anything its staff had ever imagined. The first casualties arrived even as the second wave of attackers still pounded the harbor. As more poured in, ambulatory patients on the wards with far less critical conditions were discharged or evacuated to vacant outbuildings and hastily erected tents behind the hospital. Within three hours, the hospital received 546 casualties and 313 dead.

It was a good body, and it had served me well, but that part of my existence was over with, and I was ready to move on. I did see the medical personnel who were scrambling to resuscitate me and I wished I could tell them not to bother. I turned around, looked up at the ceiling, and floated up into the plenum and through the roof of the building.2

I imagine the only reason would have been concern for broadening awareness of its existence. —Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, Chief, Medical Staff, Technical Services Division of the CIA (1950s–1960s), remarking on why the details of the use of LSD on unwitting mind-control subjects under Project MK-ULTRA was kept secret from other CIA personnel

But my perspective has changed. In some ways, the medical field has distorted the way we conceptualize disease. Many people now consider it a phenomenon that individuals cannot control—one that medical personnel exclusively are able to remedy or not.

Nationally, 85 percent of oil industry jobs are held by men, and most women in the field work as engineers, administrators, medical personnel, or on cleaning staffs. Oil companies tout this as gender diversity in their press releases, but women hold fewer than 2 percent of the jobs beyond those positions. The gender inequality in the field has made nearby Williston—the only population hub for over 100 miles—look like a seething all-male metropolis complete with strip clubs, greasy burger joints, Coors Light chugging contests, bar fights, and seatless Porta Potties on oil rig locations

The Communists in December 1917 introduced a novel (for the time) divorce law that allowed either partner to terminate a marriage on grounds of incompatibility. They did not, as yet, legalize abortion, but they tolerated it and it was widely practiced. Generally carried out under unhygienic conditions by unqualified personnel, the procedure claimed numerous victims. To remedy the situation, in November 1920 the government legalized abortions performed under medical supervision. This law, authorizing abortion on demand, was also the first of its kind.

Fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in the bottom half of their class.

You see, because parents contribute to their children's underachievement, many teachers “Judge, Lecture and Compete” with them as a way of working on the case. Instead of this, you should Support, mentor and Partner. The idea is to Support not judge. Mentor not Lecture and Partner not Compete. Judging parents wouldn’t get you anywhere especially if those parents are underachievers themselves. Instead look out for ways to support them say by providing the needed information for them to do better. Instead of lecturing them it is better to mentor them –plus you would automatically gain a position as a mentor instead of a critic and they would look up to you as such and lastly, remember, these children are theirs so don’t compete with them on that, instead partner with them concerning these students. In Medical School, there is said to be a protocol taught to nurses and doctors and other relevant hospital personnel to deal with upset persons. It contains 6 steps or ideas , you should look into the protocol and come up with something similar. What better place is there to learn how upset persons who usually are the cause of their problems are than the hospital

It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good.

The President called it the “Epitome of the American dream.” Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government.” But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit. The answer to my parents’ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so aware. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that’s because I didn’t want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep.

Owen is utterly out of whatever closet he may once have been in. Is resident Concerned Gay Medical Personnel, or some such. This being so, everything is devoted to the political aspect of homosexuality. And this means exclusivity. His is a polarized view. There are homos in the world and then there are heteros. Nothing else. A bipolar existence. Table d’hôte enforced. Either Lunch A or Lunch B. No à la carte. All of his stories have a homo conclusion; all of his references are to the “gay community”; all conclusions point to a closed and intensely self-conscious group society. Part of the reason, of course, is that he is talking to me. But another part is that he has committed himself. And when you do this, you invest. Political preference takes over. You become a card-carrying Catholic, a card-carrying Communist, a card-carrying Cocksucker.

Uh-oh.” Brent reached into the console and picked up his two-way radio, pretending to turn it on, then holding it up to his mouth. “This is car two-two-nine requesting backup. We’ve got an officer down. I repeat, officer down. Dispatch, please alert medical personnel that officer is whipped.” “Please remind me why we’re friends.” “Aw, you love me, you dick.

Psychologists need to be interested and learn about PNES so they can be a part of this field. The more people who are involved, the more people will become aware of it. It’s about education, education, education. Educating the public, the medical personnel and everyone across the board.

When she arrived in Castine the USS Comfort was a tired, World War II vintage Hospital Ship. Her keel had been laid as a Maritime Commission C1-B hull, which was most frequently used in the construction of troop ships. Built by the Consolidated Steel Corporation in Wilmington, California, she was launched on March 18, 1943. As the USS Comfort (AH-6), a naval hospital ship, she served in the South Pacific during World War II, having a U.S. Navy crew and an Army medical staff. In 1945, the USS Comfort took part in the battle of Okinawa, and was struck by a kamikaze pilot, killing 28 of the ship’s personnel, including six nurses, and wounding 48 additional people. When she was decommissioned and struck from the Naval Vessel Register, her title was retained by the U.S. Army. Not being needed, she was taken up to the Hudson River Reserve Fleet near Bear Mountain in New York. In 1949 her title was returned to the Maritime Commission, who on August 24, 1953, assigned her to Maine Maritime Academy for use as a training ship.

In a pastoral letter in 1976, Archbishop Kabanga of Lubumbashi issued a devastating critique of the system that Mobutu ran. The thirst for money . . . transforms men into assassins. Many poor unemployed are condemned to misery along with their families because they are unable to pay off the person who hires. How many children and adults die without medical care because they are unable to bribe the medical personnel who are supposed to care for them? Why are there no medical supplies in the hospitals, while they are found in the marketplace? How did they get there? Why is it that in our courts justice can only be obtained by fat bribes to the judge? Why are prisoners forgotten in jail? They have no one to pay off the judge who sits on the dossier. Why do our government offices force people to come back day after day to obtain services to which they are entitled? If the clerks are not paid off, they will not be served. Why, at the opening of school, must parents go into debt to bribe the school principal? Children who are unable to pay will have no school . . . Whoever holds a morsel of authority, or means of pressure, profits from it to impose on people, especially in rural areas. All means are good to obtain money, or humiliate the human being.

P.S. Soon after I wrote this chapter, Mikhaila’s surgeon told her that her artificial ankle would have to be removed, and her ankle fused. Amputation waited down that road. She had been in pain for eight years, since the replacement surgery, and her mobility remained significantly impaired, although both were much better than before. Four days later she happened upon a new physiotherapist. He was a large, powerful, attentive person. He had specialized in ankle treatment in the UK, in London. He placed his hands around her ankle and compressed it for forty seconds, while Mikhaila moved her foot back and forth. A mispositioned bone slipped back where it belonged. Her pain disappeared. She never cries in front of medical personnel, but she burst into tears. Her knee straightened up. Now she can walk long distances, and traipse around in her bare feet. The calf muscle on her damaged leg is growing back. She has much more flexion in the artificial joint.

If someone had been writing a manual for police officers and medical personnel on how to handle a rape case with compassion, I would have been the perfect test case on procedure. They were wonderful. And I know this now because I have lobbied Congress and state legislatures about treatment of rape victims. I’ve seen worst-case scenarios, and they’re devastating. Now I can appreciate the care with which I was handled. Now I know it rarely happens that way and it really rarely happens that way for black women. I am grateful I had the experience I did, wrapped up in the worst experience of my life. Now.

To the demoralization of the displaced persons was added with the passing of time the “amoralization” of the occupation personnel, whose black-market activities in cigarettes, medical supplies, food and transport were soon nothing short of staggering

Penance (Scripture selection — Joel 2:12-13) The name of Gene Hamilton may be new to you if you are not from the archdiocese of New York or have not read A Priest Forever by Father Benedict Groeschel (published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1998). Gene was a seminarian for that archdiocese at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. From all accounts he was a fine student, a friendly, sincere young man, eager to be a priest. He was diagnosed with cancer, and the final years of his life were a real cross for him — pain, decline, hopes way up after surgery and treatment only to have them dashed with another outbreak. In his brave struggle a saint emerged, and I use that word purposefully. In his pain, agony, and dwindling strength, a man of deep faith, indomitable hope, and genuine love arose; a seminarian of prayer, who never complained, thought more of the needs and difficulties of others than his own. A man driven by one desire: to be united with Jesus in his passion and death, hopefully, yearning to do so as a priest. There was a lot of longing for a miracle by his family, brother seminarians, friends and admirers; many, including doctors and other medical personnel, told the young man, “You’re going to beat this, Gene.” Dozens who just knew he was too good, too innocent, too pure and holy to die so young and painfully, prayed for his recovery. In January of 1997, Gene Hamilton was too ill to come on the pilgrimage here to Rome with the men from Dunwoodie. Bishop Edwin O’Brien, realistic and thoughtful man that he is, with the late Cardinal John O’Connor, approached the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the dicastery of the Holy See under which seminaries come, for permission to ordain

Blast at close range. Ugh! Autumn flipped and turned through the air as she was pushed away by the powerful force. “OH! I think this fight is over, folks! No one can withstand such a powerful attack at close range!” yelled Rex. The gladiator landed in the dirt and rolled for several more blocks before coming to a stop. Rex ran over to Autumn’s body and started counting down. “10… 9… 8…” Jasmine stood far away as she watched her rival’s motionless body. “7… 6… 5…” Finally, Autumn lifted her head. She looked up at Rex, who was counting loudly in her ear. “4… 3…” The gladiator got up to her hands and knees. “2… 1…” She got up to a one knee kneeling position, but it wasn’t enough. “0!” yelled Rex. “That’s it, folks! This fight is over! And what a fight it was!” “I told you it was over…” said the fierce monk. Autumn fell back and sat on the dirt. “Jasmine has won the match! Wowee! That was intense!” announced Rex. The audience cheered and clapped for the both of them. “Whoa… that match was insane,” I said to Bob. “Yeah, I know… but it’s kind of weird to watch them fight so hard just for the glory of it,” Bob said. I nodded. “They’re both really competitive, I guess.” With that said, we both continued watching as Rex ran over to Jasmine and asked, “So, how does it feel to be the winner?” “Great…” she replied simply. “And Autumn, how do you feel?” Rex asked. “Ugh… how do you think I feel?” the gladiator replied. “Okay, then!” Rex continued making announcements about the fight. Meanwhile, Jasmine looked over at Autumn and said, “Hey… good fight.” “Yeah… good fight...” Then Jasmine walked over to the sitting gladiator, and they both bumped fists. Rex returned to Jasmine, grabbed her hand and raised it up in the air. “The winner of today’s last match! Let’s give it up for Jasmine the monk!” “Autumn! Are you okay?!” yelled Arthur as everyone around him cheered and clapped. “Also, please give it up for Autumn for putting up an amazing fight!” yelled Rex. The audience cheered just as loudly as before. Bob and I clapped as we watched medical personnel rush in to take care of the two combatants. “Man, I’m not sure that was worth it,” I said. “For some, it might be,” said Bob. “Yeah, I guess there are people who love glory more than their own wellbeing.” Bob nodded. “Come on, let’s go in and check up on the two of them.” “Are we allowed in there?” “Well, we’re basically in the fighting area already.” “Yeah, we got some front row seats, huh?” I nodded, and then we went in toward the center. “How are you feeling, Autumn?” I asked as I rolled up to the medics working on the gladiator. “I’m alright… but I can’t believe I lost…” Autumn said softly. “It’s okay, it was quite a fight,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I’m sorry that I let you down, Steve…” “Huh? What? You didn’t let me down.” “By losing, I let down gladiators everywhere.” I shook my head. “Nah, don’t be too hard on yourself, Autumn.” She just looked down at the ground. “Plus, I’m sure you’ve won if you had taken that Blood Lust potion earlier, instead of saving it for later.” “You think so?” Autumn said as she looked up. “Yeah, you took quite a beating in the beginning. If you were Blood Lusted from the get-go, you could’ve avoided most of that damage,” I explained. “Ah, yeah, huh?” “Speaking of the potion, how did you get one, anyway?” “I put in a special order at Paul’s Potions Shop. It took like a month to get made.” Bob nodded. “Yeah, they’re super busy over there.” “Ah, so Cindy brewed it for you, huh?” I said. “I guess she’s the only one who would know the recipe. Anyway, you really surprised me with that Blood Lust potion.” “Heh… my secret weapon…” Autumn said. “And I thought that I wouldn’t even need it.” “Who knew monks were such fierce fighters,” Bob said.

Studies have found that sleep-deprived medical personnel, in particular, commit many more errors and cause many more deaths than those who are well rested.

According to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation statement, approximately 10,000 American military women were stationed in Vietnam during the war. Most were nurses in the Army, Air Force, and Navy, but women also served as physicians and medical personnel, and in air traffic control and military intelligence. Civilian women also served in Vietnam as news correspondents and workers for the Red Cross, Donut Dollies, the USO, Special Services, the American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Relief Services, and other humanitarian organizations.