#i will never forget working a hospital during a devastated landscape

[shallowseeker]

dean going "no, cas" during sacrifice because he saw the angels falling :), bro thought that cas was probably dead for a bit there.

Every day you tell me a bedtime story that makes me cry!!!!! Yes, his little "Cas, no," was heartbreatking.

Aside/// This was one of my fave scenes. The scene gets me every time. Small churches were supposed to function as family extender systems, giving you access to fellowship, resources, food.

Jody Mills compared having a brother to having a church—when churches are at their best, they're supposed to be sources of support! Churches were supposed to put people first, their wellbeing above everything else. "There's nothing I'd put in front of you!"

And here, we have the system above falling, too corrupted by war and hatred to even function.

[niqhtlord01]

Humans are weird: Hope for the future

( Don’t forget to come see my on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord )        

The planet Alia near the edge of human territory and had grown from it's species first colony outside of their home system of a sparse few settlers to a thriving metropolis of millions.

The shinning spires of metal and glass of the planet's mega cities pierced the skies like the hand of an angry god reaching out to the heavens and the wealth and prosperity that flowed from it's vast trade network and supported the outlying colonies for further expansion. Yet for all their wealth and prosperity the fate that had been decided for this world was something that could not be changed.

A massive seismic event occurred on Alia shortly after it's new year celebration. The planet's tectonic plates became highly volatile and a series of growing earthquakes began triggering around the globe. Within a week of the events triggering a massive shattering happened and the plates shifted violently without warning.

Oceans swelled and receded, mountains crumbled and volcanos detonated, rivers changed direction and howling winds ripped across the lands so intense it shredded flesh from the bone of any foolish unfortunate enough to be caught in the open. Countless buildings shook and toppled and thousands if not hundreds of thousands died in the ensuing chaos as entire cities were swallowed beneath the cold surface of the planet.    

Communication with Alia was lost and though the rest of the wider galaxy was unable to establish contact their response was already put into motion.

The human governing body organized a massive relief effort and was further bolstered by neighboring alien domains that shared trade with Alia and had heard of the travesty. Before the tectonic plates had even stopped shifting a fleet of relief ships from a dozen worlds was already enroute.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dust slid off the toppled column like a waterfall as Uto lifted it. The Vorka's muscles straining and bulging as he used all of his strength hefted the massive concrete pillar. His breathing calm and measured as he breathed in rhythm with his lifting. He lifted the mass over his head and in a single motion cast it aside with a deafening *THUMP!*  

When the dust settled aide workers rushed passed Uto and cleared the rubble that had been underneath the column and in short order a door was revealed. Uto bent down and punched his fist through the metal door and ripped it off it's hinges. A dozen pairs of eyes looked up at him as he removed the door from his arm and dropped it harmlessly to the ground before gently extending a hand down. One of the people in the shelter took his hand and he carefully lifted them out into the open.

"Res ease, hue-mn." Uto struggled with human language, his tongues struggling to form the correct words.

He set the human, a scrawny female Uto wagered, to the ground. She looked up at him with a mixture of emotions dancing across her face before throwing her arms around Uto and hugging him. Uto stood transfixed as the female wept and thanked him over and over as the other rescue workers began lifting the remaining survivors from the shelter.

Unsure how to react Uto stood still for several moments before one of the rescue workers took the still sobbing woman away with the remaining survivors. Uto watched the frail female leave before turning his gaze back across the now ruins of the capital city.

Numerous fires still burned across the entire metropolis; some scattered around the ground while others burned high up in the few remaining sky scrapers that had not toppled during the quake. Roadways were cluttered with thick dunes of debris ranging from metal beams to massive chunks of concrete turning the landscape into some horrid nightmare forest.

Portions of the city's sea wall had broken and sections of the city itself had drifted into the ocean. Sky scrapers that once stood over 300 stories tall now appeared as nothing more than tiny isles just breaking the waterline.  

Though he kept his thoughts to himself, Uto was amazed by the level of devastation nature still could have on modern civilizations.

He stood their for several minutes taking in the catastrophe before heading back and resuming the rescue work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Several long hours passed with further rescue efforts across the entire city before their overseer called for a crew change and Uto's team began heading back to their hospital ship to rest.

If the shattered city was unpleasant to look at at during the day it was terrifying to look at at night. Nearly all of the power grid sections had been destroyed leaving the vast roadways shrouded in a darkness so thick it felt as if Uto could reach out and grab hold of a chunk of it.

His team was murmuring among themselves with Uto only half paying attention to their conversation when he spotted something down a side street between two toppled buildings. A single light was waving back and forth slowly from beyond the darkness like a beacon of old warning wayward travelers.

Uto held up a hand and pointed to the light and his team stopped and followed his direction.

"Another survivor?"

"Out here? Wasn't this area already swept?"

"Maybe they missed one."

The rescue team debated among themselves before Uto sighed and began walking towards life.

"No mazer," Uto spoke, "we help all."

With that the rest of the rescue team began following after Uto.

As the team came closer to the light they were able to better make out the surrounding area. The weak light appeared to be a lantern hanging from a wooden pole hanging from a small building at the end of the side street. A tiny structure with half it's walls caved in but the remaining structure appearing sturdy enough to support the roof.

"You smell something?" one of the rescue workers said quietly.

Uto sniffed the air and realized there was indeed a strange smell in the air that did not belong in such a wasteland.

"I'd recognize that smell anywhere." Another of the rescue workers spoke before pushing their way forward.

Uto made to grab him fearing the way ahead was unstable but they were too fast and they were already making their way inside through the broken wall section before shouting "Everyone, get in here!"

At that Uto and the other rushed forward expecting the worst but were confounded once they entered the building.

Rather than the gutted remains they had expected the inside of the building was semi clean and well lit. The worker who had rushed forward was sitting at a table on the opposite side of the room with another human handing him a steaming bowl. At seeing the other workers they raised their hand with the bowl to show them.

"It's a ramen store!"

While the word was unknown to Uto it seemed familiar to the others who then in turn piled in and began sitting down at what tables still stood. The man behind the counter appeared to be an elderly human but moved as if the years had only effected his exterior rather than his reflexes and soon there was a warm bowl of ramen for everyone present.

Uto stepped towards the counter and two of his team members parted to allow him a seat. As he took it the old man handed him a bowl.

"For your hard work." the man said as he smiled.

Uto looked at the bowl then at his team. All of them were eagerly eating and the mood was one of joy and comradery; a steep contrast to the dread they had been dealing with as they sifted through the remains of the city.

"Ssank ou." Uto muttered as he began sampling the contents of his bowl. It was a flush of flavor the likes Uto had not had since he was on his homeworld. Warm and delicious, almost disarming in it's nature to such a degree that when Uto looked up and for a moment felt as if he wasn't in the ruins of a once proud city.

When Uto finished his bowl and set it down the elderly man was ready and handed him another.

"Why ssssay here?" Uto asked the man, now curious about this human living alone.

The elderly man waved a hand around the building as he continued cooking. "This restaurant  has been in my family for three generations now; I could no more leave it than I could chop off my own arm."

Uto looked back at the ruined walls and roof as portions of the shingles slid off and shattered to the ground. "I am sorry is ruined." To his surprise the elder man chuckled.

"It is not ruined, only broken."

The man must have saw the confusion on Uto's face and he continued. "In my culture when something has been broken it is, like a vase or cup, it is not thrown away and discarded but instead mended with gold to heal the wounds and restore it."

Uto shook his head at the man's remarks. "Iz confusing."

"Is it?" The old man pointed to Uto's arms. "You are covered in cracks and scars yourself, yet you did not resign yourself to languish in the trash and be forgotten."

The man handed out several more bowls before fully turning to Uto. "This city has been broken and many have been lost, the wounds are fresh and feel as if they will never heal again; but in time the city will rebuild and the streets will once again be filled with the sounds of joy once more."

"Ruins are only made when those who remain are unwilling to rebuild what was lost."

Uto pondered the man's words and again looked at his team as they mingled. Their faces were filled with joy and hope he did not think any would have after witnessing such devastation first hand.  

"Ou are very wize." Uto tilted his head in acknowledgement to the old man who seemed to blush slightly and laugh.

He sheepishly waved to the store again. "It comes with owning a ramen shop." He leaned in close and whispered "All the best ones have sage advice; it makes the food taste better."

The two laughed and sat the night away, a tiny corner of joy in a city though broken, would never be defeated.

[narcisbolgor-blog]

Alabama rot: The dog disease with no cure – BBC News

Image copyright Jessica Worthington

Image caption Pippa was just two-and-a-half years old when she died from Alabama Rot

Tearing through woods in Wiltshire was a regular activity for Pippa the Cocker Spaniel - running off her energy amid the trees and mud of the local landscape.

But little did her owner know that just six days later, she would pass away in a London animal hospital having contracted Alabama rot.

The disease was first discovered in the US during the late 1980s, but did not appear on UK shores until December 2012 when the first case was reported.

Since then, 98 dogs have died from it, with 15 cases confirmed already in 2017. Yet, there is still little information on its cause or cure.

Specialists are meeting in Reading for the UK's first conference focused on Alabama rot, as vets, nurses and academics continue to search for the answer to the disease.

A walk like any other

Pippa belonged to veterinary nurse Jessica Worthington, who lives in Swindon.

"I had her from when she was an eight-week old puppy," she said. "She was just like her breed, always running around and excited."

Jessica took Pippa and her other dog Molly to woods near the village of Marlborough in December 2015 and let the dogs play, as she had done plenty of other times.

She gave them a good shampoo after to stop her house being covered in mud but noticed something was wrong with her one pet.

"I thought Pippa seemed a little lame so I took her into work with me that night," said Jessica. "Then, the next morning, six or seven lesions had appeared on her feet."

When she checked Molly, she had the same thing.

What is Alabama Rot?

Image copyright Getty Images

Cutaneous and renal glomerular vasculopathy (CRGV) or Alabama rot is a serious disease which has only recently been recognised in dogs in the UK.

It causes lesions on the skin and occasionally in the mouth, which can look like bites, sores, wounds or stings.

Some dogs go on to develop life-threatening kidney failure.

It causes tiny blood clots to form in the blood vessels which blocks them and can ultimately lead to damage of the affected tissue.

In the skin, this causes ulceration, but in the kidney it can lead to severe organ dysfunction.

Any age, sex, or breed of dog can be affected and it is fatal in nine out of 10 dogs.

SOURCE: Alabamarot.co.uk

Jessica rushed the pair to specialist vets Anderson Moores, in Hursley, Hampshire, where David Walker leads research in the UK into Alabama Rot.

Within days, Pippa's kidneys and liver were failing and she died at the Royal Veterinary College.

Image copyright Jessica Worthington

Image caption Pippa being treated at the Royal Veterinary College

"It was heartbreaking," said Jessica.

"Molly had the exact same treatment and improved. Luckily, she seems to have recovered and is back to her normal self.

"But we will never forget Pippa."

'It was extremely quick'

Gabrielle Williams from Magor, in Monmouthshire, South Wales, lost her five-year-old whippet Fleur to the disease in March.

"It started when she was sick one morning," she said. "I didn't think much of it. She was fine the rest of the day and ate her food."

But soon things began to get worse.

Image caption Fleur (right) died just a week after first showing symptoms

"A day after she had an intermittent limp," said Gabrielle. "Then a lesion appeared.

"She deteriorated extremely quickly. They did blood tests and found that her kidneys were failing too. Then more lesions appeared, also in her mouth."

From the first symptom of her being sick to her being put to sleep was just one week.

"It was extremely quick and devastating to see her deteriorate so badly," added Gabrielle. "There was nothing the vets could do."

"Fleur was a fantastic character and losing her has broken my heart. I take comfort in the fact I have my other dogs... but they still look for Fleur and seem lost without her around."

Losing a dog so young

In February, Cathy Moss, from Bournemouth, went through the same experience with her three-year-old Cocker Spaniel Maggie.

They had been for a walk in a forest near her home for a change of scenery and over the next few days Cathy noticed a change in Maggie's behaviour.

"It all happened so quickly," she said. "She was quieter than usual and had lost interest in her food for a couple of days.

Image copyright BuglerSmith

Image caption Maggie's owners said she will never be replaced in their family

"She then started licking her back paw and we spotted a sore, so took her to the vet where they took tests and said it looked like it could be Alabama rot."

Cathy knew the disease could be fatal, but still didn't believe she would lose her.

However, soon after she was transferred to specialists, Maggie's kidneys began failing and they could not save her.

"It's so sad to lose a dog so young," said Cathy. "I would hate for another dog to have to go through this. More research needs to be done."

Be vigilant

Anderson Moores vet Mr Walker said he did not want dog owners to panic, as Alabama rot is still a very rare disease, but he called on people to be aware.

"Without us knowing the cause of the disease, it is incredibly difficult for us to give preventative advice," he told BBC Breakfast.

"But I think the best thing that we can tell pet owners is to be vigilant.

"If they see a skin sore on their dog and they don't know why that has developed, they should go and seek veterinary attention. We suspect there is an environmental trigger for this disease, although to date we haven't been able to find one [but if] people want to know the geographical location of the affected cases, then they can look online.

"It probably will help if pet owners can get their dogs to the vet early when they see that skin sore the chances are the outcome might be better. We have got dogs through this."

Has your pet been affected by Alabama rot? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with your stories.

Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:

WhatsApp: +44 7525 900971

Send pictures/video to yourpics@bbc.co.uk

Upload your pictures / video here

Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSay

Send an SMS or MMS to 61124 or +44 7555 173285

Or use the form below

More From this publisher : HERE

=> *********************************************** Post Source Here: Alabama rot: The dog disease with no cure – BBC News ************************************ =>

Alabama rot: The dog disease with no cure – BBC News was originally posted by 11 VA Viral News

[gyrlversion]

‘That was the only option for me’: What life was like for women who needed abortions before Roe v. Wade

During the eight-hour car ride from Ohio to New York, they rode in absolute silence.

The year was 1971 and Pamela Mason, an 18-year-old freshman at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, had just found out she was pregnant. She knew that she and her boyfriend had been careless, but she also knew she wasn’t ready to be a mother. The moment she realized her period was late, she felt like she was going to pass out.

When she first called up her boyfriend to tell him the news, he immediately hung up. Half an hour later, her phone rang.

“What do you want to do?” he asked her. Her answer was easy: “I want to have an abortion.”

Mason’s unplanned pregnancy occurred two years prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the US and granted women a constitutional right to the procedure. At that time, abortions were heavily restricted in her state.

“I never thought ‘Oh, well, we can have the baby,'” Mason, now 65 and an administrative assistant living in New Jersey, told INSIDER. “It was strictly I am getting an abortion. That was the only option for me.”

That meant driving 500 miles away in a 1967 green Chevy Impala to New York City, where abortions were legal. And, Mason thought at the time, that distance was doable.

Women created underground networks to help each other access safe abortions

In the decades prior to Roe, there were several ways in which women could try to have an abortion.

Some women, typically those who were wealthier and with “contacts,” could convince licensed doctors to perform the procedure as a matter of conscience — or profit — said Carol Sanger, a law professor at Columbia University and author of the book “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in the 21st Century.” But, not all doctors were so willing because the penalties fell on the doctor performing the abortion.

In many cases, women had no choice but to partake in illegal abortions to terminate their pregnancies. Some worked with organizations and underground abortion networks, like the Chicago-based group “Jane,” or the Clergy Consultation Service, made up of religious leaders nationwide, which had been created to help women navigate the abortion landscape and safely access the procedure. Many of the female members of “Jane” learned how to perform the procedures themselves, at one point performing abortions four days a week and serving as many as 10 woman a day.

But, others weren’t as lucky.

“The situation pre- Roe was that the rich people did okay because they could pay to get a proper legal abortion. Some people were savvy enough to contact organizations like ‘Jane’ or the Clergy,” Sanger said, adding, “for ordinary women, they would just go by word of mouth and take their chances because they wouldn’t want to be pregnant.”

A young woman holds a sign demanding a woman’s right to abortion at a demonstration in Madison, Wis., April 20, 1971.

AP Photo

Leslie Reagan, a professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the book “When Abortion Was a Crime”, said that illegal abortions became more clandestine as a result of tough enforcement by police and prosecutors. Doctors could be penalized with fines or jail sentences that varied by state. In those illicit situations, the quality of care was extremely uneven and could have disastrous consequences.

Sometimes, if there were complications after an illegal abortion, women had no choice but to rush to emergency rooms, only to be harassed by hospital staff and police with probing questions about who performed the procedure. “Most people would be taken care of by doctors, but some of those people died in the emergency rooms,” Reagan said.

Other women resorted to self-abortions, the most notable tactic being a coat hanger-induced abortion. But, according to Reagan, desperate women were willing to try anything: “people went to the drug store and they got orange sticks. They also used medical things, like catheters which are rubber covered wires so they are stiff… they used pens, cotton, pencils, a list of things,” she said. “There were people who tried to use Coke bottles, tried to use Clorox… there were these pills that were sold and they were told to put them in their vagina, and they just burned through the tissue.”

Women protesting abortion laws, Dec. 9, 1969.

Photo by Joe Runci/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Many women, who could afford the cost, traveled elsewhere to have the procedure, with underground abortion networks helping them navigate the journey and offering details — like how to travel safely or tips on not getting ripped off. For women on the East Coast, Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, were a popular destination, while those on the West Coast traveled to Mexico and Japan.

The story of “Miss Sherri”

One of the most high-profile cases of a woman trying to travel abroad for an abortion was that of Sherri Finkbine, a 30-year-old television host known as “Miss Sherri” on the children’s show “Romper Room.” In the spring of 1962, Finkbine, a pregnant mother of four living in Arizona, took pills her husband had brought her following a business trip to England, to curb her morning sickness. She later discovered the pills contained thalidomide, which could cause severe birth defects. Finkbine decided to terminate her pregnancy.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. Hoping to warn other women about the drug, Finkbine shared her story with a local reporter, asking for anonymity. But her identity was exposed, unleashing a firestorm over her decision to have an abortion. She requested a therapeutic abortion before a three-man board at a Phoenix hospital, but was denied.

View of pregnant American television show host Sherri Chessen Finkbine (known as Miss Sherri on ‘Romper Room’) sits with her children during her ongoing legal case to seek a medically prescribed abortion, Phoenix, Arizona, August 1962.

Photo by J. R. Eyerman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

In the early 1960s, when Finkbine requested an abortion, 44 states, including Arizona, only allowed abortion if it endangered the women’s life. Women who were caught going to an abortion doctor were often required to appear in court.

“Women were in a difficult position at times because they were still being hauled into court and having to give testimony and sometimes being examined to support the case against an abortion provider,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who has written extensively about the history of abortion and Roe v. Wade, told INSIDER.

Raids on abortion providers’ offices — and subsequently women being brought to court to testify against them — became common in the 1940s and 1950s as a way to enforce abortion laws, Reagan wrote in her book “When Abortion Was a Crime.” Women could be posed questions about their abortion provider, the procedure, and their sexual encounters. When a Chicago woman who had an abortion refused to testify about the procedure in 1949, she was ordered to six months in jail for contempt of court.

A 22-year-old woman sits in a Los Angeles jail following an abortion arrest.

Photo by Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty Images

After Finkbine’s name became public, the death threats started, and the FBI even stationed themselves at her home as a safety measure. Eventually, she went to Sweden to have the abortion.

Eight years later, in 1970, New York legalized the procedure and, according to Sanger, became “a mecca for performing abortions.” In the years before Roe, three other states, Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska, passed similar laws. But, unlike New York, those states required women seeking an abortion to have already lived in the state for a certain period of time.

Women, like Mason, flocked to New York for the procedure.

To scrape together the money for an abortion, she stole discarded soda bottles

At Ohio State in the 1960s, it was known among the student body that Planned Parenthood was the place to go for birth control and information about reproductive health services. Mason took a bus from campus to Planned Parenthood, where she was immediately referred to a clinic in Manhattan. She called to schedule an appointment and was told the procedure was $150, in addition to travel costs.

For Mason and her boyfriend, money was tight; she only had around $50 in the bank at the time. To scrape together the funds, she stole discarded glass soda bottles from her neighbor, which could be sold for around a nickel. Her best friend swiped bottles from her mom to contribute to the cause.

They set out on a Saturday night in the clunky Chevy Impala and, as Mason recalls, her boyfriend barely spoke to her throughout the whirlwind trip. “I was pretty devastated by his reaction to kind of just treat it like it was my fault, that was the message I was getting,” she said. “I was just trying to keep my mind on the mission, basically, that I’m doing this because I want to and, regardless of how he is going to behave, I’m not going to pull the car over.”

When Mason arrived to New York City she was immediately enthralled by the throngs of people and traffic consuming the city. “Wow, this is some place,” she thought to herself. Her boyfriend dropped her off at the clinic and whisked away to find parking. She was all alone.

1972: Members of the New York women’s Liberation Army demonstrate on a street corner to demand abortion rights.

Photo by Peter Keegan/Keystone/Getty Images

At the clinic, she was so nervous she could barely speak. While explaining the procedure, a concerned counselor paused to ask, “are you OK?”

“I want it to be over,” Mason replied.

The abortion was painful but was quickly over. She’ll never forget the kindness exuded by clinic staff.

Almost five decades later, she feels immense relief that New York City was only 500 miles away from Columbus. “If I lived in Kansas or Missouri at the time, I don’t want to think what would have happened to me,” Mason said. “I was geographically lucky.”

A string of abortion laws have recently passed, aimed at putting Roe V. Wade on the line

In early May of this year, Alabama lawmakers sent shockwaves across the country by passing the country’s most restrictive abortion law. The law effectively bans abortions in the state, unless it poses a “serious health risk” to the mother, and doesn’t include exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. Doctors who perform the procedure could face up to 99 years in prison.

And Alabama isn’t alone: various states have passed measures recently to restrict abortion access. Earlier this month, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a so-called “heartbeat bill” that bans the procedure after a heartbeat is detected, typically around five to six weeks and before many women know they are pregnant. In mid-May, legislators in Missouri’s State Senate also passed a bill to ban abortions after eight weeks, with no exemptions for rape or incest. Since the start of 2019, states like Utah, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi, have brought forth extreme anti-abortion measures, part of a concerted effort to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Anti-abortion activists from around the US gather in Washington, DC January 19, 2018 for the annual “March for Life.”

EVA HAMBACH/AFP/Getty Images

None of the recently passed abortion bans have formally gone into effect, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights intend to challenge the measures.

Mason says she couldn’t believe it when Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973. She was still enrolled at Ohio State and immediately began volunteering at the state’s first abortion clinic. At that time, the clinic was the only one in the region — and the phone was constantly ringing with women not just from Ohio, but the surrounding five states as well.

Eventually, she was offered a full-time job.

“We sometimes had to turn away more people than we could help because of the large demand,” she said about her time working at the clinic. “I wish these lawmakers understood the need, and the demand, for safe, legal abortions.”

In the decades since the passage of Roe, anti-abortion groups and lawmakers have pursued a strategy of slowly chipping away at abortion access, imposing measures such as required waiting periods, mandated counseling, and strict requirements on abortion clinics and providers, to make it more difficult for women to access the procedure. Federal laws, like the Hyde Amendment, also block federal Medicaid funds from being used to pay for abortions.

Since Roe was decided, states have introduced more than 1,200 abortion restrictions, with more than a third of those enacted since 2010, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and policy organization on reproductive health.

“Many women today, particularly in the Midwest and the South, have been living in environments where, frankly, Roe is already not a reality for them, and losing Roe would of course make the barriers to accessing abortion that much worse,” said Rachel Sussman, National Director of State Policy and Advocacy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “It is going to have a disproportionate impact on people who are already facing systematic barriers to accessing healthcare, so women living in rural communities, women living in poverty, people of color are going to face these barriers.”

Activists dressed as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” chant in the Texas Capitol Rotunda as they protest SB8, a bill that would require health care facilities, including hospitals and abortion clinics, to bury or cremate any fetal remains whether from abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth, and they would be banned from donating aborted fetal tissue to medical researchers, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, in Austin.

AP Photo/Eric Gay

Going forward, Sussman said it is imperative for those who support women’s reproductive health to reach out to their state’s elected officials about the importance of safe, legal abortions.

For women like Mason, who benefited from the procedure, that message is more critical now than ever.

“The trauma for me was driving 20 hours. It wasn’t the abortion or the aftermath or thinking ‘what had I done?'” Mason said about her experience. “I am so grateful to the people in New York City who made this totally petrified 18 year old feel like it’s going to be OK, and to get back to Ohio in one piece and to go to school on Monday.”

Mason is grateful she had access to an abortion when so many others didn’t. “When I look back on the trajectory of my life, all the things I’ve done throughout my adult life were only possible because I was able to terminate my pregnancy, so just all around it’s a lot of gratitude.”

The post ‘That was the only option for me’: What life was like for women who needed abortions before Roe v. Wade appeared first on Gyrlversion.

from WordPress http://www.gyrlversion.net/that-was-the-only-option-for-me-what-life-was-like-for-women-who-needed-abortions-before-roe-v-wade/

[isaacscrawford]

Remembering Uwe

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

The healthcare world learned with great sadness this week of the passing of our friend, Uwe Reinhardt. I met Uwe in 1982 at the Federation of American Hospitals meeting in Las Vegas. Uwe opened the meeting by apologizing, in his disarming German accent, for not being his usual sharp self. He had, he said, skipped breakfast because his wife May had instructed him not to pay for anything in Las Vegas that he could get for free at home. This was vintage Reinhardt, innocent and knowing at the same time. That meeting was the beginning of a long and warm friendship.

Uwe would have been acutely uncomfortable with his colleagues referring to him as a “giant” in our field, because he was genuinely humble, and had not forgotten what it felt like growing up poor in the frozen steppes of Manitoba after WWII. And there was no sterner test of humility that occupying the James Madison Professorship of Political Economy at Princeton, just about as flossy an academic title as you will find.

For many years, Uwe taught a standing-room-only undergraduate course in Accounting at Princeton. The way he taught it was as a cleverly disguised course in moral philosophy. A main trope: “how would a ‘seasoned adult’ look at this problem?”  A ‘seasoned adult’ was someone who had lost his or her moral compass and sense of shame. So, where would a ‘seasoned adult’ book a bribe paid to a foreign official to obtain a contract, etc.? He was cleverly goading them not to lose their sense of outrage and their own moral compass, a tricky task without patronizing them.

Uwe had a devastating dry wit. There was the barest hint of vermouth in the Reinhardt martini.

You lived in fear of being placed on a program before him for what he might conceivably say about your talk. Please forgive the following, but I will never forget being on the program with him for the Board of Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina about eight years ago. For some reason, our host had asked Uwe to talk about the current political landscape and me to talk about international health systems and what we could learn from other countries. This was a cruel thing to do, because Uwe had forgotten more about this topic than I know.

So I spent a month preparing this talk. I deconstructed the famous World Health Organization ranking of health systems, in which the US ranked 37th, behind Oman, Malta, San Marino, Switzerland etc., (largely by, effectively, double counting income inequality). And I found some great data it turned out Uwe hadn’t yet seen on WHY the US healthcare is so much more expensive than other countries (hint: ambulatory services dwarfed pharma pricing and the cost of our multi-payer system). As an almost 60-year-old “expert”, I was more nervous giving this talk than I was at my Ph.D. thesis orals at the University of Chicago decades earlier. To my immense relief, he LIKED it, and asked me to send him my slides.

Our last conversation, about a month ago, was about this very topic.   We were talking about the latest round of international cost comparisons, and he said “Our colleagues need to invent a new parlor game. This one is a complete waste of time.” Most of the countries we were unfavorably compared to, he went on, were smaller than Los Angeles County, and had been doing what they had been doing for generations. I riffed on how our health system WAS a country, bigger than Germany, sort of like a successful version of Afghanistan, replete with tribal conflicts, warlords, corruption, a bad communication system, language problems, etc. That reforming the US health system was a LOT harder and more dangerous than invading a middle eastern country like Iraq. He told me to be careful with that one.

He knew when not to be careful. During the 1980’s, he served on the Physician Payment Review Commission, which was eventually folded into MedPac. So he was a fixture on the medical society lecture circuit. On a panel in front of a bunch of physicians, he bridled at a physician who argued that cutting Medicare physician fees would damage the quality of care.

Uwe asked him whether he was going to leave a sponge in a patient after closing him up at surgery because his fee was reduced. That remark put Uwe on the American Medical Association’s “do not call” list for the better part of a decade.

Uwe had a soft heart, and if you wanted him to speak for you and could get to him, he would say “yes” and deeply discount his fee.   After some marital byplay, he eventually delegated the negotiations to his formidable wife, May. He met Tsung-Mei Cheng, a fellow immigrant, while studying graduate economics at Yale. May was the daughter of a Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) General who fled mainland China for Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War. Photos of May photoshopped into Russian Commissar garb were a fixture in Uwe’s colorful presentations.

May is an improbable combination of steely, razor sharp and tough minded, but also sweet, gentle and loving. They were the most amazing couple. Delegating negotiation over speaking gigs to May was a classic economist’s move. Who better to place a value on a night away from home than his loving wife and fellow economist? She drove a very hard bargain. Later in his career, Uwe made numerous trips to Asia, “holding May’s coat” as he put it. He took immense pride in May’s role in advising Pacific Rim governments like Singapore and Taiwan on health financing, and eventually mainland China, on their financing reforms.

I talked to Uwe every few weeks or so, for decades.   Whenever something happened in the world that upset me or I just could not wrap my head around, I would call him up and ask him how he felt about it. He had a calming influence on me. I do remember him remarking on what a bad sign it was that so few members of the incoming administration of George W. Bush had passports, and that they could do a lot of harm without knowing it. That was a prescient forecast. The only time I can remember in 35 years where Uwe boiled over into outraged, white hot anger was over the War in Iraq, which he felt put his son, a Marine captain, at needless risk. His son was nearly killed by an IED on a subsequent tour of Afghanistan.

I learned through friends that Uwe got cancer at about the same time I did. He was absolutely not interested in telling me about it and didn’t, though he DID talk about multiple unexplained hospital visits. He also said that after age 65, we are all of us on thin ice, and it doesn’t take much to break through into the freezing cold water. We did appear together in the fall of 2015, both dealing with cancer and neither knowing about the other, in front of a health plan audience in Massachusetts. I blew up on the panel and remarked that if someone referred to a patient one more time as a “consumer” I was going to throw up.   He happily piled on without explaining what he was going through.

I remember Uwe saying once that our colleagues in health policy weren’t going to learn so much by travelling abroad, but that they would return perhaps feeling really lucky about how much talent and resources they had to work with. Our job, he said to me more than once, was to “keep them honest”. He never lost his moral compass, but also never mounted a high horse about it. Despite its manifest flaws, he loved his adopted country. It is VERY hard to imagine this world, and this field, without Uwe in it.

Article source:The Health Care Blog