Category Archives: medical news

45 years of tobacco freedom!

It was 45 years ago today that I lit the last cigarette I ever would attempt to smoke … only to snuff it, toss it and turn my back on a nasty habit I had acquired at the tender age of 15.

I was 30 years of age when I quit the habit cold turkey. My bride had been badgering me to do so, in that I had developed a “smoker’s cough.” I was smoking two packs a day, man! I wasn’t feeling well that day, so when I lit the cigarette, I damn near choked on it. My immediate thought in the monent was: What the hell am I doing to myaelf?

I knew the answer. I was killing myself. I was not prepared to die, given that I had a beautiful wife and two young sons who told me they wanted me to part of their lives.

I knew nothing about the cost that the habit would bring to those who still light ’em up today. Cigarettes sell now for about $7 a pack. Multiply that by two and that’s $14  each day going up in flames in my house. Ninety-eight bucks each  week, and $5,096 annually.

Wow! I can think of many more productive and enjoyable ways to spend that kind of dough.

And healthier, too!

As I look back, I believe today that decision — made immediately and acted on with dispatch — was among the smartest acts I have commited in the long life I have been granted.

Placebo effect takes hold … maybe

Three weeks into a nutrition and health management program run by the Veterans Administration and I am going to issue a preliminary progress report.

I signed up for this program a few weeks ago because I determined I need professional help with shedding the weight I gained after I lost my bride, Kathy Anne, to brain cancer. I devoured far too much comfort food and I paid the price with a lot of excess weight.

The program I joined is 16 weeks long. We just finished the third week of lessons delivered via online connection to my laptop here in North Texas.

Have I lost significant amounts of weight? Am I now able to look at myself in the mirror? No on both counts. However, there must be some sort of placebo impact taking hold of me.

Why? I feel better. It’s tough to define. I am proud of myself that I am able to exhibit some long-lost dietary discipline. I am keep strict daily logs of the calories I consume and the calories I expend through exercise and, well, just moving around and about.

I have heard about docs prescribing placebo medication — which, of course, is fake — as a sort of disguise to determine whether a patient is really sick. I will consider this positive effect on my outlook as a form of placebo I am receiving from the dietitian I am meeting each week.

I know that Billy Crystal’s SNL character “Fernando” would say it is “better to look good than to feel good.” Baloney. I feel great. I’ll settle for that gladly as I continue along this journey.

New year, challenge await

Long ago, I vowed to cease making New Year’s resolutions for reasons you’ll understand … I don’t follow through on them.

So, what the hell is the point?

However, 2025 is going to mark the start of a new journey I intend fully to complete. I wrote on this blog a while ago that I have sought professional help to lose the weight I gained since February 2023. I buried myself in comfort food after losing my dear bride, Kathy Anne, to glioblastoma brain cancer.

I packed on way too many pounds.

I reached out to the Veterans Administration Medical Center where I get my medical care. They have a nutrition program at the Sam Rayburn Clinic in Bonham. On Friday I will engage with a nutritionist to begin a 16-week class on building a better, healthier lifestyle.

The VA calls the program MOVE. I don’t know what MOVE means, although the all-capital-letter identifier suggests it’s an acronym; I’ll ask when I sign in Friday morning.

I used to have sufficient self-discipline to accomplish weight-loss goals by myself. That discipline has vanished. I decided to admit to a lack of self-starting ability. The VA has been most helpful in preparing me for the start of this class.

My weight-loss goal is substantial. I hope to achieve it by the end of 2025. I figure that if I succeed in meeting the MOVE goals during my class period, I’ll reach my target weight according to plan.

I won’t chronicle my progress regularly on this blog. I am taking a moment today to tell my friends and family members — and others who read my messages — that this old man is about to try a new approach to achieving what we all want … to live a long and fruitful life.

I am not yet ready to check out of this Earthly world. Therefore … I’ll see y’all at the end of the road.

Trump adds new ‘wack job’ to lineup

Wack jobs have found a home in what is shaping up as the weirdest presidential administration in history.

The latest of them also happens to be a scion of one of America’s most revered political families: Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.

How in the world can I begin evaluating Donald Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to be health and human services secretary? I’ll start with the obvious. Dude is an anti-vaccine activist who then says he doesn’t oppose vaccines per se, only those used to combat the COVID pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people around the world.

He also once picked up the carcass of a bear cub and delivered it to a national park and also declared that a worm got into his brain and ate some of the tissue inside his screwed-up noggin.

This is the moron Trump said he would allow to “run wild at HHS” in an effort to protect Americans against disease.

What the … ?

I feel compelled to re-state that RFK Jr.’s father, the late U.S. senator and U.S. attorney general — who I believe would have been elected president in 1968 were it not for the asshole with the pistol in Los Angeles — was my first political hero,

To think that Junior has become such a weirdo only makes me wonder: What would daddy think of his namesake?

Pro-birth … not pro-life

I am on the verge of abandoning the long-held term used to identify those who oppose a woman’s reproductive rights.

They call themselves “pro-life.” The reality is that they instead are “pro-birth,”

Why the change? It stems from the draconian measures enacted to restrict abortion in many states, including Texas. Here, legislators approved a ban on any abortion when a woman has been pregnant for six weeks or longer.

It makes no exception for the health of the unborn babies. Consider what happened to a Dallas woman who had to go out of state to obtain an abortion because one of the twins she was carrying had no chance of survival. She obtained the abortion.

Legislators are requiring women to give birth to children even when that act would jeopardize the health of the child and possibly destroy a woman’s ability to give birth in the future.

That is not a pro-life position. It promotes birth …. and it is a lie!

Should the 2024 election turn on this issue? Damn straight it should!

The Republican nominee in waiting has bragged about how he “single-handedly” deprived women of their right to govern their own bodies. The Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, cannot let his opponent get away with that idiotic boast.

Ex-POTUS now opposes national abortion ban … oh, really?

POTUS No. 45 has just declared his opposition to a national ban on abortion, saying that states should have the final say on what happens within their borders.

What in the world are we to glean from the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee’s latest stance on abortion?

Let’s review for a moment this moron’s path through the abortion pea patch.

He once declared himself to be fully pro-choice on the issue. Then he ran for president in 2016 and promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that inscribed a woman’s right to choose as a civil liberty. He kept that promise, with three judges named to the high court during his single — and hopefully only — presidential term. Republican senators declared their intention to enact a national ban, the former POTUS was silent. Now he says it’s up to the states.

While making that declaration, the former Idiot in Chief has boasted about “single-handedly overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Where does this clown stand on the issue? Don’t answer that. I think I know. He doesn’t stand anywhere on it.

He has no view. He has no policy.

Jackson demoted … but he’s hiding it

Ronny Jackson retired from the U.S. Navy with the rank of rear admiral.

However, the former sailor who now serves as the 13th Congressional District representative in the Texas Panhandle, no longer has that rank. The Navy demoted him to captain, citing the results of an extensive investigation into “inappropriate conduct” when he wore the Navy uniform.

Here’s the deal, though. Jackson’s website still lists him as a rear admiral. No mention made of his current rank, which is still substantial; it’s just not a “flag officer rank” to which officers aspire.

Jackson, let’s remember, served as presidential physician to Barack Obama and the idiot who succeeded him as POTUS. He once said that the 45th POTUS was healthy enough to live 200 years, or some such nonsense.

The Navy probe into his conduct substantiated allegations of bullying, “fostering a negative work environment,” and using alcohol inappropriately, according to the Washington Post. The demotion was handled quietly two summers ago. The Navy said Jackson’s conduct is “not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022.”

None of these allegations was a secret. Jackson had been reported to have done these things while he was being considered for a Cabinet job in the previous Republican administration; the POTUS wanted him to serve as veterans affairs secretary, but Jackson pulled out after questions arose about whether he was qualified to run such a gigantic federal agency.

He also reportedly dispensed drugs a bit too, shall we say, freely to those who asked for them.

To be clear, I never have been a fan of the ex-White House doc. He moved to Amarillo specifically to win a seat in Congress after long-time GOP Rep. Mac Thornberry decided against seeking another term. Unlike Thornberry, who grew up in Donley County, Jackson never had lived in the CD 13.

And also unlike Thornberry, Jackson has acted like some sort of clown while firing off tweets damn near daily questioning whether President Biden has the snap to serve as commander in chief.

I am one Texan who is embarrassed that this clown represents my many Panhandle friends in the U.S. House.

Now we have this demotion to further stain his already-soiled reputation. Can we finally get some transparency from this guy? He needs to acknowledge his demotion … and stop living the lie.

Court goes way beyond what is decent

The Alabama supreme court has issued a ruling that is going to reverberate all over the nation, as it endangers a medical practice that allows couples to welcome children into this deeply troubled world.

The court has ruled that embryos are “children,” and that the destruction of embryos that are not implanted into women’s bodies via in vitro fertilization theoretically could be construed as “murder.”

This despicable ruling is a nod by the court to the Christian nationalist movement in Alabama and it well could be — and should be — challenged as violating the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

This one hits many millions of Americans right where they live. Indeed, a member of my family gave birth some years ago to twins after she and her husband decided to seek an IVF procedure. Had the court ruling issued in Alabama had been in force in the state where they live, this couple could not have welcomed their son and daughter into the world.

The First Amendment declares that Congress must not enact any law that establishes a state religion. The Alabama high court has thumbed its nose at the amendment and declared that if Christian nationalists want to declare embryos to be children, then that’s all right. Let ’em have their say, the court has ruled.

This is crap. No, it’s worse than that. It is an evil intrusion into a couple’s most delicate decision-making process.

Amarillo wants to govern traffic to fight abortion?

Amarillo’s five-member — and all-male — city council has me scratching my noggin over a highly dubious law it is considering for approval.

Let’s see how this works. The city is considering a ban on people using public roadways if they intend to travel through the city to obtain an abortion.

This prompts what — to me, at least — is an obvious question: How in the name of Big Brother does the city enforce such a law?

Amarillo, where I lived for 23 years before my wife and I relocated to the D/FW Metroplex, is the largest Texas city to ponder such a screwball idea. The city is getting plenty of pushback on it and the council so far is unable to make a decision.

This week, the council conducted a special meeting at the civic center to accommodate the crowd attending, but it didn’t allow any public comment.

This notion is being pushed by those on the far right who oppose abortion to the extent that they want to make it illegal for a woman to obtain one. The Amarillo City Council is considering whether to weigh in on it.

I am shaking my head over this goofy notion. I want to stipulate that the council contains not a single woman. These all are men making a decision that involves whether a woman can control her body.

I’ll get back to my point, which is that such a law is unenforceable! How do police track the traffic? How does anyone determine whether an occupant in the vehicle is heading for an out-of-state medical clinic to obtain an abortion?

And aren’t the right-wingers of this world opposed to big government, that they oppose the Big Brother imposing his will on the people? Oh, wait. I almost forgot! Their anti-Big Brother posture applies only to those issues that don’t get ’em all riled up.

This is about the slipperiest slope I have ever seen … ever!

Rewrite this cruel abortion law!

Have we become so wedded in Texas to the notion of following a hidebound ideology that we cannot consider the human impact from policies that come out of our Legislature?

Don’t answer that. I know the answer. I believe it is yes.

Kate Cox is now the official poster woman for a policy that needs a serious revisiting when the next Legislature convenes in January 2025. Cox is the Dallas woman who was pregnant with a child who was doomed to die days if not hours after being born. Cox needed an abortion. Why? Because doctors told her that giving birth could harm her reproductive future, that she might be unable to get pregnant again.

Cox could obtain that abortion in Texas because of a cruel law that makes the procedure illegal, except when a pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. No other exceptions are allowed. Cox got kicked around. A lower court granted her permission; the Texas Supreme Court nixed that ruling. Then it issued a permanent ruling that disallowed Cox’s desire to end her pregnancy.

She went out of state to receive the procedure.

This is an insane law. It needs to be rewritten to allow for the type of exception that Cox faced.

The so-called “pro-life” movement is heralding the SCOTEX decision. This movement has nothing to do with being pro-life. It is instead a “pro-birth” movement that put Kate Cox’s parental future in dire peril.

The Texas law — one of the nation’s most restrictive — makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. Hell, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant so soon after conception! That didn’t matter to the numbskulls who forced this bill onto the books.

To worsen matters, they wrote a law that punishes doctors who perform an abortion with criminal penalties. And, of course, they didn’t allow for the type of circumstance that Kate Cox faced were she to give birth to a baby who had zero chance of survival.

Think for a moment about the heartbreak that awaited Cox and her husband and their family.

The next Texas Legislature has the power to improve a bad law by broadening the exceptions allowed for ending a pregnancy. If our legislators have a beating heart, they will act to lessen the chance of other women being trapped in the vise that could have delivered permanent reproductive damage to Kate Cox.