I spent my early childhood in a trailer park in Texas so, until I became an emergency physician in Oakland, I thought I knew something about barriers to healthcare access, and maybe even something about poverty. The Emergency Department at the Oakland county hospital has around 75,000 visits a year — say, 200 a day. It has 43 beds; because of overcrowding, there are ‘extra’ patient beds in the hallways, which have ended up being designated as official patient-care areas: first came Hallway 1, then, a year later, Hallway 2, and now Hallway 3 as well. At night the ED usually has one supervising physician with a couple of housestaff — trainee doctors — a student or two, and around ten nurses; there is double supervising coverage from the late morning through to about 2 AM, the hours of heaviest traffic.
Posts published in February 2010
For sale, at auction, opening bids welcome: one used airliner in bad condition. No engines, no avionics, no chance of flying again. Missing doors, missing rafts and emergency chutes, distressed cabin, heavy damage to the belly of the rear fuselage, the wings lopped off. View by appointment with the owners, Chartis — a new name for a large section of AIG. The wreckage is in storage in New Jersey; the successful bidder must remove their acquisition within one month of sale or rent will be charged.
“The heartbeat of Caspar has stopped,” a grandmother grieved, when the Caspar Lumber Company mill closed down. But the 1955 report of Caspar’s death was premature. Caspar’s heart lay not in its mill but in its community, a long dormant force that flamed back to potent vitality when sparked by a real estate crisis in 1997.
For many years afterward I’d approach this date with deep, dark trepidation, convinced that some sort of disaster was certain to befall me. The one…
BLACK ELVIS? Bill Taylor writes: “A few nights ago, Wednesday, February 10, around 9:30pm as it was after our AV chorus rehearsal, I was driving…
Fredrick Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee, died at the age of ninety on February 11, 2010. I still carry a Frisbee in my knapsack…
Three interesting charges have appeared in the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Bookings lately, all of which have prompted a bit of cyber-skepticism about why a person…
Half a century ago, a new decade ushered in the rebirth of the American left and of those forces for radical change grievously wounded by…