Part One, Pre-Op, is here.
Surgery day had finally arrived and of course I was a bit nervous.
Personal Narrative
Septoplasty, Part One
Last Thursday I had a Septoplasty. I thought it might be interesting to some of our readers to read about it from beginning to end. Of course it isn’t really over yet as I’m still in the recovery phase, but I can’t really do much as far as any real activity goes so I decided to do this. I am also wanting to put this short series out as a guide for those who get this procedure done in the future so they know what to expect and how it all goes down. It may also give a glimpse for our foreign readers into how our medical system works in the good ‘ol USA.
Part One, today, will be pre-op, part two will be the actual surgery day, and the final part will be recovery. I may add an epilogue later with financial information and insurance and how that all went down.
Below the fold will be part one, pre-op.
The Birth of Educational Wokeism – A Personal Story
I’m almost certain that I witnessed the seeds of teacher-training wokism yea these four decades ago when I was wrapping up the class hours necessary for a degree in English, an age before it became screamingly obvious that a BA in English didn’t guarantee that the recipient of it was conversant with proper grammar, spelling, the literary output of the greats from Chaucer to Wilde, or blessed with the ability (even if only acquired through imitation) to write in a clear and pleasing style.
With my usual efficiency and persistence, I had managed to complete every single required class for that golden degree by three and a half years into the enterprise, leaving me with just a requirement for so many class credits subject unspecified for my final semester toiling in the groves of academy as they presented at Cal State University Northridge. (A state uni with practically no notable characteristics or reputation then, or now. It was your standard state university, providing in a workmanlike fashion, higher education to a mixed bag of students freshly minted high-school alums, foreign students, working adults and returning senior citizens.)
Done With Disney
I posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog how distressed I was at the turn that the management of Disney’s corporation had gone of late and having made a personal decision to delete Disney from my range of entertainment interests. Now it seems that Disney management is going full woke and full steam ahead … which, OK, is the choice of corporations to make in their sphere. If management of Disney wants to go all-gay all the time, in catering to a bare 2-3% of the public, it’s their company, their choice. Maybe not a good one, but theirs to make.
Now, what isn’t OK is for a corporation to come out full-throated political in the case of Florida’s law limiting what can be construed as sex ed to the elementary school set; this aimed at kids barely aware that there are differences between boys and girls. Believe me, parents and grandparents feel very strongly that such lessons are wildly inappropriate to the point of being construed as sexual grooming. Normal parents (and grandparents) will not put up with lesson materiel which is almost guaranteed to damage children, especially as a fair number of elementary school teachers seem prone to overshare regarding their own sexual conduct.
Bearing False Witness
Depending on the version of the Ten Commandments, the eighth or ninth is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” in simpler terms, you shouldn’t tell lies, especially a lie intended to falsely accuse another person. I was reminded again, of the damage done by malicious accusations, upon reading this horrifying story, linked through Insty because there was such a malicious person in the neighborhood where my family lived for more than a decade a person given to making random and spurious accusations about his neighbors. When I wrote about my family, I called this residence Hilltop House a post-war bungalow perched on the knee of a range of hills, surrounded by similar and rather modest houses on half-acre or quarter-acre lots, spread out along a rambling tangle of narrow roads above Sunland-Tujunga. A good block away from Hilltop house was a cul d sac of about half a dozen houses; one of the residents in the cul d sac was an older couple … and the man, who I will call Felix S. began to go nuts. Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. He became convinced that his neighbors were all part of a vast conspiracy to manufacture drugs and that there were tunnels and pipelines running the drugs between all the houses around him, and that odors from the drug manufacturing were poisoning the air around his house. Eventually, he put up all kinds of industrial fans around his yard, intended to blow the fumes away, and became notorious as the “Fan Man.” But that came later.