When The Cure May Be Worse Than The Disease

Last night was not much fun as we landed in the emergency room again for several hours. At least this time I got to head home instead of being admitted to the hospital. The problem, likely caused by the antibiotic I was on for the infection in my chest area, was that I keep spiking fevers, which then break in floods of sweating only to start all over again once I've cooled down. Apparently sulfa drugs can do this sometimes - a good thing to take note of for future reference - and I have been placed on a different antibiotic and am waiting hopefully (while sweating rather profusely at the moment) for the symptoms to subside. All of the blood work and cultures have come back negative so far this time, so maybe the change in medication is all that is necessary - I'm crossing my fingers that this is the case!

On other fronts, I noticed that MSN had an article about the terrible dearth of health care available to women in Iraq due to gender issues. This is fundamentalism gone haywire and, much like the Christian fundamentalism that encourages similar outrages here in the United States, really needs to stop - a project of many years, if not decades, I am sure. Everything that does not, or absolutely refuses to, evolve, whether a society, a culture, a religion, or an organism, is doomed to extinction with a lot of very painful contortions along the way. I truly hope the Muslim population of the Middle East is able to make this transition into modernity with fewer casualties than it seems they are currently experiencing.

It seems unconscionable that one nation, specifically the US, should have such good health care and low infant mortality rates, while there are other nations with so many difficulties keeping the mothers alive much less the infants and where health care seems to be directed more by religious dogma and prejudice than common sense and necessity. The religious leaders in these places need to take a long, hard look at the grave disservice they are doing to their nations and the people who follow them by promoting ignorance and fear. I am not advocating a wholesale - or rapid - change into a US type of democracy in order to advance better health care, but the rules that forbid male-female contact within a medical context to the point of costing lives and the villifying of those who choose to pursue careers in the health care industry really needs to stop!

In saying all of this I can imagine how frightening it must be to look ahead from a place of tradition and a known set of rules and see things that appear so foreign and threatening to one's beliefs, especially when those threats come robed in the hope of better lives and better health care. I also know that hospitals can get to be pretty frisky places on occasion - stress will do that to a person's mind - and that does not help the situation either. However, and I put this question to the religious leaders of the Middle East, would you rather allow proper and expert health care and then have to deal with the potentially resulting crises of conscience following, or continue to bury more mothers, infants, and children than you need to due to a refusal to deal with your own humanity? Keep your hands and souls tied so tightly there is no hope of a very real and possible salvation of lives or allow just enough of a relaxation of the rules and traditions to permit the health care that is so crucial to the well-being of your nations to take place unhampered? It is part of the evolving thing. Yes, it is something of a trade off and I am sure more of a compromise than most fundamentalists of any faith would choose to make, yet I am talking entire nations of people - millions of people - and not merely a few select individuals. What is best, in the long term, for those millions?

My heart goes out to the Middle Eastern nations as they struggle with such issues, especially the religious ones, as I have had some small experiences struggling in that area myself (fundamental, born-again, etc., etc., Christianity) and I know how difficult it is on a personal level to deal with your own imperfections and struggles in the face of a perfect and obdurate diety who seems to require everything and delivers little or nothing very tangible in a humanly real sense (I am not advocating apostasy, merely grousing my grouse about the seeming lack of miraculous happenings from on high). I also have had my struggles with the miseries of this life and the "hope" of the life to come (i.e. "heaven"), although those have largely ceased in that I have found both my Heaven and my Hell here on this earth. All of my worst moments and deepest pains have taken place here, yet I have also found my Heaven here as well. The blessings of a beautiful day, the delicacy of color and markings of the New England birds visiting our deck, the wild flowers blooming along the highways the irridesence found in the wings of the tiniest of insects, the detail and intricate construction of the leaf of a tree or a blade of wild grass or the petal of a flower, the love of those whom I cherish, the smile of my niece when she finds something I've said funny, seeing the care and concern given to the patients in the hospital primarily by the nursing and support staff during my recent stays there; all of these things convince me that, at least for me, my Heaven is to be found here and I want no other.

Perhaps, as I refuse to place my hopes on an intangible something that remains forever nebulous, perhaps that does make me apostate, but it cannot cause me to be any less grateful to the God who created the things that populate my Heaven. Nor can it diminish the power of the love I have given and, in turn, received over the years, the pain that comes from having loved so much when loss is experienced, or the hope that same love gives as healing takes place and the sun begins to brighten once again following pain. Perhaps I am one of the fools who "rush in where angels fear to tread," but I am seldom sorry I have ventured forth into such places of the heart and mind.

I wonder what St. Augustine might have had to say...

Izzlebug