Blogs

Peace everyone.

I just wanted to share my performances with you and encourage someone today. I have had a Trach Tube since 1998, due to 70% throat blockage, Asthma and Chronic Bronchitis. Through it all, I have never stopped performing vocally. I have recorded 9 solo vocal projects, and 2 vocal projects with my family's group. Enjoy!

I don't understand why voters don't realize that the HMOs are calling the shots when it comes to our healthcare. They are the ones deciding who lives or dies and the quality of life we have as far as our health is concerned.

For 2010 Medicare has switched my Rx coverage and I had my first refill this week. For years I have been taking a medication that my doctor prescribed I take 2 times a day, but much to my shock my new provider has decided that I should only take it once daily instead. They don't know me and my doctor is the one who best knows my medical needs!

I live in Massachusetts where the winning candidate for Ted Kennedy's seat campaigned primarily against healthcare reform. Oddly enough a poll taken among those who voted for him said healthcare reform did not go far enough, yet the winner opposes it.

Healthcare reform is trying to get the HMOs out from between patients and doctors and stop them from calling the shots as to what your doctor prescribes for you or doesn't.

Can somebody tell me how it is that people are persuaded to vote against their own best interests? For 50 years one party has consistently stymied all attempts to reform healthcare, and the record shows that too many of them leave congress and go to work in cushy jobs in the healthcare or pharmaceutical industries. They take campaign funds from these industries to keep themselves in office and subsequently drug and healthcare costs get higher and higher, less people can afford coverge and the HMOs and drug manufacturers get more and more powerful to the point where legislation was passed a few years ago to keep the government from negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare recipients.

The US is the only developed nation without universal health coverage in spite of being, even in these economic times, the richest country in the world.

What is it about we Americans that makes us so stubborn when it comes to denying quality healthcare to all our fellow citizens while our elected officials and the rich are the only ones who are able to obtain this fundamental need?

We really have to begin to think for ourselves instead of letting the talking heads on TV and radio think for us. A healthy nation is a strong nation!  

Every story I have heard regarding the hows and whys of what happened to put you in that wheel chair or crutch or struggling to carry four glasses of wine with a plate of mud crab on the lap, every story has been worthy of publishing. They are always incredible experiences, which for many brought them closer to life than they had ever been. I have told that same story so many times that for the last few years I have come to 'embellish' my own. There has been the fighter pilot seat ejection malfunction, the lion tamer falling off the stand above five hungry lions... and the pub story, where I and the maiden had fallen (on bed in prone motion) through three floors of badly dilapidated pub architecture, to be stopped with a sudden ground floor crack that just happened to be my spine voicing a crunch that screamed the sound of colliding neutrons.(very popular after last drinks are called).

In my daytime persona as an Arts teacher in High Schools mainly in remote Australian communities, many Aboriginal communities, the pleasure of these young student minds with their direct questions and truthful 'no holes barred' responses, is refreshing and honest. Whilst the teachers dance around getting to some notion of satisfying that curiosity of what made him a 'parapl...something or other' but at the forefront of investigative journalism high school staffroom style, 'Can he still get it up'. This usually comes out several times during late Friday evening staff drinks sessions which are progressively higher in volume, the more difficult the school, the less funded, the further remote...etc.

So I have come to a time when having repeated the story so many times, I am not the type to carry a ghetto blaster or Dictaphone with the story ready for play-back at the request of a drunken divorcée or inquisitive child. So it has become an adventurous past time to re-invent my sordid past with exciting and at times boring and homely replacement disasters, always trying to out do the last. And I have to say, the oohs, and ahhs are so dick dastardly addictive.

And to all those of you with tragic episodes filled with pain, and to some, like myself - regret.. why not push that beast to the side and enjoy the secret satisfaction of re-invention. I challenge all of you to present here, the most entertaining and extraordinary accounts of how you happened to attain your own personal modifications and figurative updates. 'Disability' is so last season...