To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
17
Jun
2022
Sunday May 22, 2022
This May, Americans are all riled up about abortion. A leaked draft of a forthcoming judgement, written by the conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, suggests that the Court is likely to overturn the 1973 Roe vs Wadedecision that has, for almost 50 years, allowed American women to have safe and legal abortions.
In Canada, May is Cystic Fibrosis Month. Cystic Fibrosis is a much less divisive issue than abortion. But the two are linked together for me. You’ll see why.
Our son was born with Cystic Fibrosis, CF. It’s a hereditary illness. Both my wife and I had to be carriers of a recessive gene. Our two genes combined to give our son CF. He had nothing to do with it – he was the innocent victim.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: abortion, Cystic Fibrosis
7
Feb
2021
It’s hard to realize that the first COVID-19 case showed up in Canada barely more than a year ago. A patient came to Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital after returning from Wuhan, China, where the disease apparently originated.
COVID-19 was a brand new disease. We didn’t know how it started, how it was transmitted, or how to treat it.
We learned as we went.
Initially, too, we saw ICU patients propped up in beds. Now I sometimes see then lying face down. It looks awkward, but apparently it helps to drain the fluid building up in their lungs.
At that point, I wondered if anyone in the COVID-19 camp had contacted the cystic fibrosis community about postural drainage.
Because nobody, but nobody, knows more about getting fluid out of lungs than the people who treat cystic fibrosis.
Tags: Cystic Fibrosis, COVID-19, postural drainage, lungs
Dec
2017
I have a lot of sympathy for Kimberley Jones. You haven’t heard of her? Almost certainly, you have heard of her son, 11-year-old Keaton Jones.
The Facebook post of Keaton, crying in the seat of his mother’s car as she brought him home from school has now had 20 million views, and been featured on newscasts around the world.
A tearful Keaton asked why kids wanted to bully, why they picked on innocent kids, why they poured milk on him. “It’s not okay,” he told his mother’s cell phone. “It’s not their fault they’re different.”
I sympathize with her, because I too had a son who suffered from teasing. And perhaps some bullying. He was born with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, hereditary, and at the time terminal illness.
Tags: bullying, Cystic Fibrosis, Keaton Jones, Kimberley Jones
May
Earlier this week, TV host Jimmy Kimmel told his studio audience, multiplied by millions on line, about his infant son’s emergency heart surgery.
Kimmel choked up as he described the events. A normal birth. In fact, an easy birth. Then, three hours later, an alert nurse noted a heart murmur, a purplish skin tone. A newborn infant rushed into surgery to repair a hole in his heart wall and a sticking valve.
Kimmel made the case for universal medical care when he said, “If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make.”
Canadians, watching those TV clips, might have felt complacent. After all, we have a universal “single-payer system” that covers those costs.
Maybe not. Recently, I’ve been hearing about a drug that B.C. and several other provinces refuse to pay for.
Tags: Drugs, Orkambi, health plans, Cystic Fibrosis, CF