A nurse who doesn’t save lives, state land without flags, dangerous breakfast treats and it all starts … now.
Do not get ill, destabilize your vitals or otherwise threaten to die in this place:
The executive director of a senior living facility in Bakersfield defended its policies that apparently prohibited a nurse last week from giving CPR to an elderly woman who was said to be barely breathing and later died.
“In the event of a health emergency at this independent living community our practice is to immediately call emergency medical personnel for assistance and to wait with the individual needing attention until such personnel arrives,” Jeffrey Toomer, director of the facility, said in a statement on behalf of Glenwood Gardens.
“That is the protocol we followed,” he said. “As with any incident involving a resident, we will conduct a thorough internal review of this matter, but we have no further comments at this time.”
Bakersfield fire dispatcher Tracey Halvorson pleaded with the nurse on the phone, begging her to start CPR on the elderly resident, according to the 911 tape released by the Bakersfield Fire Department.
“It’s a human being,” Halvorson said, speaking quickly.
“Is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?”
The woman paused.
“Um, not at this time.”
We’ve maybe, possibly, lost our way.
But the poor nurse, who was then having a really bad, no good unfortunate day, managed to be heard on the 911 recording. “She’s yelling at me,” she said of Halvorson, “and saying we have to have one of our residents perform CPR. I’m feeling stressed, and I’m not going to do that, make that call.”
(Here’s an update where the family speaks and the firm says things and I don’t care.)
That’s some kind of nurse, some kind of medical care mitigated by absolutely nothing.
Also in California: Caltrans policy stymies a proposed veterans monument.
Small-town folks struggling to put up a monument to veterans: It sounds like something straight out of “Mayberry R.F.D.,” but for residents of this Central Coast town, it feels more like “Catch-22.”
After three years, the privately funded $60,000 monument, which is sponsored by the American Legion and would be placed on a sliver of land owned by the California Department of Transportation, is still unbuilt. The sticking point has been opposition from Caltrans to the monument’s use of the American flag and the agency’s apparent reluctance to allow the display of words — such as “United States” — on the monument’s military emblems.
[…]
In an interview, Peter Adam, the supervisor representing Orcutt, was unequivocal about the idea of striking the flag from a veterans monument: “That’s a degree of crazy we shouldn’t allow.”
The policy stems from a First Amendment case where the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Caltrans should not have allowed removal of activists’ antiwar banners from a highway overpass while U.S. flags were allowed to fly. Caltrans, then, decided to bar all flags from state roads. The plaintiff in that suit, by the way, is quoted in this story. And they are as mystified by it all as you are right now.
Our great-grandparents would be ashamed of all of us. Bureaucracy in general, however, is thrilled.
And we haven’t even discussed pastries yet. But we will.
A seven-year-old Maryland boy has been suspended from school after biting his breakfast pastry into a shape that his teacher thought looked like a gun.
Josh Welch, a second-grader at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, said he was trying to nibble his strawberry Pop Tart into a mountain.
“It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” Josh said. “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.”
But when his teacher saw what he had done, the boy says she got “pretty mad” and he knew he was “in big trouble.”
Josh is in the second grade. He should know the difference between mountains and firearms, even if his school doesn’t. Here’s the letter home to concerned parents.
Assault pastries! That sucrose-laden confectionary treat is a loaded weapon! Suspended for two days, young Josh and his friends will no doubt realize how silly the authority figures in their school are behaving.
When I was in high school one of our teachers built and demonstrated a potato gun that fired off rubbing alcohol. She would run through the halls, burst open doors and shoot — wait for it — a tiny nerf basketball at people. It was hysterical. It was also the 1990s, so get off my lawn, I guess, with your “nurses” and your flags and your Pop Tarts.
