They generally stagger around in large flocks and then fly over my Mother’s car. The ferals leave them alone because they don’t trust drunken birds and the robins make a lot of racket singing pub songs or whatever.

The robins up here are rather lazy and probably only migrated as far south as necessary to find some live bugs.

I notice that Congress is trying to take action against people using bogus Census forms for fund-raising. That affects the Republicans more than anyone.

If we’re lucky, the Republicans will actually refuse to cooperate, and we can watch their power centers die off from a lack of Federal money for ten years.

Hospital pharmacies are different than regular pharmacies. The regular pharmacies that my Mother uses, KMart and Walgreens, won’t fill prescriptions for any of the drugs she has reactions to, and their programs are based on the underlying chemistry, not just trade names. Their programs have caught a couple of problems that were caused by generic substitution, i.e. she is allergic to the substitute, but not the brand name. The lady at KMart is not above suggesting alternatives, usually generics, when there is a problem.

The pharmacies in hospitals are working for the hospital, not the patient, and that isn’t a good situation.

The stupid bit with my Mother’s doctor is that he stopped by the hospital and actually did the admission exam. The nurses knew who he was and were shocked to find that he wasn’t in the main system, although he was in the ER system, and was doing calls at the hospital when my Mother went in. She went in at a time he specified because he was going to be at the hospital. Someone failed to check a box, and the system halted for two hours.

My mother had to wait for admission because no one had put her doctor’s name in the new system although he was an on-call specialist.

good grief. things like this are why i wish we could just expand the vha to cover everyone. they’ve already got an emr system that’s been working reasonably well for years, designed by drs for drs, and it’s open source. if the govt owned all the hospitals, we could just make them all use vista [no not that vista, this vista].

Medical personnel are data entry clerks and nothing more.

sadly, this is too often true.

Medical personnel are data entry clerks and nothing more.

My mother had to wait for admission because no one had put her doctor’s name in the new system although he was an on-call specialist. GIGO.

i have suspected this, in large part because of my own life-and-death encounters with bad reactions to medication, including one AFTER the information had been entered into my computerized ‘medical’ record. your mom has my sympathies and best wishes.

Looks like, Anya, has the answer that these are the standard choices, probably based on immigration records, and the fact that Spanish is the first language of US citizens in Puerto Rico.

Yes, Anya, that was another reason I wondered about the lack of French, because it is such a common language in Africa, as well as the Caribbean and Canada.

Hipparchia, the key is who are the data being collected for within the facility. The basic answer is the accounting department, not the medical people. [It’s testing and rehab after a bad reaction to medication by by Mother.]