Sound Off

I want to talk a little about the hospital..despite the fact I really wanted to steer away from that topic on my blog, I'm going to talk about it anyway.

Recently, Starbucks came under fire because all of a sudden, everyone cared that Starbucks was letting the water run to keep the spoons clean/cold. Apparently wasting millions of something of water a day. Well last time I checked, Starbucks has been doing that since its inception and Starbucks (no matter how much I snub them as an ex-barista) is not the only coffee place that does it. Anyway, hearing it on the news made me go, "so what?". Now here's the deal: what about HOSPITALS?

If people saw how much paper and plastic was wasted at a hospital, the environmentalists would all commit suicide all at once. Just today looking over reports (that print out on a daily basis) I was apalled by how much paper is printed...I don't really know the count but it was at least 700 pages. from one printer in a huge lab full of printers. that's 700 pages of bleached paper just for blood test reports.

Also, the receiving part of the lab gets an average of 200 specimens an hour, every specimen is in a plastic bag, wrapped in bubble wrap and some rubber bands. We do not recycle the plastic bags. They go straight to the garbage.

The wrapping from the needles and containers and the trays we use on each patient also gets thrown away and a blood collector can see about 50 patients in four to five hours.

Now is it just a necessity to keep everything clean? Of course, this is healthcare...so...it's okay to waste all this? Is it really? I'm not a big environmentalist but working at a hospital and seeing how much they waste disgusts even the likes of myself.

Now my second gripe, there have been some celebrities recently in the news where they narrowly escaped death being caught on fire and jumping out of a plane. They ended up being treated because of their Second + Third Degree burns. Now of course, this is a traumatic experience and I wish them a speedy recovery but it makes me really sick to see that they're getting the best treatment and the quickest treatment.

There are a lot of people who end up in the Burn wards that lie there for months. There are people who are very severely burnt and most are paralyzed and they don't get the opportunity to walk out with just seven surgeries in two weeks. It reminds me of this song by Kanye that goes, "You know the best medicine goes to the people that's paid, if Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS and all the broke motherfuckers passed away, you're telling me that if my grandma was in the NBA, right now she'd be okay?"

Just putting it out there.