Emergency room is for emergencies
Dear Editor:
Re: “Patients need to take some blame for health system ills,” (Herald, Feb. 9)
Kudos to the emergency room physician who had the courage to tell it like it is: Entitled patients showing up in emergency rooms without having any good reason to be there, demanding services they don’t need and complaining about doctors who try to reason with them.
If you have a long-standing condition or minor illness, it can be appropriately dealt with by your doctor or a clinic or the very helpful nurse line.
The emergency room is not a drop-in clinic, nor a replacement for your family doctor.
It should be reserved for true emergencies, and when the public abuse this, they selfishly put others at risk.
Please show some care for others and for the beleaguered staff. Don’t add to the problems in our health-care system.
Ingrid Olson Mercer
Victoria
Golf courses should all have Soloriders
Dear Editor:
There is no legitimate reason why paraplegics be denied access to golf courses.
All it takes is one special cart and an attitude change.
I suggest courses provide a Solorider cart at their club, either have it included with the rental fleet or purchase one. One-time cost is about $13,000, a small amount in the total budget of a golf course. Let the world know golf cares about paraplegics, and promote the use that each course can now provide.
To encourage participation I suggest a special fee of $25 for a nine-hole round with the cart included; or $40 for 18 holes. That is only a small income to the club, but better than “break even”; and it will go on for future years bringing in some income they never had access to before. And the goodwill will be far greater than what extra dollars you forego.
For many years, and by various means, I have tried to have B.C. Golf clubs provide on-course access to paraplegics and, I might add, with no success. When I see the many ways that have been provided to make life more pleasant for those confined to wheelchairs because they cannot stand on their legs; by communities who have adapted sidewalks and pubic facilities; by banks and businesses who provide ramps for wheelchair access; by team projects like sledge hockey and wheelchair basketball; by bowling alleys; by golf club clubhouses to make them wheelchair friendly, etc, all at an extra cost, I cannot understand why only golf courses, a natural for individual participation, resist any effort to assist the paraplegics who may be interested in enriching their lives through golfing.
My interest in this stems from when a group of us purchased a single-rider, hand-controlled electric specialized cart which allowed a paraplegic friend to join us on the Osoyoos Golf Course. The pleasure it gave him, and how it enriched his life was something that impressed me greatly.
After two years of him joining with us in the seniors league play, someone rammed his cart hard enough into a concrete wall to damage the driving gears. It was an obsolete model and could not be repaired. End of pleasure for my paraplegic friend.
Ironically, about three years ago I developed an incurable medical condition until I could no longer stand on my legs; after more than 30 years as a regular member of the Osoyoos club there was to be no more golf for me. But I learned about a hand-controlled electric Solorider cart which was readily available and was being used on some golf courses elsewhere.
I purchased my own Solorider cart and have now played over 20 modified nine-hole rounds from a sitting position. It works well and could be readily available to many others. Any golf club could do that; some elsewhere have.
Tony Brummet
Osoyoos
Term UFO is now politically incorrect
Dear Editor:
Children in Canada and U.S. know all about the North American Aerospace Defence Command. They refer to it as NORAD every Christmas Eve, when Santa’s sleigh is tracked on its journey around the globe.
Now everyone around the globe is learning about NORAD shooting down unidentified flying objects above North America. As with everything else, there is now a politically correct term for UFO, which is unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP.
After shooting down the Chinese balloon into the ocean off South Carolina, the political leadership in Ottawa and Washington became a tad trigger happy, and three more UAPs were targeted by NORAD. They were deposited either onto frozen tundra in Alaska and the Yukon, or into the choppy waters of Lake Huron.
We, the Great Unwashed are now told that they were most likely harmless commercial research or scientific balloons. Our esteemed leadership seemed to be heavily under the influence of CRAP, which stands for Completely Ridiculous Alien Piffle.
Had the Chinese balloon appeared a few weeks earlier, Dec. 24 would have been very hazardous for that jolly old man in the bulky red suit and his trusty reindeer. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, there was a young lady in a bulky red suit who had the eyes of millions of television viewers fixated to her every move as she floated in space on a platform for about 14 minutes.
Of course, it was Rihanna, accompanied by a host of diminutive dancers in white hoodies, performing some kind of hip-hop ritual on other platforms. The young Barbadian lady was very enthusiastically received, but have to admit that my musical preference is for The Beatles.
Can only guess that both Santa and Rihanna were spared from the NORAD/ CRAP madness because of a song written by John Lennon about 60 years ago titled “Yes It Is.”
The opening line goes... “If you wear red tonight.”
Bernie Smith
Parksville
We could all unite, defend and defeat
Dear Editor:
Strangely and sadly, what humankind may need to brutally endure in order to survive the very-long-term from ourselves is an even greater, non-humanoid nemesis than our own politics and perceptions of differences — especially those involving race — against which we could all unite, defend, attack and defeat, then greatly celebrate.
Perhaps a humanicidal, multi-tentacled extraterrestrial invader, like that from the 1996 blockbuster movie Independence Day.
During this much-needed human allegiance, we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and witness just how humanly similar we are to each other.
I’ve been informed, however, that one or more human parties might actually attempt to forge an allegiance with the ETs to better their own chances for survival, thus indicating that our wanting human condition may be even worse than I had originally thought.
Still, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we will inevitably revert to those same politics to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone — including those of scale: the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal — and so forth we slide downwards.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock
