Tom Delay's Comments:

“Mrs. Schiavo’s condition, I believe, has been at times misrepresented by the media, but far more often has simply gone unreported all together. Terri Schiavo is not on a respirator; she can breathe on her own. Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life-support.

“She’s not being ‘kept alive’; she is alive. It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo; it will only take the medical care and therapy that all patients deserve. Mrs. Schiavo is not being denied heroic measures; she’s being denied basic, basic, basic medical and personal care.

(In re Theismann, it's true Taylor knew pretty much what he'd just done, and was REALLY sorry and did a lot of "you're gonna need a bigger stretcher" concerned kibitzing as soon as it happened.)

I have watched a couple of different plays where baseball players knock each other out by cracking heads, which strikes me as about the silliest thing you can possibly do on a diamond, barring only losing the ball in your own clothes or getting tagged out due to interference by untied shoelaces.

Then there was the footage of Bo Jackson dislocating his hip in football, and then, like, standing up and walking on it. Which is NOT NORMAL. (They made him lie down later.)

Gov. Bush and the state's social services agency filed a petition in state court to take custody of Schiavo and, presumably, reconnect her feeding tube.

The latest I've read is that this effort is going nowhere. I don't have any more details than that.

Popping in to say "avoiding the medical injury shtuff, as I faint easily."

Yet another reason I didn't go into dad's field. Or mom's - she's a psych nurse, after all, because anyone's blood other than her own, or mine or my sister's, makes HER faint, too. Funny in a nurse. Not so funny in ER.

I remember my mother's dilemma about one of my blood draws. She didn't want her colleague to take my blood, because I was her kid, but she didn't want to stick needles into me either.

The word "preventative" is jammed into my head in the slot where I fear "preventive" goes. It would be a relief to hear it's a Commonwealth thing. Or perhaps I'm just extrapolating forcefully from "argumentative."

Timelies,

Healing~ma to Emmett.

Still sick. Took a sick day yestersay. Came in today because I didn't want to miss another day of work but would much rather be at home in bed.

On the plus side, since Monday I've been writing daily for the first time in years. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about the quality once my head clears up, but I'm glad I'm actually producing something. Here's hoping the bout of creativity doesn't leave with the illness.

I remember my mother's dilemma about one of my blood draws. She didn't want her colleague to take my blood, because I was her kid, but she didn't want to stick needles into me either.

Where my mother was annoyingly happy whenever she got to do any of our medical treatment. Which usually consisted of taking stitches out or lancing things, but I'm sure would have extended to blood draws had we gone to her hospital.

In retrospect, I'm very glad we didn't go to her hospital.

My mother's selectively extremely squeamish. She thought the idea of Bodyworks plastination was disgusting, yet it was her medical books that scared me so much as a tot (I swear one was just a deformity coffee table book -- got me worried I could develop congenital problems). She'll dissect freshly killed rats without a second thought, but my seven millionth blood draw freaks her out.

The word "preventative" is jammed into my head in the slot where I fear "preventive" goes.

Huh, me too. m-w.com does recognize "preventative" as a word, but it seems to be the redheaded stepchild to "preventive".

Also out sick today. Been fighting a cold or some similar ick, and the cold/ick won.

OTOH, I think I scored some fun drugs out of it.

Closer to topic, I had a college roommate who was pre-dental. Also into bodybuilding, so built like a linebacker. Another friend TA'ed him in a lab-type class, told me roommate screamed at the sight of blood.