When the Levee Breaks

This morning I was playing a compilation cd I'd made several weeks ago, and Led Zepplin's version of "When the Levee Breaks" rolled around. It's an obvious connection, but I thought about the catastrophes in the Midwest. The song was written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929. It was two years after the horrific floods of 1927, and more flooding was inundating the Midwest in 1929. Cedar Rapids was under water then as it is today. I think the '27 flood was more on the songwriters' minds, however. Google "The Great Flood of 1927" and read any article. Wikipedia has a fairly accurate one. It sounds eerily familiar. A levee above New Orleans was blown in order to save the city from the flooding which had ravaged the entire Mississippi basin. Turns out it wasn't necessary. Levee breaks farther up the river had abated the  flooding, just as they are doing now.  Funny how the planned break then inundated the poorer areas of St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parishes instead of the richer sections of New Orleans. What happened next was analyzed again after the disaster with Katrina. 

After the Great Flood, more than 330,00 displaced African Americans were rounded up and forced onto the levees in deplorable refugee camps. Some were forced at gunpoint to shore up the levees. It was one of the many reasons for the Second Diaspora, the movement from the South to cities in the North, like Chicago and New York. 

It will be interesting to see how "Shrub" (St. Molly's name for Bush) will handle this disaster.

 My heart goes out to all those who have lost so much. 

Fun in the ER

I just love having to be in the ER. It's so productive to sit for five hours while you think you're in painfully dire straits (appendicitis) and may rupture your appendix while you wait. Then you finally get to go back to the ER exam room and wait some more for the doc, the blood work, the icky stuff you have to drink before a CT scan to do its thing (two hours), get the results of the CT scan (not appendicitis but its benign cousin, epiploic appendagitis, which is a rare condition), and then wait for someone to take the IV out of your arm so that you can go home. Total time - 10 1/2 hours. I will say one thing, the wait was bad, but the doc and nurses were first rate, harried and tired, but first rate. 

Every time I have to go to the ER (recently a lot because of my elderly mother), I am appalled at the backup situation in hospitals. I'm sure its not just the one where we go. I know because of the appalling state of health care in America. Most of the people in the waiting room appeared to be poor or immigrants. I'm assuming they don't have insurance because most of their ailments seemed to be of the kind that a trip to a doctor's office the next day could handle. At least our hospital has a system of triage that routes less serious patients to expedited care rooms and serious patients to critical care rooms. Even at that, it was obvious that they were undermanned.  The ER wing itself is inadequate, but that will be rectified when the hospital builds its new central city hospital. I just hope they find the doctors and nurses they need to run it expeditiously. 

As for the makeup of the waiting room, that's the central problem facing America's healthcare system. We HAVE to get some sort of universal healthcare in order to serve the uninsured and underinsured of this nation. Knoxville is lucky in that it has two volunteer health clinics: one is for the uninsured and is free; the other is for the underinsured, and patients are charged on a sliding scale according to income. There aren't enough of these good facilities, however. There shouldn't have to be any. I hope America votes for the presidential candidate who will help develop a good universal program. I think we all know that's Obama.