It was plenty late arriving but Sunday’s
first hard frost fell from the sky like George Bush’s shock and awe campaign in Iraq. It
hit fast and hard and completed autumn’s Job One.
Job One in autumn is putting to sleep every
yellow jacket in the county. Jack Frost got it done Sunday. He knocked all the
wasps onto their backs, frostbitten stingers pointed skyward. Deader than the
falling leaves.
So that’s it for another stinging insect season.
The one just past was particularly nasty, starting early and lasting longer
with wasps seriously aggressive in September and the first half of October.
Wasps are especially noticeable – and especially
aggressive – in the fall because they are on vacation. Spring and summer they
toil non-stop gathering food for their colony’s young. In late summer and early
fall the queen wasps stop laying eggs and the workers are free to go about
looking for carbohydrates and sweets, such as rotting fruit, to feed
themselves.
More free time to roam usually means more
encounters with humans. When they sting they don’t leave behind the stinger,
therefore one wasp can sting multiple times.
I had two wasp encounters this fall. The second
encounter, on Thanksgiving Weekend, landed me in a hospital emergency room. Two
stings from a lone wasp left me looking like Pumpkinhead, my eyes swollen
almost shut.
Three little bags of intravenous cocktails
started to put me back in shape. No real damage done but it was a good reminder
how dangerous these critters can be. And, another reminder of the
contradictions in our health care system.
Allergic reactions to wasp stings can kill.
Deaths from wasp stings are rare in Canada but anyone spending a lot of time
outside, especially in the fall, is wise to carry a couple of antihistamine
tablets. They will slow down an allergic reaction, if you happen to develop
one.
Allergic reactions occur sometimes even if you
have been stung before and have not reacted. Also, wasp stings can react with
some medications, like blood pressure pills.
Going to hospital because of a wasp sting had a
positive side. Once again I got to see the dedication and professionalism of
medical staff who perform miracles in spite of the cancerous government
bureaucracies that control their work.
The growth of health care bureaucracies is
shocking and people need to rise up and demand a stop to it. Ontario has 14
Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) each with a CEO earning an average
annual salary of close to $300,000. Then there are the COOs, CFOs, Chief
Communications Officers and on and on.
Search the Internet for LHIN salaries and you’ll
find eight screens of the names of LHIN employees earning the big bucks. Big
buck acronyms sucking up dollars that should go into direct care for patients.
Ditto the 14 Community Care Access Centres
(CCACs), which govern home care.
Executive salaries in these questionable
bureaucracies have been soaring. Meanwhile, the salaries of people who do the
real work helping patients have fallen behind.
Bob Hepburn, a Toronto Star staffer, reported
last year that only 40 to 50 cents of every tax
dollar earmarked for home care actually reaches the health-care professionals
who deliver services to patients. Guess where the rest goes? Executive
salaries, administrative costs and corporate profits.
Meanwhile, back in the bush the frost has killed
all the worker wasps but the queens have survived. They will hibernate below
ground until spring when they will establish new colonies, build new nests and
the cycle will begin again.
There is no such cycle in the health care system.
The real workers survive the bureaucratic hard frosts and continue to help
people with their afflictions.
Their big buck bureaucratic bosses, however, do
not get to hibernate like the queen wasps. They continue to shuffle paper,
improve their media relations and lobby politicians for more money and more
power.
Wasp stings can be neutralized by drugs. Too bad
there is not a drug to relieve taxpayers from the pain and swelling of health
care bureaucracies.
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