The parable of the wrong way driver

 

 The parable of the wrong way driver

The other day on the freeway there were two incidents of wrong way drivers within a 24 hour period. The first accident involved two vehicles and both drivers were killed. The second one only the driver who was in the wrong was killed the other was not. There have been a number of wrong way driver incidents in which the drivers were not killed but injuries occurred. The highway patrol has been alerted and seeks to to stop the wrong way driver and keep him from injury and death.

This is an analogy to the highway to heaven or the covenant path. The covenant that leads us to our father in heaven and it is that we don’t have to pay anything for it, we just have to keep on the covenant path. This covenant path leads to our father in heaven and exaltation in the celestial kingdom all we have to do is keep our covenants. The covenant path begins with baptism into The Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints and we keep on that covenant path by keeping our Heavenly Father’s and Jesus’ commandments and in addition we covenant in the temple to do certain things and we covenant to obey all of our Father’s commandments and in addition in the covenant of marriage we bind ourselves in a covenant relationship to another individual for time and all eternity.

 

So what has this to do with wrong-way drivers?

 

Just as on the freeway there are wrong-way drivers on the covenant path to exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom. These wrong way drivers are often well-meaning people who think they are going the right way. They may misread the scriptures; or have an agenda of their own. They blindly travel down the covenant path and try to get others to follow their doctrine and principles. By so doing they die spiritually and in some cases cause others to die spiritually as well. Just as in the first case cited above.

 

Sometimes only one wrong way driver loses his direction on the covenant path and because he does not heed the direction given through the prophets and apostles and the holy scriptures, he loses his way,turns in the wrong direction and eventually crashes and loses his life in the spiritual sense. There are direction signs to guide on the freeway.  They must be heeded just as the directions in the scriptures and from the prophets must be heeded while we are on the covenant path. We can thus avoid loosing our life by going the wrong way on our path back to our Father in Heaven.

 

Follow the prophet. Don’t go astray is Grandpa’s advice.  

 

 

Adventures in telemedicine

 Adventures in telemedicine 

Written some time ago

Last week we were invited to a get together at a neighbor's home. One of our good neighbors said that her grandson was riding a bicycle and went over the handle bars and suffered a fractured clavicle. The parents were to fly to the East and our neighbors were tend the boy and the other children. She wanted to know if the grandson would need to have surgery and the parents would have to postpone their trip. I said I would need to look at an x-ray to tell.

Our friend said she had a copy of the x-ray on her phone. She texted me a copy. I looked at the break and it was widely separated and fragmented. I sent by text the x-ray to Dr. Ogilvie who is an orthopedic specialist. He looked at the clavicle and called me and said that there was a good possibility that there was muscle between the fragments and that the boy should have an open reduction and a plate to fix the fragments. 

Our friend later informed us that the boy was taken to surgery and they found the fragments separated widely and soft tissue interposed. The parents canceled their trip and their tickets were voided, but because of a storm they were given a voucher for the whole amount.

My daughter-in-law called about her father who had fallen in the shower and was somnolent and unsteady. He had been checked by the doctor and went to a week long family reunion but did not participate actively. They made an appointment to see his family doctor, but other family members were pushing to have him go to the emergency room and get an MRI. She called for my opinion. I listened and told her to go to to the appointment and to avoid the emergency room. He is claustrophobic. I suggested that he probably had received a subdural hematoma. She went the appointment and the doctor was explaining what the CT scan he had received previously showed. When my daughter-in-law asked him if it was a subdural, he responded in the affirmative.

The crisis with the family was averted.

I received a call when I was working in the missionary department from a mother who had a son with back pain in Taiwan. He had been seen by a local physician and a MRI was obtained. The mission president's wife uploaded it to Novorad and she was informed that a doctor here in Utah had read it. Nothing was in the Elder's medical record. I could not find out who was consulted. I found the study on Novorad, but I don't know how to read MRIs. The mother called me the next day saying she had gotten the disc and no one could open the files to view the images. I could not help her with that. I told her I would call Dr. Oglivie and have him look at the study. In the meantime I opened the files on my computer and using the cropping tool in Onenote I copied the study into a Word document and then emailed it to the mother. Dr. Oglivie looked at the MRI and phoned me to report that the Elder had scoliosis and he could not see any disc impingement on the nerves. I copied the sheet of instructions from missionary medical and sent it by email to the mother with the information obtained from Dr. Oglivie.

My wife got a call from a sister that we minister to. She told my wife that she had iritis and we should not come to our appointment that day. In the conversation the sister said that she had recurring episodes of iritis over the last number of years. For some reason I thought of Sarcoidosis and the fact that it was associated with the pollen of loblolly pine. I called her and suggested that she mention this to her doctor. She had lived in the south and on a street lined with loblolly pine trees.

The last days are upon us

In light of recent events which have led to some people leaving the church, I wish to warn my grandchildren of things that will surely come to pass. 

A number of years ago a member of a stake presidency embezzled millions of dollars from some good friends and members of his ward. He was convicted and served 7 years in prison and has yet to repay the money that he stole.

The news is replete with episodes of a similar nature. In addition, the church will be mis-characterized as allowing and condoning inappropriate behavior as a recent article from the Associated Press which made headlines across the nation. I wrote this letter to my friends. It contains some points that you might consider in evaluating situations that may occur.

"My Dear Friends,

I have heard of your trials from afar.  If it were possible, I would remove them from you.  After some thought and contemplation I offer the following in hopes that it will in some way be a soothing balm and let you know that I still regard you as my friends and fellow travelers on the road to Christ.

There is adequate historical evidence that leaders in the church can go astray and cause pain to the flock of Christ.  I have been recently rereading the New Testament and Jesus the Christ. Although Jesus personally chose his apostles, one closely associated with him, betrayed him, and it was over money.

In the time of Joseph Smith, Warren Parrish, Joseph's secretary misappropriated money entrusted to him and caused the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society and a great apostasy from the church in Kirtland and it was over money.

There are a few church members who do now and will in the future take advantage of their membership in the church and their positions of leadership to deceive and steal money, property, and possessions from unsuspecting fellow saints.  Even the very elect may be led astray. 

I recently heard of a family that came to America from a Scandinavian country to Utah in the early days. They sold all that they had and came to Ellis Island with some missionaries. When they disembarked the missionaries offered to exchange their money for them.  The missionaries never returned and absconded with the family's money, their entire savings. Because of this many descendants left the church.

There are many trials to come to individual members of the church.  Each and every member of the church will be tried and tested to see if they will stand firm in spite of all things that they will have thrown their way.

Christ said that the servant was no greater than the master.  Thus we can expect to be betrayed and misunderstood from both within and without the church.  Hopefully that will not happen often in our lives.  We will be given individualized and customized challenges to bring us to Christ.  For those like me we have to learn to rely solely upon the Lord and not on our own strength.

We must be like Job and say, “The Lord giveth and taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The promise to the faithful is that what we lose will be restored to us many fold if we maintain our integrity.

If we believe in the promise, we can go on with our life.

What do we do with those people who have wronged us?  We forgive them. This is probably the most difficult thing to do.  We would like to see justice done in this life.  When we feel betrayed and taken advantage of, we want to see our sense of justice exercised.  The hardest thing to do is leave things in the hand of the eternal lawgiver.

There are two scriptures that we need to remember.  “I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”  The other is, “Let the Lord judge between thee and me and reward thee according to thy works.”  We thus leave everything to the Lord and it takes the burden from our shoulders.  He will judge righteous judgment.  We want Him to be fair with us not only in our case, but he also will avenge us of our wrongs.  You can be assured of that.  I find that this is the most difficult test of our integrity.  We cannot let the actions of others determine our eternal salvation.   

I hope that you will not let the actions of one individual jeopardize your eternal salvation.

Sincerely,

Your friend in the gospel of Christ."

 

With my love,

Grandpa 

 

Introduction to Dr. Laurence Gee

 

Introduction to Dr. Laurence Gee

I received my medical school training at the University of Utah.  During my senior year of medical school, the obstetrical department of the LDS hospital employed me.  That year the hospital did not have enough interns to staff the labor and delivery department so they hired senior medical students to cover from 7:00 pm to 7:00am.  I worked every third night and delivered over 500 babies and assisted on numerous other deliveries during that time. 

I completed a rotating internship at the Dee Memorial Hospital in Ogden and completed two years of pediatric residency at the University of Utah Affiliated Hospitals.  During my first year of pediatric residency the hospital in Ogden did not have enough interns to staff the emergency room, so I worked one night a week in the emergency room in Ogden.

Once I completed my training in pediatrics, I opened a private practice for the diseases of Infants, Children and Adolescents in the town of Lander, Wyoming.  The population at that time was approximately 7,000.  There were about 30,000 people in the surrounding county area.  When I went into practice in 1965, I was the fifth pediatrician in the State of Wyoming and the only one in the western half of the state.

Wyoming is a state in the Rocky Mountain area of the United States.  The area is 97,814 sq mi
(253,348 km2)  - 

Width 280 miles (450 km)  - 

Length 360 miles (581 km)

Inasmuch as there were a number of people that did not want to go to the other doctors in the town, I took care of all ages of patients and also delivered babies.  Not long after I arrived, the veterinarians had a convention in Jackson, Wyoming and there were none in town.  A patient of mine had a horse that ran into a barbed wire fence and cut her shoulder.  She was a prize racehorse and so I was asked to sew up the horse’s shoulder.  I joked that it was ok, because the horse was only 3 years old.

I had been trained to take out tonsils and adenoids and put tubes in ears.  None of the doctors in Lander were trained to put tubes in ears, so that was something new to them.  No one had ever done an exchange transfusion for hypebilirubinemia of the newborn due to erythroblastosis fetalis,  so I did the first one in that hospital.  I had a patient with Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and wanted to do a bone marrow aspiration, but there was no bone marrow needle in the hospital, so I had to improvise.

We had a small 40 bed hospital when I first came to Lander.  They later built a 100-bed hospital.

I was drafted into the Navy as served as the base pediatrician at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California and took call in the obstetrical department at night and delivered babies and assisted at c-sections. 

I was a founding member of the Wyoming Pediatric Society. 

I trained residents, interns and child health associates and physicians assistants in my office in Lander, Wyoming.

Appointments

Pediatric Consultant to Wyoming Children’s Health Services, 1965 to 1996

Alternate Chapter Chairman Wyoming Chapter, American Academy of   Pediatrics 1976-1977

Chapter Chairman Wyoming Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics 1977-1983

President and Founding Member of Wyoming Pediatric Society, 1977-1983

Chief of Staff Bishop Randall Hospital, Lander Wyoming 1970-1972 

Chief of Pediatrics Bishop Randall Hospital, Lander Wyoming      1968-1986, 1990 to 1996.

Clinical Instructor in Pediatrics, University of Wyoming 1980-7

Wyoming Representative to and Council Member of American Academy of Pediatrics District VIII Perinatal Committee, 1990 to 1996

Pediatric Consultant to Wyoming Deaf and Blind Services 1985 to 1996

Medical Director Morning Star Manor Nursing Home, Ft. Washakie 1990-1997

Missionary Medical Advisory Committee, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 2003-Present

 

PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS:

Diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics since 1972         

Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1973          

Fremont County Medical Society 1965-1997

Wyoming State Medical Society 1965-1997

Irish and American Pediatric Society 1996-2000

The new face of medicine

 

The new face of medicine
Or what you need to do in today's environment

Recent events have brought to my attention what you, my posterity need to be aware of with the changes in American medicine.

First you need to be in charge of your own medical records. Since the advent of Hillary Clinton's meddling into the health care scene with the passage of HIPA. We have seen a rise in the schism between the patient and the physician. There has been a loss of trust.

When a patient requested his medical records, we used to give them freely. Now they are sold back to the patient. The process that one has to go through now to obtain medical information is complicated and time consuming and at times frustrating.

The time was when the doctor kept the record and was the repository of your medical records and information. When he closed his practice, he passed them on to his successor or notified the patient to pick up their records.

Now that Obama care is in place electronic medical records are going to be mandatory. You are supposed to be given a copy of the visit with a diagnosis and treatment given or prescribed.

I have received calls in the missionary department from returned missionaries who need their immunization records. They have not kept track of their records and have expected the church to keep their records for them. They are disappointed when I have to tell them that I cannot assist them.

My suggestion is that you make a file and keep a record of all of your immunizations and record your visits to the doctor and hospital. A hard copy is good, but with today's technology you can keep it on the hard drive of your computer and back up to at least two flash drives. The technology may change in the future, so adapt to that.

If you do not take charge of your own data, you will eventually be frustrated and disappointed.

By being the keeper of your own medical records you can then transfer from one medical home to another and not have to try and remember dates, illnesses, surgeries, and hospitalizations.

One man once told me, "a dull pencil is better than a sharp mind." Keep a document of every illness, hospital visit, dental encounter and medical procedure that you have.

I suggest that you be fully immunized.  You should keep a written record of all immunizations. There should be a backup copy of these records.

Here is a list of the immunizations that you should receive.
Tdap every 5 years or DT ever 10 years
MMR one series is enough
Hepatitis A and B
If you have not had either then there is a combination vaccine called Twinrix
Polio, one series is enough
Chicken Pox (Varicella) unless you had the disease.
For young missionaries get meningococcal meningitis vaccine or if you are going to college and living in a dorm.

These immunizations should be obtained. They are recommended by the first presidency and council of the twelve and by grandpa.

Keep your records.  Recently I learned that electronic medical records can be deleted after 7 years.  This from the Internet.

"Medical records shall be retained for at least seven years. Medical records of minors shall be kept until the age of eighteen plus four years, but in no case less than seven years. (d) The Hospital may destroy medical records after retaining them for the minimum time period."