Skip to main content

All Better? Why go to Rehab?

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no. -Amy Winehouse

My mother is home from the hospital, where she arrived weak and dehydrated last Thursday. She thinks that an antibiotic made her ill.* My mother uses a wheelchair but she can stand up and she can walk with a walker. She couldn't use her legs when she went to the hospital, but by Monday, she could transfer herself from the bed to the wheelchair with no help, just someone to spot her.

The hospital wanted her to go to rehab, but like Amy Winehouse, she said no, no, no, for good reasons:

  • She felt well enough to go home.
  • Rehab is expensive.
  • They feed you a crappy diet at rehab--crappy meaning full of carbage. It's especially unhealthy when you're diabetic, like my mother.
  • Got normal blood sugar? They're johnny-on-the-spot with the orange juice to jack it back up.
  • Mom was assaulted at a rehab center a few years ago. The person was never brought to justice.

Being home and careful about her diet, Mom's fasting blood sugar is getting back to normal--111 this morning, down from 257 after the regrettable waffle breakfast at the hospital. She's back to puttering around the house. It helps that she refuses to take the statins her regular doctor ordered and lower her insulin dosage as the doctor at the hospital recommended. She doesn't have heart disease and her A1C is 5.0--that's a normal level. Why should she change her medication?

I think most medical professionals are caring people, but some are too eager to sell their services and products, which can do a lot of harm to patients' health and bank account balance in some cases. Let the patient beware.

*Too late, I found that coconut oil might have cured the infection.

Comments

tess said…
yea! i'm glad she's better, AND has the sense to do what her body and REAL science say is good. :-)

Lori Miller said…
Mom's not a science buff, but she knows better than to take something that's working and do the opposite.
Anonymous said…
"•Mom was assaulted at a rehab center a few years ago."

Oh my God! That's awful. I'm glad she's feeling better, Lori.
I think a lot of medical types WANT to feel that they are doing good, and it just wouldn't occur to them that they may be actively harming people.
Lori Miller said…
She was assaulted by a staff member and sustained a brain injury that left her barely able to speak for a week. Sad to say, some conventional medical treatments will do worse than that. No doubt, it's hard for medical professionals to admit they may have been harming people.
Lori your mom must feel so much better for being at home and "back to puttering around the house" Just the fact that she can and is doing so must make her feel so much better. Wishing her a continued good recovery

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan. She took away my father's statins yesterday, so he should start feeling better soon, too.

Popular posts from this blog

What $115 Buys--Junk Food vs. Real Food

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts.  Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.  

Celebrities Shilling for Big Soda

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this.  Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

$17/pound chips! Real food is cheaper

 My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight.  Music: On We Go (ClipChamp)  First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...