~ as if our recent blood disorder wasn’t enough to contend with, now we have two other concerns to cause us to fret:

‘A southern Illinois woman died after being severely burned in a flash fire while undergoing surgery, a rare but vexing dilemma in operating rooms.
Surgical flash fires …occur an estimated 550 to 600 times a year…’

and

‘Doctors say a North Carolina man who was plagued with coughing fits should be OK now that they have removed a 1-inch piece of plastic from his lung, where it had rested since he apparently inhaled it nearly two years ago while sucking down a soft drink at a Wendy’s restaurant.’

we didn’t sleep last night as we were afeared of bursting into flames on an operating table whilst having a nekot wrapper removed from our lungs, but this morning we learned that we are of the people who will be dead in 12 minutes anyway, long before we could ever afford to enter a hospital:

‘Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers…’

public response: