The recovery continues to be slow, but steady. I'm at least not getting stricken with anything else to put me a few steps backwards thus far. I'm still getting exhausted too easily, along with dizziness/light-headedness, laboured breathing, and a wildly pounding heart, but level of activity needed to reach those signs of pulmonary fatigue is gradually increasing each day. It's unfortunate and really aggravating that these are the only symptom barometers I have to indicate to myself as to whether or not I'm healing. It sucks that I have to push myself to those levels each and every day and measure how long it takes to reach and recover from such stress periods for me to figure out if I'm actually making any progress. It's so ridiculous. It's like being given a hammer to smash your fingers with as your only option to use to tell whether or not you have any feeling in your hand. It's counter-intuitive to push one's self closer to the edge of collapse, but I still manage to do it.
It was a more vigorous day than I should have allowed it to become; but snow fall warnings were being issued again, and I chose to be practical with the time and shopped a bit after going to the medical lab. Today, it took me almost an hour to do the sort of shopping task which ordinarily takes me 15 to 20 minutes to do for the same amount of goods that I ended up getting. The excursion today has left me really bushed, but it was worth it. The past stretch of eating soup several days in a row was getting pretty monotonous meal-wise. I couldn't resist the chance to find some delicacies that are more flavourful, and yet such that they can be prepared on the lighter side, which is more agreeable with my current state of appetite. I did it before this next predicted big dump of snow comes blowing in tomorrow. It was probably a mistake to be trying to tour through a place as large as the Superstore for groceries given the way I felt afterward, but it was close to the lab, there was heated underground parking, and they had what I wanted all under one roof.
I'm bothered by the fact that enough snow has fallen for cross-country skiing, and more is coming; but I'm not fit enough for that sort of rigour yet, and I may miss this season entirely. The next paragraph is a jump ahead into Friday.
Today is Black Friday in the states, but it's White Out Friday here. The snow is arriving, the result of the wet Pacific air jabbing its way across the mountains and far inland, mixing with the descending Arctic chill. I walked the dog outside at 5:45 AM, just because I couldn't sleep. The random yet necessary rest periods splattered throughout the course of a day, and no set routine of things throughout these past couple of weeks have been really messing up my sleep patterns. It wasn't exactly a bright or sane thing to do: for the dog and I to walk the streets alone in the dark in inclement weather with my defective lungs. However, it's better than taxing myself more with trying to tramp through a few more centimeters after an extra three hours of accumulation; and when it's expected later to blow up to 50 km/h gusting with increasing wind chill and whiteout conditions, all just for the sake of waiting for daylight. They say that this will all last until midnight, so today is turning into a total write-off for getting some relief from going shack-whacky or hoping to get stuff done outside of home. The doctor just phoned to tell me that my INR levels are a little high and we readjusted dosages. I should be taking it easy for today anyway.
The big American marketing phenomenon of Black Friday is oozing over our border into our own shops and stores. I had gave thought to checking out some Black Friday sales for tech stuff, specifically seeking out a hugely discounted big-ass external hard drive for network backups, but I'm going to let that pass today. I honestly don't think it will be worth the trouble. This wretched weather may actually be useful in dissuading me from impulse buying any other tech stuff out of this burgeoning madness to cure boredom, like an Xbox One console, or a super-mega home theatre system that I can't really afford. I'm hoping that the sale will extend beyond door-crasher specials for today, and will be available throughout the weekend as things simmer down. As much as I am getting sick of being stranded in here, I just have to turn my head 90 degrees to look outside through my living room window, and turn back again to read, binge-watch TV, and surf the net, and be thankful again that I don't have anything so pressing happening to make me be out there on a day like today, and to learn to be content with what I have.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Saturday, November 22, 2014
PE Status: One Week Post-Hospital
It has been a week and a day since I came back home from the hospital. Recovery is happening, but very slowly. I've been spending the majority of that time being cooped up and shut in at home like some sort of fart in a jar; lingering around here and feeling like my wits are getting dulled by the staleness of the slow time and my lack of vigour. For the first couple days, I didn't have much of an appetite. Cooking and eating even felt too strenuous. Throughout the past week, the amount of energy/stamina that I seemed to have had for my most active periods during each given day varied between about one sixth and one quarter of that of my regular normal state of health when I compare and assess. The margin line of my daily activity where I start crossing into that red zone and begin to feel the effects of overexertion to my heart and lungs seems to shift each day, and happens so unpredictably: better one day, and then worse the next. The only remedy now is to move slower and take frequent pauses and breaks. Consequently, it takes about twice as long to do even lighter chores and errands that involve walking, repetitive motion, and carrying and moving stuff. My eyes are becoming really fatigued from all the extra reading and staring at screens. This is all getting boring. Ella, as fun as she is, doesn't contribute much to the art of conversation.
I'm trying not to weaken more and stagnate. I give myself some chore or reasonable goal to do each day with some form of progressive intensity. As tempting as it is to save energy and use extra money on processed/pre-packaged snacks and meals, or getting food delivered, I've been committing myself to cook my own meals mostly from scratch. I push myself to get off my butt and get more active with some walking and limb movement exercises. At Day Four after returning home, I began to walk the dog outside and around the half the block by myself; still some light-headedness, speedy heart, and laboured breathing, but nothing too severe. I welcome these chances to get the fresh air, but I still have to inform people when I'm heading out, and I can't yet go as far as my normal usual routes. I'm trying to expand my range though; I just hate how gradual the process has to be. Yesterday was really tiring after running around, because I felt pressured and relegated to do as much as I could to resupply, and get at least some essential tasks done that I needed my car for before the forecasted freezing rain and snow hit us later.
It's bothersome that I have to be all of a sudden so mindful about simple stupid things that I never had to take account of before. For instance, the weather is doling out a spell of freezing rain now, later to be blanketed by snow, which I normally didn't have much concern for. However, now I have to walk outside with more prudence. With me being on anticoagulants, any possible simple slips and falls on ice that I would have just simply shook off before are made more dangerous and potentially life-threatening due to the greatly increased risk of internal bleeding from such impacts. Now that I've cleared aside all the tasks that I needed to do with what little energy had, I'm now going to start using the treadmill downstairs in the rec room to have some means of measuring my progress and temper myself up. It's a handy option to have when the ice on the streets outside gets too treacherous. Not that I have the inclination or energy for it, but contact sports are a definite no-no. I never did bruise very easily before, but now with me being on Warfarin the least little hard bump/pinching pressure make me bruise like an overripe peach. The area surrounding my stomach around the injection spots where I was giving myself Tinzaparin looks like some weird black/purple/brown Rorschach ink blot. I'm glad, at least for now, that the last of the injections was yesterday.
I'll hopefully know more about how I am to proceed onward from here after I see the doctor next Monday.
Surprisingly, there is not much out there on the Internet regarding the aftercare and recovery for survivors of pulmonary embolisms; which is actually fine because I'm suffering from too much information overload already as it is. The best website I think I found so far is THE CLOT SPOT (www.clotspot.com), although I wish I could glean something more definitive from it pertaining to my specific case.
I'm trying not to weaken more and stagnate. I give myself some chore or reasonable goal to do each day with some form of progressive intensity. As tempting as it is to save energy and use extra money on processed/pre-packaged snacks and meals, or getting food delivered, I've been committing myself to cook my own meals mostly from scratch. I push myself to get off my butt and get more active with some walking and limb movement exercises. At Day Four after returning home, I began to walk the dog outside and around the half the block by myself; still some light-headedness, speedy heart, and laboured breathing, but nothing too severe. I welcome these chances to get the fresh air, but I still have to inform people when I'm heading out, and I can't yet go as far as my normal usual routes. I'm trying to expand my range though; I just hate how gradual the process has to be. Yesterday was really tiring after running around, because I felt pressured and relegated to do as much as I could to resupply, and get at least some essential tasks done that I needed my car for before the forecasted freezing rain and snow hit us later.
It's bothersome that I have to be all of a sudden so mindful about simple stupid things that I never had to take account of before. For instance, the weather is doling out a spell of freezing rain now, later to be blanketed by snow, which I normally didn't have much concern for. However, now I have to walk outside with more prudence. With me being on anticoagulants, any possible simple slips and falls on ice that I would have just simply shook off before are made more dangerous and potentially life-threatening due to the greatly increased risk of internal bleeding from such impacts. Now that I've cleared aside all the tasks that I needed to do with what little energy had, I'm now going to start using the treadmill downstairs in the rec room to have some means of measuring my progress and temper myself up. It's a handy option to have when the ice on the streets outside gets too treacherous. Not that I have the inclination or energy for it, but contact sports are a definite no-no. I never did bruise very easily before, but now with me being on Warfarin the least little hard bump/pinching pressure make me bruise like an overripe peach. The area surrounding my stomach around the injection spots where I was giving myself Tinzaparin looks like some weird black/purple/brown Rorschach ink blot. I'm glad, at least for now, that the last of the injections was yesterday.
I'll hopefully know more about how I am to proceed onward from here after I see the doctor next Monday.
Surprisingly, there is not much out there on the Internet regarding the aftercare and recovery for survivors of pulmonary embolisms; which is actually fine because I'm suffering from too much information overload already as it is. The best website I think I found so far is THE CLOT SPOT (www.clotspot.com), although I wish I could glean something more definitive from it pertaining to my specific case.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Pacing, But Doing It Very Slowly
It has been an especially harrowing and significant week for me. I got to learn the hard way that I'm not Superman. Some of my readers and familiars may already know about what happened to me. This entry is for those who didn't, or were left behind in the dust as to the state of my condition throughout the chaos. I'm trying not to bog you down with too many details, but writing this out thoroughly just once spares me from having to explain it numerous times verbally on a person to person level and repeating the same conversations, which I have been finding very physically exhausting to do right now. It's the long-winded explanation that I literally don't have the wind for.
For the last couple of weeks or so, I was beginning to notice a gradual and progressive impairment to my breathing, and was getting interrupted sleep; sometimes drenched with intense night sweats. I started to notice things, like for instance, that while I was cycling to work, it felt like I was dragging an anchor behind me: using three times as much energy, yet going two times slower. I dismissed it as perhaps a cold coming on, yet I wasn't coughing or sneezing; just panting and wheezing. My energy seemed to decline dramatically and fizzle out earlier and earlier each day throughout the course of a week. When this past Monday came around, my breathing seemed even more stifled, my heart was pounding uncomfortably and uncontrollably, and the strange pressure I was feeling in my chest seemed to intensify exponentially after just a short stint of walking the dog, and a climb up the flight of stairs to my home.
It was a strange and unique form of pressure in my chest that registered in my mind, but not anything that I would have immediately identified or compared with in my own personal mental inventory of sensations of what I already knew of as "pain". Because it was more like simple discomfort and less like "pain" to me, I dissuaded myself from seeing a doctor earlier on, thinking that I would probably just be turned away, and then have "paranoid hypochondriac" stamped into my medical file.* After all, I reasoned, I just had a physical six weeks earlier and was given a reasonably clean bill of health. This time though, the discomfort prevailed a little too long and was really strong in magnitude at that time. There was even more breathing impairment along with the beginning of shakiness and feeling like my legs were going to buckle out from under me. It was a definite sign that things were taking a turn for the worse. I was prompted then to follow up on my friend's advice to see my family doctor to at least get a referral to see an allergist, or a respiration specialist to see if I acquired something like asthma. I just learned recently through a first aid class about what the signs for a heart attack were, and I didn't sense any of what I thought were the supposed internal symptoms of one. What I experienced accorded more with what I learned about as the symptoms associated with asthma. I drove nine kilometres to my doctor's clinic. It was a foolish thing to do in retrospect, because I could have passed out at any moment. I staggered from the parking lot, through their front door, to the reception. I was breathing as fully and deeply as I could, feeling my lungs fill to full capacity, and yet I felt like I was totally suffocating. I saw my doctor, who then rigged me up to an electrocardiogram to read my heart rhythms. Then, before I knew it, an ambulance was being dispatched for me to take me to a hospital emergency ward.
After several hours of waiting for a CT scan, I used much of that time watching my heartrate readout on the monitor being unable to sink below 110 beats per minute, despite the fact that I was lying down still and immobile. Any movement I made caused it to spike even higher yet. It lowered once they hooked up a blood-thinner IV and oxygen line on me. I finally received my CT scan results, and the good news was that they concluded that I did not actually have a heart attack (although I came close to it). The bad news however was that they discovered that I had pulmonary embolisms in, not just one, but both of my lungs. They can be as deadly as a heart attack if they aren't caught in time and treated. I suppose I managed to get some sense to get to the doctor just in the nick of time. I am lucky that my heart has had a bit of seasoning and conditioning through my running days, or else I really think that if it was just even a little bit weaker and unable to handle all this extra stress and punishment, I'm sure that I would have died that day.
It's fairly straight forward to understand what pulmonary embolisms are and what they can do. I'm not wasting time and energy to explain any further details about it. Use a search engine if you are curious and want to know about such things; you'll get a better explanation. What I don't understand yet however is the how and why of my particular case. I'm still struggling to process all of this onslaught of information now nearly a week after all this happened. The medical team working with me is just as mystified as I am as to how a person with my particular health and history could even ever have acquired such a condition in the first place. It would be something in which the people who I serve would be statistically far more likely to get rather than myself. I'm still slotted for a series of additional tests on an outpatient basis to figure out what's going on, and thus I have nothing more to say about my progress: except that for now I've been deemed well enough to be home, and recovery is going too slow far my liking. I'm pacing around indoors now, albeit very slowly, as my only exercise to promote better circulation in my limbs and body to prevent blood from pooling and creating more clots, even though the doctors currently seem to think that this wasn't a factor for me.
The most unnerving things for me about all of this are as follows:
Today, my mission and ambition is to start walking the dog again for one time outside today. I have been given instructions by my medical team to limit my range within my surrounding block. It's sort of a place where I'm picking up from last Monday to work towards some normalcy. We'll see how life goes on from there.
*- A doctor, in my mind, is someone I see once or twice every year for a physical for taking preventative measures, or else for any other time when I feel real "pain" . . . that's it. As nice a guy as he is to see and chat with, I don't make it a habit to run to my clinic every time I feel "discomfort", or else I'd be there once or twice every bloody week.
For the last couple of weeks or so, I was beginning to notice a gradual and progressive impairment to my breathing, and was getting interrupted sleep; sometimes drenched with intense night sweats. I started to notice things, like for instance, that while I was cycling to work, it felt like I was dragging an anchor behind me: using three times as much energy, yet going two times slower. I dismissed it as perhaps a cold coming on, yet I wasn't coughing or sneezing; just panting and wheezing. My energy seemed to decline dramatically and fizzle out earlier and earlier each day throughout the course of a week. When this past Monday came around, my breathing seemed even more stifled, my heart was pounding uncomfortably and uncontrollably, and the strange pressure I was feeling in my chest seemed to intensify exponentially after just a short stint of walking the dog, and a climb up the flight of stairs to my home.
It was a strange and unique form of pressure in my chest that registered in my mind, but not anything that I would have immediately identified or compared with in my own personal mental inventory of sensations of what I already knew of as "pain". Because it was more like simple discomfort and less like "pain" to me, I dissuaded myself from seeing a doctor earlier on, thinking that I would probably just be turned away, and then have "paranoid hypochondriac" stamped into my medical file.* After all, I reasoned, I just had a physical six weeks earlier and was given a reasonably clean bill of health. This time though, the discomfort prevailed a little too long and was really strong in magnitude at that time. There was even more breathing impairment along with the beginning of shakiness and feeling like my legs were going to buckle out from under me. It was a definite sign that things were taking a turn for the worse. I was prompted then to follow up on my friend's advice to see my family doctor to at least get a referral to see an allergist, or a respiration specialist to see if I acquired something like asthma. I just learned recently through a first aid class about what the signs for a heart attack were, and I didn't sense any of what I thought were the supposed internal symptoms of one. What I experienced accorded more with what I learned about as the symptoms associated with asthma. I drove nine kilometres to my doctor's clinic. It was a foolish thing to do in retrospect, because I could have passed out at any moment. I staggered from the parking lot, through their front door, to the reception. I was breathing as fully and deeply as I could, feeling my lungs fill to full capacity, and yet I felt like I was totally suffocating. I saw my doctor, who then rigged me up to an electrocardiogram to read my heart rhythms. Then, before I knew it, an ambulance was being dispatched for me to take me to a hospital emergency ward.
After several hours of waiting for a CT scan, I used much of that time watching my heartrate readout on the monitor being unable to sink below 110 beats per minute, despite the fact that I was lying down still and immobile. Any movement I made caused it to spike even higher yet. It lowered once they hooked up a blood-thinner IV and oxygen line on me. I finally received my CT scan results, and the good news was that they concluded that I did not actually have a heart attack (although I came close to it). The bad news however was that they discovered that I had pulmonary embolisms in, not just one, but both of my lungs. They can be as deadly as a heart attack if they aren't caught in time and treated. I suppose I managed to get some sense to get to the doctor just in the nick of time. I am lucky that my heart has had a bit of seasoning and conditioning through my running days, or else I really think that if it was just even a little bit weaker and unable to handle all this extra stress and punishment, I'm sure that I would have died that day.
It's fairly straight forward to understand what pulmonary embolisms are and what they can do. I'm not wasting time and energy to explain any further details about it. Use a search engine if you are curious and want to know about such things; you'll get a better explanation. What I don't understand yet however is the how and why of my particular case. I'm still struggling to process all of this onslaught of information now nearly a week after all this happened. The medical team working with me is just as mystified as I am as to how a person with my particular health and history could even ever have acquired such a condition in the first place. It would be something in which the people who I serve would be statistically far more likely to get rather than myself. I'm still slotted for a series of additional tests on an outpatient basis to figure out what's going on, and thus I have nothing more to say about my progress: except that for now I've been deemed well enough to be home, and recovery is going too slow far my liking. I'm pacing around indoors now, albeit very slowly, as my only exercise to promote better circulation in my limbs and body to prevent blood from pooling and creating more clots, even though the doctors currently seem to think that this wasn't a factor for me.
The most unnerving things for me about all of this are as follows:
- Even though I'm set on taking the right path in treatment for them and trying to not let them grow more, the clots still have a potential to shift, dislodge, and migrate as they began to shrink and loosen up. They then may potentially move to block vessels that feed blood in the lung tissue itself, causing pulmonary infarction and subsequent necrosis (death of tissues) in the lung, or else cause blockage and damage to other more vital bodily organs. It comes to my realization that it's like I've had a time bomb wired into my chest, and the only means I have to defuse it are anticoagulant medications, extra vigilance, and having a constantly charged cell phone nearby for a 911 call. I have no idea yet as to how long that it will take to clear this up, if it is clearing that is. It angers and disappoints me somewhat that I have been proactive in trying to stay healthy, and this still ends up being the result of it.
- The extreme limitations put on the amount of physical activity I can do within a day. My life has been turned upside down. Simply taking a small bag of garbage out thoroughly exhausted me yesterday. I caught myself on a couple more times being too light-headed after doing what seemed to be very little, and had to sit down immediately before I got so dizzy and could have passed out. It's frustrating to have all this time off, yet so little energy and ability to make what I would call good use of it. I'm still overwhelmed with uncertainty as to what this will mean for me in terms of future travel, energy, and time needed to deal with this problem alone. I'm also bothered by what this will mean for me in terms of possible future loss of work and income.
- A new routine of having to be dependent on medication. It's not just some simple pills either, but stuff that needs constant dosage correction and regular sessions of blood work to do it, and using other junk that I have to give myself through daily injections.
- What bothers me most now is the loss of some of my independence. Perhaps one reason that I'm not a good candidate for marriage, co-habiting with someone, or having a lasting romantic relationship is because I don't seem to respond or react well to being pampered, coddled, or asking and getting help for stuff that I should damn well know how to do myself. I really don't have the right words to describe the reasons, it's complicated. I'm just not used to asking for favours from anyone. Now, I'm put in a spot where I'm left to impose upon and trouble people to do chores with heavy lifting/exertion, or other errands for me. Worse yet is getting people involved in fixing up my stupid mistakes I have made and should be responsible for, like fetching a pair of my glasses for me that I had forgotten back at the hospital. I'm finding this role reversal of going from a helper to helpee a very difficult one to adjust to.
Today, my mission and ambition is to start walking the dog again for one time outside today. I have been given instructions by my medical team to limit my range within my surrounding block. It's sort of a place where I'm picking up from last Monday to work towards some normalcy. We'll see how life goes on from there.
*- A doctor, in my mind, is someone I see once or twice every year for a physical for taking preventative measures, or else for any other time when I feel real "pain" . . . that's it. As nice a guy as he is to see and chat with, I don't make it a habit to run to my clinic every time I feel "discomfort", or else I'd be there once or twice every bloody week.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Mindful Consumption: Patronage and Support to Our Public Liquor Stores
Another conference was attended, giving me a lot more to dwell on with the current political climate in this province and reviewing the insidious changes to the Saskatchewan Employment Act, and how it ultimately affects us as not just unionized employees, but all of us as workers in general. I thought I'd better start taking a firmer stand on things; to be a more conscientious opponent against all the bad things that this government is doing to strip away our crown corporations and the privatizing of other public institutions. We ended the first evening of it having a bit of a social mixer and being well entertained with a hypnotist act. On the closing of day two, a note of gratitude came to our entire group from the young lad who was our bartender the night before. He said that ever since he worked at the hotel where our conference was, we were the people who he had so far made the most tips from; this is news coming from a guy who on numerous times served that same room full of businessmen and corporate big shots who probably drank more and had a lot more money than us to spread around for gratuities, but their habit of greed prevented them from doing so. That fact gave me lots of faith that we as unionized employees are really innately out there looking out for our fellow labourers, affiliated or not. The subjects of liquor, corporate business greed and hypnosis set my mind to write about this so called trial of privatized liquor stores in the province, and the propaganda that the Wall government is trying to use to sell us on this nonsense. Given what I said in my second sentence, one thing of meaningful action I vow to do, and we all should do as well, is this:
Stop buying from the new privatized liquor stores in this province. Why?
They take profits and revenue away from being used for public services and works in the province. With that money in pure profit diverted instead to private corporations, the government then becomes further relegated to reclaim those losses through more taxation elsewhere, or else slashing funding to other aid programs and public services and amenities. The yield from the profits going to the government coffers from just Saskatoon alone is huge: one million a month from just one of the larger ones alone, according to one of the brothers from SGEU. I dread to think about how much of a loss that would be if all of a sudden every liquor store in this province became privatized.
The employees of the private stores are paid less than the unionized workers at the public liquor stores for the same labour, and I will not support an entity that is doing its part to drive a bigger wedge between the rich and the poor, and taking away from its workers the chance of having a fair living wage, despite the fact that I'd be paying about the same price (or perhaps even more in cases) for the same product at private store. If you do manage to find a cheaper price for the same product at the private store, the average overall difference is probably amounts to within the range of a dollar. However, the difference between the hourly wage non-unionized and the unionized employee is usually greater than a dollar. Why can't they then just be paid the same higher wage if the workload and product prices have little to no significant difference? There are discounts in the public liquor stores too, but just because they aren't advertised more publically in a flyer, as with the case of the private store, we are given the illusion and misconception that there aren't any discounts at all in the public liquor store. I find it to be a strange irony that the private stores can advertise alcohol "publically" while the public stores do not.
You may, for whatever reason, truly hate your current government; and may think that by not buying from the public liquor store it will be your way of "sticking it to the man!" , but think of this repercussion. The reality is that when you take that booze money from the government and instead give it as a profit to a singular (family-owned as is the case with Sobeys here) multi-billion dollar corporation, that buys and lobbies governments on their agendas without our say so, you have basically started a trend of selling off whatever personal political power that you have left as a citizen and a consumer, to a corporation who will give you sweet-bugger-all as a result of their profits, unless you are a share-holder and relying on the crap shoot that is the stock market for a dividend return from them. When all is said and done, the ultimate thing that all governments respect is a means of filling their coffers. The more means of power that a mass of citizens has to pay its government directly, the greater the chance that same government might actually listen to and think more about those masses of people rather than listening the whims of a corporation that has become too large with money: to the point where their money is greater than that of what the rest of the masses have combined.
If there is little to no difference in savings in cost for product, what about the factors of transportation: vehicle usage, fuel, and time? On a personal level, the public liquor store I use is close enough to cycle or walk to; it's convenient, more economical, and more environmentally responsible. The cost of fuel I'd be using to drive to either private liquor store from my place on either end of this town would burn up whatever savings (if any) I would have gained from the booze I bought there. In a practical sense, it's totally pointless for me to buy from the private stores here. As it is now, in Saskatoon, the two private stores are logistically located in some very out of the way spots for the majority of the population of the city, while the public stores are distributed more closely amid the majority of the residential neighbourhoods. You certainly wouldn't be buying the privately sold liquor for the fuel economy (or to save time) in Saskatoon unless you maybe lived in the far West End or in Stonebridge. I don't even have to draw out the Hamiltonian circuits or Eularian graphs to prove it. As someone who grew up rurally, it drives me crazy when people don't more accurately account and factor in for the actual fuel and time costs in the overall "savings" when getting their purchases.
I'm a frugal person, but not to the point where my saving of a few nickels and dimes supports depriving another local worker a chance for a few more dollars and protected rights and benefits if s/he were union affiliated, and only serves to take away revenues that help my community and province, and gives more power and leverage for corporations to exploit people and crawl into the hip pocket of government leaders. Buying from the public liquor stores is a direct investment into the province of Saskatchewan. Buying public ultimately serves the greater good.
Stop buying from the new privatized liquor stores in this province. Why?
They take profits and revenue away from being used for public services and works in the province. With that money in pure profit diverted instead to private corporations, the government then becomes further relegated to reclaim those losses through more taxation elsewhere, or else slashing funding to other aid programs and public services and amenities. The yield from the profits going to the government coffers from just Saskatoon alone is huge: one million a month from just one of the larger ones alone, according to one of the brothers from SGEU. I dread to think about how much of a loss that would be if all of a sudden every liquor store in this province became privatized.
The employees of the private stores are paid less than the unionized workers at the public liquor stores for the same labour, and I will not support an entity that is doing its part to drive a bigger wedge between the rich and the poor, and taking away from its workers the chance of having a fair living wage, despite the fact that I'd be paying about the same price (or perhaps even more in cases) for the same product at private store. If you do manage to find a cheaper price for the same product at the private store, the average overall difference is probably amounts to within the range of a dollar. However, the difference between the hourly wage non-unionized and the unionized employee is usually greater than a dollar. Why can't they then just be paid the same higher wage if the workload and product prices have little to no significant difference? There are discounts in the public liquor stores too, but just because they aren't advertised more publically in a flyer, as with the case of the private store, we are given the illusion and misconception that there aren't any discounts at all in the public liquor store. I find it to be a strange irony that the private stores can advertise alcohol "publically" while the public stores do not.
You may, for whatever reason, truly hate your current government; and may think that by not buying from the public liquor store it will be your way of "sticking it to the man!" , but think of this repercussion. The reality is that when you take that booze money from the government and instead give it as a profit to a singular (family-owned as is the case with Sobeys here) multi-billion dollar corporation, that buys and lobbies governments on their agendas without our say so, you have basically started a trend of selling off whatever personal political power that you have left as a citizen and a consumer, to a corporation who will give you sweet-bugger-all as a result of their profits, unless you are a share-holder and relying on the crap shoot that is the stock market for a dividend return from them. When all is said and done, the ultimate thing that all governments respect is a means of filling their coffers. The more means of power that a mass of citizens has to pay its government directly, the greater the chance that same government might actually listen to and think more about those masses of people rather than listening the whims of a corporation that has become too large with money: to the point where their money is greater than that of what the rest of the masses have combined.
If there is little to no difference in savings in cost for product, what about the factors of transportation: vehicle usage, fuel, and time? On a personal level, the public liquor store I use is close enough to cycle or walk to; it's convenient, more economical, and more environmentally responsible. The cost of fuel I'd be using to drive to either private liquor store from my place on either end of this town would burn up whatever savings (if any) I would have gained from the booze I bought there. In a practical sense, it's totally pointless for me to buy from the private stores here. As it is now, in Saskatoon, the two private stores are logistically located in some very out of the way spots for the majority of the population of the city, while the public stores are distributed more closely amid the majority of the residential neighbourhoods. You certainly wouldn't be buying the privately sold liquor for the fuel economy (or to save time) in Saskatoon unless you maybe lived in the far West End or in Stonebridge. I don't even have to draw out the Hamiltonian circuits or Eularian graphs to prove it. As someone who grew up rurally, it drives me crazy when people don't more accurately account and factor in for the actual fuel and time costs in the overall "savings" when getting their purchases.
I'm a frugal person, but not to the point where my saving of a few nickels and dimes supports depriving another local worker a chance for a few more dollars and protected rights and benefits if s/he were union affiliated, and only serves to take away revenues that help my community and province, and gives more power and leverage for corporations to exploit people and crawl into the hip pocket of government leaders. Buying from the public liquor stores is a direct investment into the province of Saskatchewan. Buying public ultimately serves the greater good.
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