Non-Brevity

If my level of interest was high enough, I might explore the reasons why so many pharmaceuticals are called by so many names. But I would say my level of interest ranges between moderate and moderately high, with occasional surges to slightly-above-normal. As far as I remember, my curiosity about drug names has never reached the point of obsession, but certain circumstances tend to cause my interest to spike. For example, I received two injections on Wednesday;  my doctor called one of them Aranesp (a brand name) but a conversation between two nurses referred to it as darbepoetin alpha. The other injection was denosumab, but other names (brand, I assume) are applied to it: Bomyntra, Osenvelt, Wyost, Xgeva. It’s not just in doctors’ offices that multiple names are used for the same products. Pharmacists, too, often choose to use a brand name instead of a generic name. When a nurse reviews with my the medications I am taking, the list read to me often includes a name I do not recall; generally, it is either a generic name for a product I have learned to call by a brand name or it is a brand name for a generic product. This confusion did not cause me much consternation until the number of prescribed medications I was taking grew to be so large. I can live with it. But sometimes I need something to blame for my sour mood; medico-linguistics can fill the bill.

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Twenty years have passed since Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a “weakened” Category 3 hurricane. Before slamming into the Gulf coast, the storm had reached Category 5, with sustained winds of at least 175 miles per hour. Though the storm’s ferocious winds did enormous damage, it was the failure of the levees surrounding the city to keep the storm surge at bay that did the most damage (estimated at $125 billion) and led to the greatest loss of life (1392 fatalities). I thought at the time that many of the complaints about the inadequacy of the federal response to the catastrophe were legitimate. I fear that today, if we were we faced with a similarly catastrophic storm, our response would be dramatically worse. The current administration’s dissatisfaction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has led it, essentially, to dismantle the agency and rethink standard responses to such powerful events. In my view, that approach is akin to shutting the doors of the only hospital serving a region (for “underperformance”)…and only THEN beginning to create a ten-year plan to determine what should be done to replace it. Perhaps preppers are considerably more pessimistic than am I—or they are omniscient—or they are both.

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Graham Davis was in the habit of leaving handwritten notes in personnel files of his staff. In most instances, the notes did not get any attention; their contents were either informational and innocuous or complimentary. One handwritten note, though, triggered an inquiry into the ways in which he interacted with employees. The investigation, by the executive committee, eventually led to Davis’ dismissal from the firm. His dismissal, in turn, prompted him to begin retaliatory legal proceedings. The legal battle between Davis and his former employer was long and brutal. The original handwritten note that started the ugly process was entered into the court records, which found their way into the local newspaper and, finally, into the national professional press. That handwritten note was written in response to a prompt on an evaluation form:

"In as few words as possible, describe the employee's work style and a characteristic that contributes to that style."

Davis’ response :

"Slow and stupid."

Leonard Tremble, who was the subject of Davis’ note, was the managing partner’s nephew-in-law. Davis was the only partner who had objected to Tremble’s hiring as a paralegal. His objection was noted, but Davis made a point of saying his objection was not a strenuous one. He said he was certain he could overcome his objections. Only after both Davis and Tremble were found dead of asphyxiation—several weeks apart—did suspicions about the possible criminality of others in the firm begin to arise. The legal battle between Davis and the firm…specifically targeting the managing partner…was far from over when the two men died.

Circumstances sometimes conspire to diminish, or even erase, the importance of events. So it was with the unfinished legal battle. The managing partner’s ex-wife, Melinda Scott, was arrested and charged with smuggling several hundred pounds of fentanyl from Copenhagen, Denmark to Dallas, Texas. At roughly the same time, Tremble’s great-grandmother, Teresa Shunkenflutter, announced her unplanned and unexpected pregnancy…and that Graham Davis was the father. Finally, the judge in the case between Davis and the law firm/managing partner was captured on live television feeds as he emptied an AR-15 magazine into the Secretary of War and the Vice President of the U.S. Naturally, addressing the lurid situations involving Davis and Tremble and the law firm and its managing director lost urgency.