Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

Have you ever wondered why customer service is so rotten these days? I’ve been thinking about that since having my “annual” visit with a new doctor at a new clinic in my new city yesterday. Actually, only the doctor was new, as the clinic is part of the conglomerate that owns St. Luke’s Hospital, where I was a patient eight years ago, and my doctors were part of St. Luke’s Urology.  I’ve concluded that being a patient in the consolidating corporate world of medicine today does not make me a customer. They like to make it sound that way in the unending stream of commercials and other propaganda, but I end up feeling like a bolt in a bin in an autofactory, not the guy driving the new car. First, I need to write about the problem with medical records. Now that records can be sent electronically, not as a pile of paper or a fax, transferring records to a new doc should be a seamless customer (patient) service delight. Not so for me. The morning after my “annual” with a new doctor, I as...

Coming of age in Minnesota means learning local words and believing they're the only ones that exist. Only when thrust into other cultures did I realize how pervasive those beliefs are, for cryin’ out loud.  Some easy ones are hotdish instead of casserole. Calling pop 'soda.' A “cold one” meant a description of a January day here. In some places it means your favorite beer, as in, “Let’s grab a cold one.” In the South, the word "Coke" can refer to any carbonated soft drink. The Southerner who pointed out my lack of knowledge ordered a “Coke” and received a Dr Pepper. He corrected me when I pointed out what I thought was a mistake. Where he was from, it is routine to order a "Coke" and have the server ask, "What kind? Dr Pepper, Sprite, or Coca-Cola?" My fixation with different nouns for similar things gained steam when we became grandparents. In the lily-white suburb of Richfield where I started this life, everyone had a grandpa and a grandma, ...

Vaccines, Oval Office "Experts," and the Benefits of Getting Old The other day, I said to the Bohunk, “At least that’s one reason why it’s good to be old.” We had just watched a bit of a “press performance” from the White House featuring two noted medical experts named Trump and Kennedy.   We raised four kids after 1974, and each one received the MMR vaccine at some point, along with others that the good pediatricians at Oxboro Clinic in Bloomington recommended. Although I’ve always been skeptical, I had the utmost faith in those doctors and the overseers of the medical profession in state and federal government. A vaccine had never injured me and seems to have kept some nasty viruses at bay.  The MMR is also known as the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine. In 1963, the vaccine was approved for Measles. In 1967, another was approved for Mumps. In 1969, the Rubella vaccine was approved—three vaccines and three jabs to keep kids safe.  Then, in 1971, the drug giant Me...

Diversity Is Survival, Not Politics: Fragile Forests, Fragile Economies Writing for a general-interest publication like a community newspaper, one tends to think twice about how readers will react when you step into something political, which is much like stepping in doggy doo-doo. Will advertisers take umbrage if they are strongly offended by the ideas and pull their advertising? Will readers with opposite opinions get so angry they stop reading? Without apology, I’m going to jump into the DEI arguments. DEI is the three-letter acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. The dividing line on DEI between the political left and right in the United States is about as stark as a line can get in our hyper-politicized country.  Moving beyond simple-minded slanders, I would say that diversity is not just some fad cooked up by bleeding-heart liberals like me. Fact is, uniformity in religion and hiring, like uniformity in forests or croplands, creates a fragile system. Diversity...