It’s my final hour stuff in that bag and that is my right
It’s my final hour stuff in that bag and that is my right
I’m not taking it out for anybody
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Police in Bolivar Missouri say they got a 911 call that someone could smell marijuana so they mounted up and headed down to Citizens Memorial Hospital and got to work like police do everywhere putting their lives on the line to protect us. Inside they found Nolan Sousley a man with stage 4 pancreatic cancer whose family says has stopped his chemotherapy treatment because it’s no longer working so they rifled through his shit trying to find the weed that wasn’t there.
Sousley posted a video of the encounter to his Facebook group page Nolan’s Tribe of Warriors Against Cancer on Thursday where it’s been viewed over 500,000 times. You’ll want to go and watch it yourself now although you might wish you hadn’t afterwards or maybe it’s more accurate to say you will wish none of it had ever happened in the first place.
“I was set for the best night’s sleep last night,” Sousley explained in a video the next day.
“I had just gotten comfortable…then this all happened…This is the one night I was gonna get a good night’s sleep. You know why? Because I was in a place where if I closed my eyes and I went to sleep and I died while I was asleep they could maybe bring me back to life. That’s how I look at going to sleep every night. This might be my last night I close my eyes… That’s how I have to look at life right now.”
The ordeal itself was longer but the video from his hospital bed stretches on for six minutes that feel like an eternity as one cop ransacks Sousley’s belongings and another stands there looking embarrassed and fidgeting with his plastic gloves. There’s usually one cop that feels like shit about being involved in this sort of thing isn’t there not enough to not be there in the first place mind you but still.
“I just want to go home doc. I want her to take this off me and I want to go home,” Sousley says when his doctor arrives to see what the hell is going on.
“We got a call saying there’s marijuana in the room,” one of the cops says. “I smelled marijuana whenever I walked in the room,” someone else in the background says who looks like a hospital cop which is an even worse type of cop to be because they don’t even have power but they want it. Sousley says that’s not possible since he doesn’t even smoke anything.
“I don't ever use a ground-up plant. It's an oil I use in a capsule, there's no smoking it. I take it like a pill.”
His friend Tim Roberts who is there with him tells the cops the stuff he uses is necessary because he’s really fucking sick obviously.
“What he’s using manages his appetite, his weight loss, his nausea,” he says.
Medical marijuana was approved in a Missouri ballot measure this past November but won’t be available until at least early 2020 as Sousley mentions to the police. He doesn’t have time to wait he says. What would you do he asks the cops. I’m not going to play the what if game one cop says.
The cops tell him they’re not going to arrest him they’ll only give him a citation if they find marijuana. We’re just looking for marijuna the cop says. If you aint got anything to hide the cop says.
Sousley doesn’t take opioids he takes THC his friend says. It’s my right to live Sousley says and it all sucks the whole thing fucking sucks to look at or even think about but here’s the worst part in my opinion which is at the end of the video when the cops haven’t found anything and the doctor is trying to get the whole thing to come to a conclusion and the cops still won’t leave because there’s one bag left that the dying man won’t let them stick their snouts into.
“This is my bag of medication and I’m not letting them look through it,” Sousley says.
“It has my final day things in there,” he says and his voice is cracking now like he wants to cry. “And nobody’s gonna dig in it. It’s my stuff. It’s my final hour stuff in that bag and that is my right. And I’m not taking it out for anybody.”
The police told the Springfield News Leader that they never ended up finding any marijuana and the Bolivar Police Chief Mark Webb also said that they had to take their Facebook page down and that some of their employees were in tears due to the calls they were getting so that’s how the cops’ feelings ending up getting hurt.
The next day Sousley and his family and a friend whose nine year old son uses THC due to he has seizures every day of his life sat down for a video to talk about what happened and why medical marijuana is so important.
“I’m not gonna just sit here on this couch and die I’m gonna stand up for something,” Sousley says. “And by god this is what I think I was put here to do. To stand up for… Everybody always says I’d do anything, I’d do it too, anything to stay alive. Everybody says it but nobody does anything about it. Well, Nolan Sousley, 5 foot 7, 135 lbs., welterweight, I’m gonna do something about it. I’m going to say something. Why can’t I do what I want to do… It’s my choice,” he says.
“My big deal is I choose to live,” he says.
“Everything that I do in my life right now I look at it like I’m doing it for the last time,” he says.
Naturally thousands of people are leaving messages of support for Sousley and calling the cops mother fuckers and things of that nature but not everybody is outraged plenty of people are thinking right now that the cops are just doing their jobs like this one nice person who just messaged me on Twitter.
“It’s they’re job,” she wrote. “They got called to a scene buy someone else. The cops didn’t go looking for it they were called there. Stop being ignorant.
“People like you disgust me,” she wrote.
Here’s a question I have what’s a bigger nightmare when you’re in the hospital preparing to die the cops showing up or this extremely cursed doctor robot?
Earlier this week a seventy nine year old man in California named Ernest Quintana was informed that his lungs had gotten too bad and that efforts to extend his life were not going to help anymore so it was time to be put on comfort care but instead of a human being explaining it to him it was a doctor on a video screen wearing headphones like he was logging in to play Fortnite. The terrible robot wheeled into the room and told the man it was time to die.
“This was horrible for me and him,” his granddaughter Annalisia Wilharm posted to Facebook. Was it time to take her grandfather home she asked the doctor on the screen and the doctor said “I don’t know if he’s going to get home” and making matters worse is that the conversation was exceptionally hard to hear as she told the Mercury News because the noise of the machine that was helping him breathe was too loud so the doctor robot had to keep repeating himself. You’re going to die. What. I said you’re going to die. Sorry what. Not in so many words exactly but like that.
“When that robot said that to him, he looked over at me and said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to go quickly,’ and put his head down,” recalled Wilharm, 33. “It was pitiful.”
Her mother, Cathie Quintana, said the hospital didn’t inform other family members about the grim prognosis, which they had to learn through her daughter.
“It was handled with no compassion at all by this robot, there was no bedside manner, no nothing,” Cathie Quintana said. “It needed to be a person, for God’s sake. My mom and myself should have been there. We want to never have this happen to anyone again.”
“This is a highly unusual circumstance,” Michelle Gaskill-Hames the senior vice president and area manager for Kaiser Permanente Greater Southern Alameda County told the Mercury News. “We regret falling short in meeting the patient’s and family’s expectations in this situation and we will use this as an opportunity to review how to improve patient experience with tele-video capabilities.”
She also pointed out it’s not a robot so don’t call it a robot although that’s how InTouch Health the company who makes it refers to it. Look at this absolute fucking horror nightmare fuel. Please proceed to the self checkout aisle to be informed about how much longer you have to live citizen.
Naturally like in the other story people are upset about this but not everybody is not this one guy at the top of the comments.
“Once the socialists take over and give everyone ‘free’ health care even talking to a robot doctor, let alone a real one, will probably be a luxury,” a person named Snowbird wrote and I wonder what it’s like to be a person like that who is constantly paranoid about an always soon to be arriving hypothetical dystopia because what do they think the world we have now actually is?
The reason that robot exists is the same reason robots and computerized customer services exist anywhere and that is because someone decided it would save them money in the long run. Whether it’s ringing in a roll of toilet paper at CVS or building a car or explaining that you are about to die it’s just cheaper to not have an actual person there doing it.
The people who profit off of this are ones like the disgusting health care villains I wrote about in my column this week in the Boston Globe. Please go read it there so they keep me around and don’t fire me for my tweets which if we’re being honest is probably going to happen in a few weeks anyway. It’s about the Hell World reality where it’s taken as a given that the responsibility to fundraise for our own medical care is on us now and the people who get rich off of that system. Here’s a bit of it below concerning a man named Shane Boyle who died $50 short of his GoFundMe to cover the price of his insulin.
I don’t know if you feel any portion of blame for Boyle’s death, but you should, much like I do. Because every day that goes by without the passage of universal health care for every American is an abrogation of duty and an absolute failure of responsibility. You and I may not bear as much blame as drug makers like Eli Lilly (who announced just this week that they will finally be offering a generic version of insulin for a 50 percent discount after sustained criticism from patients and lawmakers alike for years), but still, at least some of that is on you and me and the representatives we elected.
(Incidentally, diabetes meds have been around since the 1920s, but the price of insulin has gone from $20 per vial in 1996 to around $275 today. I’m not sure how much money Boyle made but David Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly makes about $16 million a year, which is very nice for him.)
Not to single out Mr. Ricks. He’s hardly alone among the gilded class of health care and medical execs gorging at the trough of misery and pain like ravenous vampire hogs. Here’s another one that just came across my feed at random, a guy named Daniel Loepp who you’ve never heard of and is the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. He must be very good at his job since he made $19.2 million in 2018, up from from $13.42 million in 2017, which, for rough comparison, is more than, say, Kyrie Irving makes a year. Then again people like Loepp are a bit better on the defensive end, swatting away requests for coverage left and right. Elsewhere in the upper echelons of health care. By comparison, Michael Neidorff, CEO of insurance company Centene, made $25.26 million in 2017, according to Crain’s Detroit. Joseph Zubretsky of Molina Healthcare made $19.74 million. David Cordani of Cigna made $17.55 million. Bruce Broussard of Humana made $14.87 million.
Shane Patrick Boyle of Houston didn’t get the final $50 he needed to live, but the memorial page set up for him and his mother after their deaths ended up raising $5,150 of the $5,000 goal, which is great news until you remember the fact that they died.
What would you do to save your own life? How much money would you raise? Would you use marijuana to manage your pain and risk arrest? Would you smash the fucking face in of a robot doctor that lurched into your room to tell you it was over? Hopefully you never have to find out but if we’re being honest you will probably get your answer by the time this is all over.