Can You Help a Family Shattered by a Horrible Tragedy?

I got to write the Causes and Effect: My Year of Giving Daily blog for six days this month and donated to some wonderful causes each day. But there's a cause that, unfortunately, popped up after my Causes and Effect run was over that I need share:

The I-275 Wrong-Way Tragedy" GoFundMe campaign exists because of a horrific accident that occurred the morning of December 12th. A 59-year-old man was driving the wrong way on Interstate 275 in Canton, Michigan, that morning and slammed head-on into another car, killing Nicholas Pare, 33, and his fianceé, Sharon McIntyre, 32.

Police found an open bottle of vodka in the car that was going the wrong way and say that alcohol was possibly involved in the crash.

Nicholas Pare and Sharon McIntyre were innocent victims. So are the three children they leave behind, ages 7, 13, and 15.

Authorities are waiting for toxicology tests to come back before charging the wrong-way driver (who, of course, sustained non-life-threatening injuries). Right now, they won't say if the driver was drunk or not, but you don't have to be a genius to figure out that he probably was. An open container of alcohol in the car and driving the wrong way on a freeway at 10:40am on a Tuesday morning are pretty good pieces of evidence, if you ask me.

Drunk driving sucks. Consider these statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

• In 2015, 10,265 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (29%) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.
• Of the 1,132 traffic deaths among children ages 0 to 14 years in 2015, 209 (16%) involved an alcohol-impaired driver.
• In 2015, nearly 1.1 million drivers were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. That’s 1% of the 111 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among U.S. adults each year.

Those numbers sicken me, and until this country decides to do something drastic to combat our drunk driving problem, they will just get worse.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe it's mandatory ignition interlock devices on all cars, like I wrote about back in 2015. Or maybe it's a zero-tolerance policy for impaired driving. Or harsher sentences for first-time offenders. Or something no one else has even thought of yet. I just know that something has to be done. Human lives depend on it.

I grew up the son of an alcoholic father, which is one reason why the subject of drunk driving gets my blood boiling. As I wrote in a post about another tragedy back in 2009:

My father was an alcoholic who had more DUIs than I could even count. On more than one occasion, he hit parked cars and all I can remember is thanking God that the cars were parked and empty. As a kid, riding in the car with my dad while he was intoxicated was a regular occurrence. I will never forget how scared I was, wondering if I was going to make it home alive, but too terrified to speak up about it. 

Whenever I hear about an incident like the one that killed Nicholas Pare and Sharon McIntyre, I think about my dad. And I'm grateful that he never physically hurt anyone as a result of his drunk driving.

Today my family made a $20.00 donation to the GoFundMe campaign for Nicholas and Sharon's family. It will help them pay for two funerals and start a fund to take care of three kids who have had their lives completely shattered, just in time for Christmas. If you have any extra money at all this holiday season, please consider making a donation, too. It doesn't have to be a large donation. Just something. Anything at all. Believe me, every little bit will help immensely.

And, as a final reminder... If you drink, please don't even think about driving. Because so often it's other people who end up suffering the greatest pain.

Below is a direct link to the GoFundMe campaign. If you donate, feel free to let me know in the comments below. It will make my heart happy to know that I was able to round up an extra donation or two for a family going through hell this holiday season.

Rest in peace, Nicholas and Sharon.

Click here to donate: I-275 Wrong-Way Tragedy" GoFundMe campaign

This family has been torn apart and the kids need your help.

Can We Maybe Cool It with the RXs?

Lately it seems like the fun never stops around here. Yesterday I turned my family's world upside down (sort of) by accepting a new job that will eventually require us to relocate. Today I went to an oral surgeon for what I thought was going to be a consultation on having an aching wisdom tooth extracted. Except that a few minutes into the appointment, I was informed that they were actually pulling my tooth today.

Who knew?

Needless to say, I was completely unprepared. Thankfully, though, everything went off without a hitch. It's been a couple of hours since my tooth was yanked out, and my mouth is still pretty numb. The same goes for my my cheek, chin, tongue, and wallet (no dental insurance). When you throw in the gauze I'm biting down on, I kind of look and sound like the second coming of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Except I'm guessing he didn't drool like I have been.

I felt no pain whatsoever during the extraction. I guess the combination of three shots of novocaine and some nitrous oxide did exactly what it was supposed to do. (Whew!) Of course, the doctor told me I wouldn't be getting off totally pain-free, so he was sending me home with a couple of prescriptions for pain relievers. "They don't let us phone these prescriptions in anymore, so we'll give them to you now in case you need them."

When I got home, I took 800mg of Motrin, changed my gauze, and opened up the envelope the doctor had sent home with me.

What I found made me mad.

In addition to a sheet of post-op care instructions, some more gauze, and a prescription for amoxicillin, there were two other prescriptions: one for thirty Norco tablets and one for 20 Percocet tablets. In case you didn't know, Norco contains a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocodone (an opioid); and Percocet contains a combination of acetaminophen and oxycodone (a stronger opioid). The instructions told me to take the Norco first, and if that didn't help relieve the pain then switch to the Percocet.

I was kind of surprised to see that I had been prescribed a total of 50 opioid pain relievers for the extraction of one wisdom tooth. I understand that I might experience some pain in the next day or two (or three or four), but isn't 50 pills a bit much? And why not just prescribe one pain reliever, with the caveat that if it doesn't do the job, call our office and we'll discuss it? It seems to me that pills are being overprescribed in the interest of convenience. Doctors can't phone in prescriptions for narcotics anymore, so they give you prescriptions you may not need...just in case.

That's wack.

I plan on sticking to just Motrin if at all possible. (If you follow this blog, you may recall that my son did that a couple of years ago when he had two wisdom teeth pulled.) I figure there's no sense in going overboard if I don't have to.

I wish doctors shared the same philosophy.

Did you know?

• Health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012, enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills.
• More people died from drug overdoses in 2014 than in any year on record. The majority of drug overdose deaths (more than six out of ten) involve an opioid.
• Since 1999, the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioid pain relievers and heroin) nearly quadrupled. From 2000 to 2014 nearly half a million people died from drug overdoses.
• Since 1999, the amount of prescription opioids sold in the U.S. nearly quadrupled, yet there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report. Deaths from prescription opioids--drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone--have also quadrupled since 1999.
• 78 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose and overdoses from prescription opioid pain relievers are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths.
• The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but uses 80% of the global supply of opioid drugs.

(Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)