Unintended Consequences

It is 3:30 AM and I am sitting here with Dad. I hope he is able to go back to sleep. He is as comfortable as I can make him and he even took a little water by straw. But his eyes are open still so I thought I would just sit here for a while and maybe he can sleep again. No sign of that happening so far. But at least maybe he can stay in bed.

About 30 minutes ago I heard him. I was asleep but something roused me. I met him at his door. Earlier, yesterday about 10 PM, he fell at this doorway to his room. His coordination is seriously compromised. He was getting up and walking out into the hallway and then returning to his bed and then repeating. He's been doing this over and over.

The Temazepam was prescribed to try and help this. It worked really well. But last Wednesday afternoon dad began to have these really wild jerky movements with his hands and feet. Wednesday night was the last Temazepam I gave because I didn't need any Thursday and by Friday I suspected it as a cause of the jerking.

Sunday the jerking had disappeared entirely. So that further makes me believe the jerking was a side affect.

I've noticed how often we employ solutions for certain problems and then find, sometimes years later, that our solution actually caused some other problem we neither intended nor anticipated.

We do it in all areas of life.

For instance in an effort to conserve oil there's been this big push to use ethanol in our vehicles. But increasing ethanol demand has caused an increase in the price of corn which has caused producers to switch from other products to raising corn. And so there's been a ripple across a broad spectrum of other products.

I see a lot more hybrid vehicles on the road now. So I wondered the other day what will happen 7.5 years from now when all those batteries begin needing replacement. I wondered if that would prove to be some new problem.

There's been a lot of talk about global warming lately and the part that human caused emissions play in it. It is interesting to me because much of the scientific community that studies such things believe we are in between ice ages in any event. And that's whether humans were here or not.

There's a better than even chance that all of them are wrong but it doesn't stop us from talking about tings as though we were eyewitnesses, either long ago or far into the future.

It is pretty predictable that we will enact legislation of some kind to try to limit human caused emissions. It is just as predictable that whatever it is we do will cause other problems about which we are now blissfully ignorant.

I was reading the other day an article were someone was lambasting evangelical Christians for holding the pessimistic view that the events described in the Book of The Revelation of the Bible were literally going to happen. I wondered if that person had ever watched The History Channel.

At least The Revelation ends with a new heaven and a new earth and a thousand years of peaceful life on Earth preceding it. The History Channel just has everything ending. Depending upon the program the means varies from gigantic volcanic eruptions, extraterrestrial collisions, earthquakes and tsunamis, mountains of moving ice, or simply the eventual return of all matter in the universe to that infinitesimally small whatever it was that existed before the big bang.

I see I've been typing an hour or so now. I'm tired. Dad's still awake.