Fast Fiction

For just a moment I’d like to pretend that I’m perfect. That will allow me to pick on others imperfections. (Well, maybe admitting that I’m not perfect allows me to pick on others, whatever it is, just pretend that I’ve admitted it or we’re suspending our disbelief for this exercise.)

I’m reading the NY Times. And there’s an article called When Alzheimer’s Steals the Mind, How Aggressively to Treat the Body? by Gina Kolata. I read it. There’s a little photo to the right and the caption says:

Randy Bryant and his mother, Hattie Kuykendall, who has advanced Alzheimer’s. He choose a feeding tube for her. “With a lot of people, it’s an easy decision to just let people go ahead and pass away,” he said. “When it’s your mother, you can’t do that.”

Is it me or is there an error there? Choose? Should it be chose? Or chooses? Something other than choose.

Then, later in the article:

Putting in a feeding tube can cost about two thousand dollars, said Dr. Douglas Nelson, a geriatrician in Hickory, whose practice mostly consists of nursing home patients. Inserting a tube requires a consultation with a speech therapist to verify that food is entering the lungs and an X-ray by a radiologist that requires swallowing barium. The procedure itself is done in a hospital, with an anesthesiologist, and a gastroenterologist or a general surgeon.

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure we don’t want food in the lungs, and further, we don’t want to have to hire someone to confirm that we’re putting food there. So either we want to verify that food ISN’T entering the lungs or we want to verify that food is entering the STOMACH.

This article came out Tuesday.

I’m not sure how this whole correction/retraction thing works, but I’m pretty sure that the web allows you to fix these things instantly. I can see that it might have been up there for a few hours, maybe a day wrong, but for two days?

Anyway, I know that I have typos up here on my blog all the time. But let’s face it, I’m not getting paid for this. I’m not the NEW YORK TIMES! I’m just fast fiction, which implies that I type fast and don’t look back.