The Sentinel from Carlisle, Pennsylvania • 9

Friday, February 26, 1988, The Sentinel, Carlisle, Pa. 3 Whispered complaints won't improve service ELECT HGHMP I Local post offices have un- dergone some radical changes. In an effort to save money, most post offices across the country -have trimmed their hours. In Carlisle, for example, the hours used to be 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

are now 9 a.m. to 4: 30 p.m. An hour and a half seems like a trifle. But it's not. It means people who used to go to offices before or after work cannot.

It means long lines over the lunch hour when people are trying to get to postal windows. Officials say the new hours are working fine; they've heard few complaints. Yet, when a reporter visited the Carlisle branch after 8 a.m., he witnessed a steady stream of customers who felt thwarted in their attempts to conduct business. Some were angry. So, we have a situation where a vital service has been cut back and people are justifiably angry.

But post office boing kept in a fool's paradise. They've had few complaints; they're saving money; everything's hunky-dory. So, disgruntled post office customers have only themselves to blame. They're obviously grumbling to themselves and grumbling to their friends and neighbors. However, mumbled grumbles don't bring results; the postmistress has noway to hear them.

People should give her a chance by letting her know if they have a problem with the new hours. She's made efforts to improve service in the past. Perhaps something can be done now. But she can't do what customers want if customers don't tell her what they want. It may be nothing can be done at the local level.

If reasonable hours of operation cannot be provided, it may be time to raise postal rates. And, as this newspaper has said in the past, the place to start is with "junk mail." UOTES If I were a banana in Selinsgrove, I'd split. 1 The Sentinel "The day when freedoms and human rights could be slighted in the name of economic growth and national security has ended. The day when repressive force and torture in secret chambers were tolerated is over." Roh Tae-woo, after taking the oath as South Korea's sixth president. Carlisle, Pennsylvania Founded 1861 Daily 1881 WAyNE Powell Publisher SencJ Letters to ecHtor daytime telephone number, middle initial and address.

All letters received must be verified before they are printed. CaroI TaIIex Editor Jacques Carter Advertising Director The Sentinel values your opinions. They create a public forum within the community. So, contribute what you think about the issues. "As of this moment, all of the checks are stopped.

West Virginia Treasurer A. James Manchin, after the state Supreme Address comments to: Letters to the court ruled that the Legislature umrc ruiea mat me Legislature In sending comments, keep letters within a In sending comments, keep letters witnin a 400-word limit and sign them, include your rz Cj lTxJ 400-word limit and sign them. Include your Editor, P.O. Box 130, Carlisle, Pa. 17013.

unconstitutionally enacted a deficit budget. L-. Winter Olympic Games have been quite tedious Is it just me or are the Winter Olympics a got good news for you and bad news. You to suffer from overcommercialization it's sliding down a chute on the back of your dud' Admittedly, I've never been one of skated great but you lost. What's your the Winter Games.

Even in the old days the I I neck. It has all the disadvantages of being your big fans of the Winter Games. To me, reaction?" should win the Howard Cosell competitors were shameless about making I f- llu ll ll III shot out of a cannon backward, but none of sensitivity award. the charm or grace. watching someone slide down a patch of ice I themselves walking DiUDoaras tor proaucts they endorsed.

Now, it seems, the games ll'liTnTTTfi DonaIcI KauI Could it be that television is eating its own? The Winter Olympics used to be a modest little event for people who wore leather shorts and yodeled. But now it has become an enormous television extravaganza that encompasses the world. Even places without snow or ice send competitors to the Games. That means the opportunity to sell a lot of ads presents itself. Giving television a chance to sell ads is like bleeding in front of a Great White Shark.

They did suppress their feeding urge during the men's figure skating, allowing some 25 minutes to roll by without a commercial, but the incident only served to underline how seldom television permits the drama of a sport to play in its natural rhythm. It is a medium that has the unique ability to make everything into a lesser version of "Let's Make a Deal," which it seems to have done with the Winter Olympics. Of course, if any sporting event deserves at 90 mph compares uniavoraDiy wun waiting for a bus. Still, in other years there has been a certain entertainment value, a sense of excitement. Not this year.

For one thing, nobody American wins anything. Well, hardly anything. A couple of gold medals here, a silver there, a bronze, but it seems that every time they set someone up as a hero, he or she falls down. Or whenever a goal is scored, we're watching a commercial. Or we're listening to a dumb interview with a sex therapist.

They even managed to mess up the figure skating a little, mainly by letting Dick Buttons talk. If I wanted snide, mean-sprited commentary I'd have watched the Republican debates. They should give Buttons a hockey puck to chew on during competition. And I thought that announcer David Santee's trick of going up to Brian Orser, the Canadian figure skater, mo- ments after he'd come off the ice, shoving a microphone in his face and saying "I've Then there are the contestants' uniforms, which range from mere bad taste to bizarre. One of the nice things about skiing used to be that skiers looked so good in their gear.

It made you want to be like Jean-Claude Killy when you grew up. Now skiers look like sausages with leprosy; pink with blue swirls, diamond patterns rampant on a field of fuchsia and that's just the men. It's enough to make you long for the days of black-and-white television. I keep waiting for the Jamaican bobsled team to show up in Hawaiian shirts and sandals but, no, everybody wears those slick suits in which you have to be Jane Fonda to look good and which prove that few people look like Jane Fonda. I think what these Olympic Games are lacking most is a sense of humor, unless you count the guy who thought up the Dr.

Ruth sex-on-skis interview. Which I don't. are dominated by film companies, ski manufacturers and equipment firms. That seems tacky, somehow. Even without television, however, I would find the Games dull.

A few of the events are exciting, of course, but most are more in the category of tedious. For example: Compulsory figures The reason this part of the figure-skating competition is compulsory is that no one in their right mind would do it of his or her own free will. Skaters do slow, slow figure-8s, then the judges get down on their hands and knees to see how well it was done. More thrilling than this is cattle-judging at the Iowa State Fair. I think they should make the skaters do their figure-8s the hard way two 4s or forget about it.

Cross-country skiing I know it's a difficult sport and you have to be in great shape and all that, but I'd rather watch a mailman deliver catalogs than watch people ski across country. This is one of the Olympic events that make commercials look good. Biathlon This is the National Rifle Association version of cross-country skiing; boredom interspersed with moments of shooting. It would be improved if they allowed the contestants to shoot at each other, but they don't. Luge Which is what we ised to call kids named Luigi back in my neighborhood in Detroit.

It involves lying down flat and Can cards reap revenge? SpECTRUM Doctors have right to know CaroL TaIIey EIIen GoodrviAN I had an orange bank card; it wasn't particularly pretty as far as plastic cards go these days. But it did its apppointed job at the automated teller's window without fail for a couple of years. Then, one day, the card developed a crack the result of wear and tear from overuse. Still, it worked. The crack, however, deepened.

And I finally asked a teller what its chances of survival were. Could my Financial Transaction Corp. card plug along although disabled? The teller suggested the card could give up the ghost at anytime. So, a replacement was ordered. At first glance, what I have just written doesn't seem like a very weighty topic or a momentous moment to record.

But, take note: The very day after I ordered a new card, the tattered orange card refused to work. Injured feelings? Retribution? Nonsense, I knew this couldn't be. It was just coincidence. A couple of weeks passed before the replacement card arrived. When it did, I was delighted.

The bank had a new design; a nifty dark blue card with much more class and standing in the world of hard plastic ambassadors. But the third time out, the machine rejected it. I took the card into the bank. A teller came outside and tried; it didn't work. She took the card and sent it back.

And another couple of weeks passed before a replacement came. The very first time I tried to use this card, it was rejected. Contact with keys will demagnetize the card. But I don't keep my keys in the same compartment of my bag. Maybe there is something wrong with the programming of the account.

The bank checked that out too as everyone tried to come up with a logical reason. In the meantime, another card was ordered. The third time is supposed to be the charm. When this little blue dandy came, I put it in the protective folder and dashed to the bank. I pushed the card into the appropriate slot.

It stay inside, awaiting further orders. I ran into the bank yelling out the good news; the card worked. But the very next time I went to the automated teller, It didn't. warranty, only good for non-risky situations." But there are times when the benefit to an infected patient may not warrant the risk to a physician. Should a doctor have to operate on a broken ankle rather than set it in a asks the orthopedic surgeon.

Should you have to perform a bu-nionectomy rather than prescribe a therapeutic shoe? "If we lost a doctor for each AIDS patient," says internist Dr. Cooke, "society might decide this is not how we want to spend our doctors. But the risk is lower. At some point we accept the loss of doctors to take care of hundreds of thousands of sick." But at what point and for what goals? This horrific epidemic is still relatively young. Our statistics are raw.

We are just beginning to deal with the real medical and ethical dilemmas. If we are going to trust the health-care profession to treat the sick, part of that trust is to give them privileged information, the tools of their job. In an emergency, there is no time for an AIDS test. But when possible, a doctor should know whether a patient is infected. Some may abuse that information, some may indeed refuse care.

We'll have to depend on their professional ethics and pressure to minimize such breaches. We must also reframe the arguments about treatment. It can't be cast simply as the patient's right to all care versus the doctor's right to any refusal. We need to assess more fully the benefit to a patient against the risk to health-care workers. We are in this AIDS epidemic for the long SAN FRANCISCO These days, Dr.

Lorraine Day goes into her operating room in full protective gear. Two pairs of gloves, goggles, a face mask, double sleeves, double shoe covers, boots up to her knees. The chief of orthopedics at San Francisco General Hospital is trying to practice safe surgery. But she is scared anyway and not a little angry. "Yesterday, I did five operations," says Dr.

Day. "Thirty percent of my patients are at high risk for AIDS. One of my patients recently needed 250 units of blood. It was pouring into him and all over us. They tell us to be careful.

But as a surgeon you cut yourself many times. Would you tell a carpenter, don't cut yourself for the rest of your life?" How frightened is this experienced surgeon about getting AIDS from a patient? "Honestly?" she asks and answers, "I have to decide whether I want to continue in medicine." What angers Dr. Day and many of her quieter colleagues is that she has no right to know which of her patients carry the deadly virus. What bothers her further is that she has no right to refuse to operate, even minor elective surgery, on a patient with the virus. It is not surprising that these concerns like the virus itself have hit first and hardest in San Francisco.

But they are spreading as widely as the disease. Are doctors, nurses, expected to place themselves at risk every day without information? Are they legally or morally obligated to give AIDS patients the exact same treatment they would give others? So far, it is believed that only a dozen health workers including a technician here at San Francisco General have been Infected on the job. Statistically, Hepatitis which killed 100 health workers last year, seems a much greater risk. But risks are not spread equally through the medical population. Nor are the feelings of risk.

Dr. This process was repeated still another time. I recall emptying the clutter in my pocketbook onto the bank counter as patient bank personnel puzzled over what could be within to demagnetize the cards. Nothing surfaced. I did not order another card.

And I convinced myself it wasn't really such a big deal. The automatic teller, to me, was for "take-out" only. The lack of a card just meant taking out less on impulse. Much time has passed, and I inventively have found other ways to "take out" as much as when I had a bank card. But, sometimes, I have felt inferior to other people when they talk about their bank cards.

After all, four or five unanimated cards have rejected me as their user. Just yesterday, I rushed to the bank during banking hours for some money. When I came back to the office, I put my wallet on my desk. And Managing Editor Kurt Wanfried who had heard of the mystery of my bank card said: "What kind of a wallet is it? "Lizard." "Oh," he said, "have you heard how eelskin yes, it's eelskin. I did change wallets; my cousin bought it in Korea." All excited, I dialed the bank and said, "Valerie, eelskin demagnetizes bank cards." She seemed delighted once she figured out who she was talking to and about what.

But I've had all night to consider this: I'm not really sure I want another card. I don't want every facet of the unexplainable explained. After all, it is more fun to ponder the possibility of a curse invoked by a worn but trusty orange card than it Is to blame an eel for creating too much static. Day believes only a matter of not a matter of 'if'." In another corner of this hospital, Dr. Molly Cooke, an internist, is familiar with this anxiety.

The mother of three small children and wife of Dr. Paul Volberding, who cares for AIDS patients, went through "absolutely excruciating anxiety, almost intolerable" when she realized the nature of the disease to which she and her family had been exposed. But as an internist she tends to think of the reassuring statistics, while the surgeons tend to think case by bloody case. Still Dr. Cooke, like virtually every other doctor I spoke with here, is uncomfortable not knowing which of her patients carry the virus.

Even Dr. Mervyn Silverman, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, says, "In the best of all possible worlds, physicians should know." He opposes mandatory testing for hospital patients because "this knowledge has side effects that are disastrous." Among those side effects may be the refusal of medical treatment. Should medical people be allowed to withhold care? The easy answer is a blanket "no." It is unethical for a doctor to turn away someone who is sick. "When you get your medical degree," says Dr. Silverman, "it doesn't come with a limited Those in the hospitals are taking risks; we expect them to.

Tomorrow, Dr. Lorraine Day will operate on five more patients. If we want her and her colleagues to go on, we have to devise strategies that offer the profession what they offer patients: Better care and better protection..