Thoughts Provoked By Trash

As I walked down the driveway last week, I saw some trash caught along the fenceline.  It irritated me a bit, but it's a part of modern life.  I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, and headed back inside.

When I fished the trash out to throw it away, though, something made me look at it a little more closely - and for a brief moment I got really mad.  Seriously - have we become so crunched for time (or simply lazy) and so consumerized that it is necessary to buy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches premade and pre-packaged???  Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  Really?

This rates right up there with buying tap water by the (plastic) bottle, for over $1 each.  Come on, folks, just turn the tap on and fill a bottle up for free!  Save the plastic.  Save money.  Avoid some extra chemicals leaching into your water from the plastic.  Then slap some peanut butter and jelly on 2 slices of bread.  Cut the crust off if you've encouraged your kids to be picky about such things.  I haven't priced it all out, but I can almost guarantee making the sandwiches yourself will be cheaper than buying commercial, pre-made pb & j's.

When we've gotten to the point where we're too busy or stretched too thin to get ourselves a glass of water from the faucet or to make our children a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we're too busy.  Something's got to give.

It takes 2 people to earn a living these days.  If even 2 people can.  Working 40 hours each, 50 hours each, 60 hours each.  Working hard, because we'd never want to be seen as slackers and because we have no choice.  Performing "internships" for free so that we can get experience, then not getting hired because the next unpaid intern is waiting, anxious to work for "experience."  Working 2 jobs at 35 hours each so that the companies don't have to pay benefits - we're "part-timers" working 70 hours each week but not "worth" health insurance or paid time off or sick leave.  When these horrible hours have their inevitable result and our bodies rebel, we become one of the "slackers", too sick to keep working.  If our health insurance comes from our employer, we're really screwed.  Too sick to work, but no health insurance if we're not working...and no work to get money to pay for health insurance.

We're not machines.  Any of us.  We're human beings, with good points and with faults, with weaknesses and with strengths.  Some of us are kind and some of us aren't.  Some of us naturally work harder than others.  Some of us are smarter than others.  Some of us are more social or less social than others.  Caring - or not.  Artistic - or not.  Creative - or not.  Neat - or not.  One way or another, there's much more to human life and human worth than paid labor.  And it's time for us - all of us - to remember that.  We need to be treated as living humans, to treat each other as worthwhile humans, and to treat ourselves with love and compassion.   We need to take our lives and our world back.  One way...or another.

But She Never Talks About....

I just finished reading Before I Say Goodbye, by Ruth Picardie.  The book was published in 1998 and is subtitled, "Recollections and Observations from One Woman's Final Year."  It's the story, told in personal e-mails, letters and a few columns that Ruth Picardie wrote about her experiences, of  a 32 year old woman, married, living with her husband and 1 year old twins in London, who is diagnosed with breast cancer. 

Ruth Picardie was a freelance writer and a former editor, a spunky, rather sassy woman who was able to capture in her writing the wide range of emotions that she experienced as, at age 32, she tackled an ultimately losing battle against breast cancer:  chemotherapy, radiation treatments, alternative medicine treatments, hair falling out, nausea, and the myriad of other indignities that she bravely and sometimes funnily endured in her final year.  She continued trying to make life as normal as possible for her children.  She wrote about how pissed she was that she wasn't losing weight - sort of a "if I have to have cancer, can't I at least be skinny without trying?" sort of thing, and about having a crush on one of her oncologists.  She wrote about suddenly finding shopping therapy particularly helpful, especially for expensive cosmetics.

But one thing she never wrote about was being worried about medical bills or about what her illness was doing to the financial security of her husband and her children.  She NEVER mentions not trying a medical treatment because it's too expensive.  She undergoes 2 rounds of chemotherapy and at least one 6 week course of daily radiation treatments.  She takes multiple medications and undergoes numerous tests and scans.  She stays in the hospital several times and, at the end of her life, is in and out of hospice for the last 2 months.  And she never mentions paying a dime for any of it.

Make no mistake, sometimes Ruth was mad as hell at the National Health Service.  Of course she was going to have been angry - she was a 32 year dying of breast cancer and nothing they did seemed to make much difference.  Of course she would have turned at least some of that anger on the people doing her primary treatment.

Ruth talks about how much all the alternative therapies she tried cost:  2500 pounds (approx. $5000) for an initial consultation with a recommended "complementary medicine guru" and then much more money over the course of several months until reports of the rapid spread of her cancer convinced her that she was just wasting their money.  Then there was a Chinese medicine regimen..for 50 pounds (about $100) each week.  Over the course of three months, she went to at least two different "healers" for several sessions each.  In her last full column, she says that she doesn't think any of this helped her one iota - and certainly not as much as the (self-discovered and prescribed) retail shopping therapy did.

In that same column where she discussed how much she had spent on the (ultimately useless) alternative therapy, she wrote, "To be fair to the beards [alternative medicine folks], mainstream treatment from arid white-coats has utterly failed, too, but at least it's a) free, and b) you don't have to listen to Vangelis in hospital."

When the cancer spread to her liver and lungs and the oncologists figured there was little they could do to halt the progress of the cancer, Ruth was visited (without asking for it) by a government social worker and given a disabled car sticker, a housecleaner who came twice a week for 2 hours each time (paid for by the government), and about $100/week disability living allowance.  Not much, maybe, but surely better than getting nothing but bills and insurance statements when you're dying.  Know any country where THAT might happen?

At the end of the book, Ruth's husband, Matt, writes the final wrap-up for the book.  He wrote about a year after Ruth died and he was scrupulously honest, as she was, about his experiences.  He admits to not always being the support to her that he wanted to be, about the stresses it put on their marriage, about what it was like as she started pulling away from him and even from the kids, in preparation for dying.  But he never mentions money or bills or stressing about whether they'd be unable to pay for their apartment or her medical care or the retail therapy she was treating herself to.  About whether they'd have to choose between drugs to fight her cancer or food to feed the family. 

Ruth Picardie died on September 22, 1997.  I don't know what health care changes have been made in England since then, but I'd still bet a dying woman doesn't have to worry as much about paying for the process of her death in London as she would in Wichita, Kansas, or in any other place in the United States.

Illness and eventual death are extremely frightening but inevitable parts of living for all of us.  It's hard enough to go through being seriously sick without feeling that your illness and/or death is going to totally leave your family bankrupt and potentially homeless.  When are we, as a nation, going to wake up and realize that ALL of us are human, ALL of us will get ill and die eventually, and ALL of us deserve to deal with that in the best way we can WITHOUT worrying about paying for it???  When are we going to wake up and realize that the only system that makes sense is a single payer system where 30% of the costs don't get eaten up in administration?  When are we going to wake up and realize that making lots of money off health "care" means that true health care must be denied for many of us?  When are we going to wake up and realize that only by having everyone, old and young, sick and well, in the same pool can we spread the costs around fairly and reasonably and provide needed care for all of us?

And, most of all, when are we going to realize that having "health care insurance" doesn't insure us against anything, least of all against illness and death?  We are all going to get ill and die, so let's be honest with ourselves...and provide at least a basic level of health care for all of us, so we can meet that frightening time of life with all our focus on our fight for life.

An Unexpected Benefit from Opossums

As I explained in my entry on opossums a while back, I don't know of any real negatives about them (other than their appetite for expensive bird seed), so I tend to let them be in my yard.

Now I've learned of a true benefit to having them around!

Debbie Roberts wrote an interesting blog article for Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens, "The Link Between Lyme Disease and Biodiversity."  In it she detailed information she'd heard at a lecture by Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.  (She's got the links to both Dr. Ostfeld and the Cary Institute, so if you're interested in these topics, I'll let you link from her blog post.)

One of the tidbits of information that I learned in reading her post was that opossums are great at grooming off (and eating? killing?) ticks.  On average, they groom off 96.5% of the ticks that attach to them, compared to white-footed mice, which leave 50% of ticks on their bodies.  Extrapolating from this, opossums seems to act as "tick magnets" or "tick vacuums" in their home areas.

I've wondered why we don't seem to have much of a tick problem out here.  Perhaps at least part of the puzzle is that we do have opossums.  (Rereading my opossum post, I had read a suggestion of this, but the information from Dr. Ostfeld puts "legs" under that suggestion.)

Chasing this line of thought a little further....  According to Dr. Ostfeld, white-footed mice seem to act as a Lyme disease reservoir.  So, logically, any animals that decrease white-footed mice population numbers will, by default, act to decrease the reservoir of Lyme disease in the area.  Score a big win for owls, hawks, fox, snakes, coyotes, and other rodent predators!!!

Biodiversity is a good thing.  Seen any snakes or coyotes in your yard recently???

Greed Trumps Health and Common Sense Yet Again

The last sentence in an article in this morning's paper caught my attention, "About 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use in the United States, but federal regulators have assessed only about 200 for safety." ("Panel: Cancer-causing Chemicals Abound", The Wichita Eagle, Friday, May 7, 2010, p. 1A, 4A)

Innocent until proven guilty is admirable in dealing with people. It's stupid when dealing with chemicals.

Oh, and by the way, can you say, "No new taxes!"? Assuming that corporations who plan to make mega-millions from a chemical will accurately and completely test a chemical and then report the results of those tests truthfully is naive at best and stupid and short-sighted at worst. Even if it does mean the government is spending less of "your" money by "wasting" it on testing for and regulating chemicals.

Barefoot in the Grass, Part 2

Having been captivated lately by the idea of going barefoot as much as possible, Prairiewolf and I started researching the new "barefoot technology" shoes available. Truly barefoot is fine for lawn grass, dirt, straw and concrete, but less inviting for prairiegrass stubble and rock driveways, both of which are important components of our yard. In the past week, going barefoot, I have "located" a big splinter on our deck, as well as numerous pine cones and sticks hidden in the grass. Nothing disastrous, but not always comfortable.

So, having decided that "barefoot shoes" were a good idea to try out, our first impulse was to find the new Vivo Barefoot technology shoes. We soon learned, however, that these are only available from one store in New York. We could mailorder them, but we couldn't try them on before purchasing them. On top of that, the Vivo Barefoots run $120-160/pair, which seemed a little steep for experimental purposes.

The other brand mentioned was Vibram Five Fingers, which we were able to locate locally, so off we went to try them out. They run about $85/pair, so they were about half the cost of the Vivo Barefoots.

I'm the one home more often, as well as the one who has foot problems periodiocally, so we opted to make me the guinea pig. I wanted the style that came almost to the ankle - even though it is harder to get on, it is reported to be better at keeping dirt and gravel out of the shoes, an important consideration if I'm going to wear them around the yard and garden in them a lot. Our local store didn't have that style in women's shoes, but did have it in the men's line, so I bought a pair of the men's and they fit me fine.

So here are my feet, sturdily encased in their barefoot shoes. I have walked up and down the driveway several times with no problem. I can feel the stones; occasionally one feels somewhat sharp and reminds me to walk lightly, but I've not had bruising or significant issues. The shoes felt strange at first (and still look strange to me - I call them my gorilla shoes), but are very comfortable once I began to get used to them. I'm not sure I'm ready to run in them yet, but then I'm not really ready to run in any shoes! I'm definitely happy to walk in them, though, and I'm curious to see whether I notice a difference in the health of my feet overall.

Barefoot in the Grass

It's amazing. Three days ago I hadn't heard a thing about the research showing that shoes are actually crippling our feet in Western society, rather than protecting them. Suddenly I'm running into articles about going barefoot every time I turn around.

First I saw an article in our local paper, the Wichita Eagle, on Tuesday. It was based on an interview with author Christopher McDougall, whose book Born to Run has apparently become a recent bestseller.

Later that day I saw a blog entry about the benefits of going barefoot on a blog by Rebecca Clay Haines that Ienjoy and occasionally check on.

Now today a good friend of Qkslvrwolf has a blog post about running barefoot for the first time, plus she links to a New York magazine article from the NY Times on the same subject. (The article is excellent - I highly recommend reading the entire thing. The trompel'oeil paintings are just awesome, and the copy's pretty good too.)

That seems an awful lot like serendipity to me! Serendipity is becoming my new red flag, signalling something I need to try out or explore a bit more.

When I was a kid, I went barefoot all the time. I prided myself on how well I could walk on REALLY hot pavement or gravel. I only wore shoes when I had to. My feet were often dirty, but I don't remember them being particularly calloused or problematic in any way.

So this morning I decided to try doing a little walking in the yard while barefoot. I don't know why this seemed so adventurous, but somehow it did. The grass was rather chilly and wet from the dew, but it felt soft and good. I decided to stay barefoot while I did a little light gardening work.

Now, I know this sounds rather "woo-woo", but as I spent the next 30 minutes handpicking blister beetles off of the potatoes and tomatoes, I seemed to be much more in sync than usual with the process. At times it even felt like the beetles were offering themselves to me! I hadn't picked blister beetles in almost a week so there were plenty to pick, but I hardly missed any of the ones I saw. (As a predator avoidance technique, blister beetles quickly drop to the ground and get lost in the leaf mulch when they feel threatened.) By the time I finished finding all of the beetles I could in the garden this morning, I could literally count on one hand the number of blister beetles I had "lost". Normally, I'd say I lose about one out of every three beetles that I spot, so this was a much higher success rate than normal.

Of course, it could be that the temperatures were a little cooler than normal (maybe by a few degrees) and that, combined with the damp air, made the beetles a little less agile than normal.

I prefer to attribute my success to my connection with the Earth this morning, though!

In about an hour of roaming the garden and yard with nothing between me and the Earth, I only had one brief "ouch" moment - when I accidentally stepped on a weed with a thorny stem lurking in the straw mulch between our raised vegetable beds. Sorry to say, that is purely my own fault because I noticed that sucker about a week ago and didn't follow my own advice to pull it out as soon as I saw it.

It's going to be interesting to experiment more with this barefoot stuff. I'm not sure I'm ready to walk the prairie paths yet, due to dual fears of accidental poison ivy contact AND accidental snake contact. I find I'm not nearly so brave about those hazards when I don't have shoes and even long pants between me and them! (There is, after all, a fine line between bravery and stupidity.)

On the other hand, I've had low level foot problems off and on for many years now, and I chronically have trouble finding comfortable shoes. Maybe magic shoes aren't really the answer; maybe the answer is going barefoot as often as I can. It's sure worth a try.

A Stroke Towards Understanding

On a totally different note, but still in book report mode, I'd like to share another book that I've read recently, My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.

Every once in a while, someone experiences something in life that can radically change how we understand something considered generally "unknowable." When that happens, if we're lucky, the someone who has had the experience writes about it cogently or in some other way shares it with the rest of us and, then, through increased understanding, we can change how we treat each other in those particular circumstances. That's what has happened with My Stroke of Insight.

Jill Taylor is a neuroanatomist who specialized in brain function during her training and early academic career, trying to understand (among other things) why a beloved older brother developed schizophrenia. She worked at Harvard Medical School and was active on the national lecture circuit, helping others understand what was happening on an anatomical basis when the brain doesn't work properly.

Then, at age 37, she had a major stroke effecting almost the entire left hemisphere of her brain. She was conscious during the entire time the stroke was occurring and she was able to figure out, from her training, what parts of the brain were being effected and why she was having the problems she was experiencing. Despite that, by the time she reached the hospital, she was totally unable to talk, barely able to understand what others were saying to her, and almost infantlike in her reactions to stimuli.

In this book, she shares with us what she experienced, how she recovered her abilities (which took 8 years), and suggestions for helping others to recover from strokes as fast and fully as possible.

Because her stroke basically incapacitated her entire left hemisphere for an extended period, this account is also a fascinating look at how the 2 sides of the brain interact to produce our normal view of reality as well as our normal personality, and what each side of the brain contributes to that "normality". Last, but hardly least, she gives us a view from a brain that is ONLY functioning with the right hemisphere - what she could understand, what she felt, how she could and could not communicate.

I read My Stroke of Insight while we were on our recent trip to Chicago, and it seemed like I was constantly noticing parallels between conversational topics and what I was learning as I read. I'm sure everyone was sick of the phrase, "In that book I've been reading....."! I've already had to watch my mother-in-law suffer (and eventually die) from a brain tumor many years ago. I've always wondered what and how much she felt and understood as she lay, basically unresponsive but with her eyes open, in the hospital those last few weeks; now I feel like I have a better understanding. Having read this book will certainly change how I care for someone with a stroke, if that ever becomes a task that I am called upon to do. By helping me understand what she experienced, Dr. Taylor also helped prepare me for what to expect, should I ever experience a stroke.

This is not a long book, but it's an important and interesting book. I highly recommend that you read it now...and reread it, if anyone you know is unfortunate enough to suffer the life-transforming effects of a stroke.

Health Care - Sense and Nonsense

I don't normally blog about political issues here. Not because I don't care about political issues, but because I don't want this blog to be taken over by them, which can easily happen.

However, I feel like I need to make a comment or two "at large" on the health care issue....

Our current system is based upon 2 fundamental flaws that will keep it from EVER being good at delivering decent health care when people really need it:

1) Employer funded health insurance. I know why this started, but it makes no sense for it to continue now. When someone gets seriously ill, one of the first side effects is that they usually cannot work. Therefore they lose their employer and, soon after, their employer funded health insurance. Thus, when they need health care the most, they can't access it. (Note: Being the primary societal payers for health costs also gives our business community significant costs that companies in other countries don't have, putting them at an economic disadvantage in the global marketplace.)

2) Health "insurance" itself. Everyone is going to get ill or require medical care, sooner or later, no matter how well we take care of ourselves. Health "insurance" is an oxymoron. Being able to pay for health "insurance" doesn't insure that we will stay healthy individually. On a societal level, siphoning profit out of our health care system doesn't "insure" that people will stay healthier either - it just means that sick people cost too much money for health insurance companies to make a profit on. The statistic that sticks in my mind (although I have no source to quote for this) is that about $.30 out of every $1 spent on health care in this country goes for insurance company costs and profits. That's stupid. The only people getting benefit out of that are health insurance employees and owners. It's time for them to make a living elsewhere, and not at the expense of health care for the rest of our population.

I read (and hear) such statements as "we have the best health care in the world" bandied about. No, we don't. We have the MOST EXPENSIVE health care, per capita, in the world. We are somewhere around 30-40th on most health related standards such as longevity, maternal health, newborn health, etc. etc. Most other industrialized countries (who basically all have "socialized" medicine, by the way) provide better healthcare, as a whole, for half the cost or less, per capita.

Or how about "if the government takes over health care, we'll have HEALTH CARE RATIONING and then NO ONE WILL GET THE TREATMENT THEY NEED IN A TIMELY MANNER". Bull corn. We already have health care rationing - we are very stingy, as a nation, on how we provide health care to the working poor, for example. In the current recession, with all the layoffs that have occurred, health care is one of the first expenses that people are being encouraged to cut out. Oh, if it's an emergency, people can go to an ER and get treated with the hospital writing off their costs, but it often bankrupts the person/family. Meanwhile, the cheaper, preventive care (that could have kept them healthier in the first place) doesn't get done because it's still too expensive for individuals to afford.

In fact, right now, those who can afford medical costs the least - those who aren't covered by employer-based health care or government programs and who are "self pay" because they can't afford "insurance" - have to pay the highest costs at doctors' offices and hospitals. The health "insurance" companies negotiate quantity discounts, then physicians and hospitals are bound to charge the higher prices (that the discounts were based on) to the patients not covered by such discounts. The "savings to the system" essentially get made on the backs of the working poor.

Then there's the "Everyone in countries with 'socialized medicine' complains about their systems and feels like they get inadequate care. The entire world looks to the U.S. in longing because our health care is so wonderful." Ah,...no. That's garbage, being repeated by people who either have a strong stake in the system remaining as it is, or by folks who never actually talk with people from other countries. The relatives that I have in countries with "socialized" medicine (an uncle & aunt with their 3 sons and their sons' families in Norway; several cousins on both sides of our family in Canada - all of whom visit the U.S. with fair frequency, so they are familiar with both systems) report being very happy with the health care they receive. Our son, in Germany, has told us that the Germans he talks with are very happy with their system too. Both our son and our daughter have spent significant time in Britain, as well, where they've reported that the citizens they've talked with are quite content with their health care as well. Are there some complaints? Of course. There's always room for improvement and some people will always complain, but overall people are very happy with their health care in those countries. The objective numbers also say that citizens' health in those countries (longevity, maternal health, etc. etc.) is better for much less money, per capita, than in our country.

Then there's the proposal to give people "tax breaks" on health insurance costs. Another sounds-good-but-actually-doesn't-help, smoke-and-mirrors idea. People without health insurance are probably not going to be able to pay for health insurance, even with "tax breaks" - these are folks who don't make enough money to pay rent, food and transportation costs without problems. There's no room in a budget like that for hundreds of dollars for health insurance!

Plus "tax breaks" like that are actually taxpayers subsidizing the health "insurance" industry.

If you want the private health "insurance" industry to work, insurance companies need to take entire communities at a time, sick people as well as healthy people, and insure them all at the same rate. They wouldn't be able to single out the sick people and not pay for their care, as they do now. They shouldn't be able to search for ways to deny payment, based on bogus claims of "experimental protocols" or "pre-exisiting conditions" such as treatment years before for a cough that is used as the basis for denying later claims for lung cancer, or treatment for menstrual cramps used as a basis for denying later claims for ovarian or uterine cancer.

My last comment is cynical, but heartfelt. I wish the American populace, as a whole, would quit proving the claim that "a lie repeated often enough becomes accepted as the truth." Come on, folks, talk with your neighbors and fellow workers about their actual experiences. Quit passively listening to talking heads spewing half truths and outright lies. Question what you read and hear.

Most of all, remember, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." The truth, as far as health goes, is, "There, in my time, will go I."