The thumb swelled up. The blood pooled under the fingernail. Whenever the ibuprofen or acetaminophen wore off, the throbbing began and the tears woke her up. At 3 a.m., she was half asleep, the pain hadn’t gotten too bad, and I was able to convince her to take medicine. At 6 a.m., I was asleep, the pain woke her up all the way, and getting her to take the medicine was a pain in the butt.
Sigh.
I suppose by the time she’s a grown up, she’ll realize that it’s just plain easier to take the pain meds right away, rather than fritter away an hour throwing a hysterical fit about how much it hurts and how much she hates taking meds.
Yah, right.
Anyway, we hauled her in to the doc-in-a-box, who promptly wanted an x-ray, just in case. There was talk about the growth plate being injured.
Now, I had heard about kids and bone growth plates, but never seen them or understood them, quite. I always thought it was some sort of medico way of talking about growing outwards. Well, duh—of course, it’s something that lets kids’ bones grow lengthwise. And, amazingly enough, you can see them quite clearly on an x-ray. So we asked for a CD of the x-rays just because they were so cool. (And, luckily, they didn’t show anything broken.)
See those thing flat parts at the bottom of each bone, that look like bones themselves? In an adult hand, they aren’t there. What you’re looking at is a growth plate—“Growth plates are areas of developing cartilage tissue near the ends of long bones.” The bones grow from the ends, where those growth plates are. As the kid matures and the bone stops growing lengthwise, the growth plates fuse with the end of the bone. You can already see how some of her palm bones (metacarpals) are beginning to fuse.
After the x-rays, we had the doc put a hole in the fingernail to drain the blood, which immediately released the pressure and made the dotter a happier camper. She was fitted with a splint, which she thought was just about the coolest thing ever, and we headed home.
I, no longer being accustomed to the sleep deprivation of having a child wake up multiple times during the night, spent the next few hours remedying my sleep deficit. I am amazed, looking back, that I was capable of coherency during those four years of the dotter’s ongoing sleep problems. Thank heavens these days she sleeps like a log through the night, and if she doesn’t, she comes in, snuggles up at the foot of the bed, and lets us sleep in peace. I do not miss those nights of constant interruption, believe me!
And then we spent the evening watching old movies and nature documentaries on Netflix.
We took the dotter to “Family Night” at school, and left there with her best buddy A. to go out to dinner. While we were at dinner, she and A. kept darting out to the atrium to play on the various mechanical toys. And somehow, while that was happening, she managed to get her thumb smashed in a door by A.
Oops.
So we are snuggled in, her thumb soaking in ice water (she wouldn’t do just a bag of ice, because it kept bumping the tender parts), and watching nature documentaries on Netflix.
I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery. My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery. Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year? After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.
So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.
Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his. He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.
The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy. I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally). The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind. Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.
In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.
First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S. The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:
When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart. I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China. I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.
Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview. While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it. Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.
The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs. The gist: ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc. It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web. This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo. It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such. And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.
Well. The shit hit the fan. The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide. A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why. A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving. One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way. The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question. All that’s left is the post mortems.
I watched this with great interest. My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?! This is an advertorial, damn it! What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?! Ewwwwwww!!!!
For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial. In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine. Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no. I mean, it’s taboo. Really, truly. As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO. You do not do this. And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.
Period.
It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.
I was appalled, myself. I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.
(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional. She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism. However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)
Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB). Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.
We have had a series of foggy, foggy nights here in the Valley, and with the fog comes a beautiful after-effect: hoar frost. The fog hangs in the air, the icy nights precipitate the fog onto any nearby surface, and the droplets of water freeze and build upon each other into an airy, fairy coating on trees, branches, signs, fences. Then the sunlight comes out, and in all directions you see a sea of frosty white. This time, instead of just one night, we had many nights in a row with the fog, and instead of breezes blowing the delicate frost formations off the surfaces during the day (which usually happens), they have stayed and the next night’s precipitation can build upon the last night’s.
The fog, of course, is not homogenous; you have areas where the fog is thick and areas where it drifts and blows and thins out…all of which shows up in the amount of frost that deposits on the surfaces.
This phone pole, for instance, didn’t get much frost:
It looks just like kids’ experiments with crystallizing sugar or salt.
This batch of trees on a ridgeline caught the sunlight; on our side of the ridge, it was dark:
A little later in the day, I wandered by Suburban Alaska Lake, and was able to photograph this lovely set of little trees, all covered with the frost:
A closer look reveals the leaf-like structure of the frost sticking to the branches (dig that vibrant blue sky! We don’t see that very often around here!):
And then I went all macro:
It really is both beautiful and fascinating.
This was the view across the lake. See how all the trees along the right side of the picture are covered, while the trees on the left side are only covered halfway down? The frost never got that low on the left side:
When I got home, this was the view in the backyard:
The frost doesn’t cling to the evergreens the way it does to the deciduous trees; I’m not sure why.
I had to drive off to our neighborhood crossing of the Little Lady river, to see what it looked like in this fairy frosting:
You can see how the sunlight only hits part of the view; that’s because the sun doesn’t get high enough in the sky to light up the whole area, since it’s in a little dip.
So: This was the post that was supposed to get done yesterday. Hah. The broken nose makes me realize just how mobile my face is; I am constantly lifting an eyebrow or twitching my nose, and each time I do that, it hurts. It doesn’t look like much, really—I am not sporting the advertised raccoon eyes, which surprises me. All I have is a few scrapes and the swollenness, but even that isn’t much compared to what it could be. The part that hurts the most, actually, is my neck and shoulders—I plowed in face first, so jammed my head. Call it “face plant whiplash”!
I was going to post pics of the lovely frost we’ve had recently…
Or maybe post pics from the Christmas parade and fireworks show this evening…
But instead, I decided to trip in the garage, face-plant myself, and break my nose. The ER doc says I will be sporting a fine pair of black eyes tomorrow. In the meantime, I am zone-y on Percocet and not really capable of any writing of any depth or clarity or wit.
Some thirty years ago, I got sick. And sicker. And sicker. So I finally hauled myself off to a doctor somewhere (I do not remember where, or how) and got diagnosed with mononucleosis. And tonsillitis. And strep throat. All at once. It hurt like hell. So this doctor prescribed antibiotics for the items that were bacterial, lots of rest for the mono, and some kind of painkiller so that I could actually swallow the other items.
I was supposed to pop the painkillers every four hours.
By the time a day had passed, I was having psychotic delusions that there were giant white rats and cockroaches crawling up the walls of my apartment.
This was not, I am guessing, the intended result. I ended up calling a friend in the middle of the night, sobbing, and asking that she help me walk the stuff off, or at least keep me company until it wore off. We flushed the remainder of the pills down the toilet.
This was my first introduction to the idea of idiosyncratic reactions to drugs.
Last Thursday, I got a sudden backache in an unusual spot–mid-back, right below my ribs. I’ve had an on-again, off-again urinary tract infection, so worried about kidneys. When the backache didn’t go away, and I kept getting sharp pains in two points directly over where my kidneys should be, I decided to haul my butt off to the doc-in-a-box Monday morning. (The DIAB offices were quite full and it took forever.)
No bacteria showed in my sample (?!), but the doc decided to treat it empirically: if I felt like it was my kidneys, probably the best thing to do would be to do some antibiotics and some UTI drugs.
Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s some Tramadol for the pain (”non-narcotic pain relief” quoth the doc).
So I sashay off, get the prescription filled, come home, and pop some pills.
Fifteen minutes later, I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open. I staggered into the bedroom with a book, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner. I sat at the dinner table in a daze, ate a bite or two of food, then wandered back to bed. At 7:30 a.m., the phone rings, it’s my wake-up call for the day from OmegaDad…I spend an hour awake–in a daze–getting the dotter up and breakfasted and out the door and realize it might be a good idea to email work. I open up the email program, start typing my boss’s name. Except I can’t type; it’s gibberish. I take a deep breath, reposition my hands, and start typing again. This time it’s only half gibberish. I take a deep breath, reposition my hands again, and start typing one. Letter. At. A. Time.
And then I went back to bed.
The end result: One pill. Twenty-one hours of deep sleep. Four hours after that of space-y zoniness; awake, but totally unable to be, say, productive or coherent.
Oh, I woke up here and there. Let’s see: the pain-killing portion ran out about six hours in, I know, because I came to enough to think, “Hunh. It hurts again.” And I woke up around 11:30 p.m., rested my zoned out eyeballs on the clock, and thought, “I really need to get up to write a filler post for NaBloPoMo.” Fifteen minutes later, I did the same thing. Obviously, nothing got done.
So now I know: no more Tramadol–or related items–for me.
Maybe next year I’ll actually complete NaBloPoMo. So close! Wah!
The antibiotics seem to be helping, though.
(And I am totally amused that no-one commented on my defiant liking of Lady Ga-Ga. I must have stunned everyone into awed and appalled silence.)
Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs. I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that. It kept on hurting throughout the day. When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.
Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting. Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two. The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck. So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there. It’s okay.” And I go back to sleep.
The questions that trouble a parent shift and change as the child grows. At first, the troubles–though they seem huge and insurmountable–are actually pretty straightforward: kiddo cries, you figure out whether she’s wet or has pooped or needs Orajel or is tired or sick, take care of things, and voila, the problem is solved. Then you move on to “why is she waking up two or three times in the middle of the night??” and the concurrent “Oh. My. God. I am soooooo sleepy I think I may just collapse right here in the hallway at work and take a little snooze; I’m sure no one will mind. Right?” You’ve got the kid biting…or being bit…or both.
Then it’s time to worry about just how soon the kiddo is going to realize just what the words she is singing to the song on the radio mean. You wince when “Greased Lightning” is playing while she’s watching Grease, and hope that she never turns to you and asks, “What’s a ‘pussy wagon’?” or “That’s weird: why would anyone say ‘the chicks’ll cream!’?”
Ahem.
(As she gets older, she will start singing more popular songs from the radio, and you’ll realize, after waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ rock songs of your yout’, that you’d have to go back in time about 100 years to find songs that you don’t find yourself casting the hairy eyeball at…It’s amazing the amount of slang devoted to sex and violence, and the amount of popular music of many eras devoted to sex and violence as well. Just look at all those folk songs. People are having sex and dying violently all over the place in those.)
Anyway…
To get back to my original subject: Trouble.
These days, I find myself worrying about friendships. The dotter has, for some reason, decided she doesn’t want to visit her best bud A.–who OmegaDad and I find absolutely charming. She’ll hang on the phone with him for hours, playing (ugh) ToonTown, but ever since she returned from an overnight and immediately developed the Not-Flu, she has been avoiding his house. (There is also the question of dogs. A.’s mom is a vet for a no-kill shelter. Their house is filled with dogs and cats. I have wondered if she’s not subconsciously upset by all the dogs reminding her of Kai. Then I figure I’m just overanalyzing things, and it’s just a phase.)
A. was supposed to come Trick-or-Treating with us. Now A. is not. The dotter immediately suggested K. K. is the diametric opposite of A. K. is female, a year older than the dotter, lazy, and snotty. She’s also the girl who has her finger directly on all of the dotter’s buttons, including adoption issues. OmegaDad and I don’t like K.
Ugh.
BUT. That wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about; it just came pouring out in the stream of consciousness brought on by the word “trouble”.
My original point with the word “trouble” is that the dotter got in serious trouble this evening at gymnastics. Coach Christina had given her group a water break, and they came barreling across the gymnasium floor in a thundering herd, led by the dotter, who was not looking where she was going.
At the same time, A., the oh-my-gosh-she’s-powerful-and-damned-good young gymnast whose team practices at the same time as the dotter’s, was starting a power sprint aimed at a rolling dive flip into the foam pit.
The two paths intersected right by the side of the foam pit.
The inevitable bad and painful collision was only avoided at the very last minute by some extremely quick thinking and movement on A.’s part, with the result that, rather than her normal perfect flip into the pit, she angled into the pit and came crashing down on her arm.
After the gasps of horror and brief adrenaline rush was over for everyone, Coach John (the head coach at the facility) gave the dotter quite a dressing down. Since they were a distance away from my perch on the bleachers, I couldn’t hear, but there was finger-shaking involved. She proceeded to the water fountain. When she was done, I gave her quite a dressing down, of the “Don’t you ever, ever do something like that again! You need to pay attention to where you’re going and what’s going on on the gymnasium floor!” type. There was some “You could have been seriously hurt!” and “You could have seriously hurt someone else!” mixed in there, along with some finger-shaking on my part too.
She was suitably subdued afterwards.
On the drive home, I told her she needed to write a note of apology to Coach John and to A., who spent the next half hour favoring her arm. This worried me; A. is really very, very good and I’d hate for her to be out of commission for a few weeks due to this…total and absolute inattentiveness.
Much to my surprise and amazement, right after we got home, the dotter retreated to her bedroom, then returned a few minutes later, said, “I’m done!”, and handed me two very contrite notes for Coach John and A.
Now all that’s left is for the dotter to deliver them to the recipients herself, on Thursday. (She wanted me to do it. Har. As if.)
Damned episode scared the snot out of me. Someone could have been very seriously hurt. At the same time, while one part of me is still seething about the aforementioned total and absolute inattentiveness, the other part of me is just slumgustered at the immediate note-writing and the well-written apologies. Bit by bit, she’s growing up.
(I won’t mention the zits.) (Maybe in my next post.) (Yes. Zits. Not a lot. But, still…)
So, after two surgeries and many days recuperating, the dawg is back home again. We had all been missing him something fierce–even the dotter, who the dawg doesn’t get along with, and who, therefore, doesn’t get along with the dawg. So he’s back, he’s ensconced downstairs (no stair climbing for a while!), he smells extremely doggy (no doggy baths for a while!), and we have managed to get him to eat and keep down a tablespoon or two of freshly baked chicken and some rice. Given that he’s hardly eaten in a week, this is monumental.
In the meantime, as soon as the autumnal equinox passed, our area of Alaska plunged directly from late fall into almost-winter. Typically, the early winter snows creep downward on the mountainsides, first dusting the tops (”termination dust”), then moving on down bit by bit.
Last week was vintage autumn: clear, vibrant blue skies, the kind that you can lose yourself in forever, with the sun glittering in etched yellow along the edges of leaves. We had some winds, and they loosened the fall leaves, which would shower down to the ground like a handful of golden coins tossed into the air.
Then came gray days and rain.
Then came the cold snap, along with more rain. We had no snow hereabouts, but you could tell the mountains were getting it. This morning, when the dotter went off to check her chickens, the back stairs were icy. This afternoon, when we motored off to the vet’s to get the dawg, the sun was out and sparkling from every damp spot on the trees and the houses and the underbrush.
And surrounding the valley, the mountains were covered with snow, two-thirds of the way down. Yesterday evening, I had caught a peek or two that showed that the snow came almost down to our level, but the sunshine today must have warmed things up enough to melt that snow back.
The mountains seem suddenly more immediate, more immense, more looming, when they are covered with snow; I don’t know why.
Right now, it’s a beautiful sight. I actually can’t wait until our first snowfall down here. Remind me of that in January and February, when I am bitching endlessly about the never-ending wintertime, eh?
We got to see the dawg at the vet’s office today; he was totally stoned on pain meds, but even so looked much better than he had yesterday morning. So we loved on him and snuggled with him, and then left, with promises of being able to check him out tomorrow morning, and maybe take him home.
A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much. Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing. And barfing. And barfing. And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty. And he couldn’t keep that down, either. At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.
The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam. Then x-rays. Then blood work. Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor). Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.
We walked out having spent $380. Ack!
The dawg stopped barfing for a bit. Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.
And then promptly threw right up again.
All through the night, the same thing: drink water, throw it up.
So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays: fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was. So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300. Ack!
Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate: $1000 to $2000. ACK! ACK, ACK, double ACK!
At which point, the qualms start. Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here. Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it. Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care. Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it. Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it. Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it. Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?
Et cetera.
It was a very odd feeling.
The end result: A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills. You can apply over the phone. Oh, goody. Just what we need…
So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.
To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”
Oh, shit.
Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.
Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently). Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well. She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal. He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room. When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now. Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing. While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.
The end result: I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours. (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].) Our finances are in a holding pattern. I’m tired. I want my mommy. My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…
Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…
Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy. At which point, I was amazed: we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened. The nurse scoffed. She said it wasn’t possible. Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???
A few months ago, yet another TED talk came across my radar. This one was given by Aimee Mullins, a young lady who was born with missing fibula bones and had her legs amputated at age one. Mullins went on from there to become a super-achiever–she received a full scholarship from the Department of Defense to attend Georgetown University, and became a record-winning athlete in Georgetown’s track team. She competed in the paralympics, received modeling contracts, has acted in motion pictures, and is a motivational speaker.
At the TED talk, she spoke of disability being a chance to be “more”:
I came away from this video excited, thrilled, wondering “what’s next?!”
At the same, time, however, in the midst of all the gosh-gee-golly-wow that I felt, there was also an overwhelming feeling that this woman’s excitement for the future of prosthetics and the possibilities they open up for her and other was…well…a function of a position of privilege.
See, she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s obviously wildly intelligent and vividly motivated. She has people falling all over themselves to show her their latest-and-greatest prosthetic advances so that she can be a spokesman–albeit tangentially–for their new product.
Let’s look at a different amputee, shall we?
Let’s talk about D. D. came down with diabetes–severely–in his thirties. It could have been due to his addiction to Dr Pepper (doubtful, but it was a serious addiction!); one version is that his diabetes was caused by a severe blow to his abdomen from his on-again, off-again common-law wife and mother of his children, which deposited him in the hospital with trauma to (among other things) his pancreas. But diabetes definitely runs in his family; his father had Type II, his grandmother had Type II, his cousin developed it in his forties, and no doubt there will be others.
Although the doctors were–as I understand it–overwhelming in their insistence that he needed to care for himself as a severe diabetic, including watching his blood sugar with an eagle eye, D. lived in denial, continuing his Dr Pepper addiction and sort of waving the diabetes away. In his forties, he began getting severe foot infections. He didn’t take care of one, and didn’t go to the doctor for a long time, and then there was a question of whether his doctor was a quack (one point of view) or whether he just wasn’t following doctor’s instructions very well (another point of view). Anyway, as is common among diabetics, the infection in his toe turned gangrenous, it had to be amputated, and then things didn’t heal, so he had to have the foot amputated.
A year or so later, the other foot had to come off too.
D. was on Medicaid (I believe). The insurers were reluctant to purchase prosthetics that were any good; oh, they’d buy the cheapest of the lot, but those (as I understand it) didn’t fit very well, were hard to walk with, and, what with one thing or another, D. ended up wheelchair-bound.
D. was not young. He was not attractive–not ugly, but not attractive. He was definitely intelligent, but rather than being a go-getter, he was the kind of guy who was always looking out for ways to “get around”, “get by”. (This was, I must say, a severe frustration for the remainder of his family.) He was the kind of guy who was irritated by other people trying to make him do things, like, say, the cops; but when someone else trespassed on his turf, he was indignant when the cops didn’t do anything. Nobody was pounding on his doors offering him bigger-better-faster-more prosthetics. And his insurance certainly wouldn’t offer anything but the basic. In the end, his being wheelchair-bound cost him his life; his house was set on fire, he was upstairs and unable to escape, and he died.
There are 80,000 to 84,000 foot amputations each year in the U.S. due to diabetes. A basic leg prosthesis starts at $2,000, with additional costs from physicians and prosthetic specialists raising the cost up to $10,000. As someone commented on a Digg posting about Mullins’ TED talk, “most of her prostheses are likely already on the market (all except the arty ones, which appear to be custom designed). no prosthesis is “mass produced” they all have to be individually fitted and cast, sometimes more than once… below the knee prostheses average $8,000 - $16,000. the ones that are for running start at around $22,500. prosthetic limbs are horrendously expensive. an above the knee prosthesis can cost as much as $32,000. it is a huge problem facing the disabled community because health insurance almost never fully covers it or repairs, alot of coverage is as low as a $1,500 annual limit for prosthetics, which in most cases doesn’t even cover repairs.” Steve, at My New Leg, takes you through the process of (a) getting a new prosthesis, (b) the complications, (c) dealing with insurance; his process starts here. All the comments I read from either amputees with prosthetics or health professionals who deal with them made it very clear that it’s very expensive to get good prosthetics and it’s very difficult to get insurance to actually cover it.
Aimee Mullins is excited by the possibilities in prosthetics. She has twelve pairs of legs; she can switch between any pair any day she wants. (Which sort of reminds me of Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz (chapter here), who was able to switch heads depending on what she wanted to look like each morning–Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for her collection…) Mullins is passionate about the future, about how people who need prosthetics can pick and choose what their new abilities are going to be. But in her talk, she glosses over–actually, she leaves out entirely–the fact that her situation is far from the norm; she, by virtue of her go-getter personality and good looks, has a much better prognosis, prosthetics-wise, than, oh, 98% of the amputees out there. My brother D. was one of those 98% who live in the real world.
I was going to use some weird pun on “tendon”, but I couldn’t think of one. So I figured I’d just indulge in some early ’80s music to say:
All is well with OmegaDad. The doc says he was very, very lucky in that he missed everything that could have caused problems–no damaged tendon, no damaged nerves, no nicked vein or artery, just straight through.
Whew. Of course, it will take weeks to heal, but, hey–it gave me the chance to make tonight’s dinner tortillas. Now I know that you need to roll them tissue-thin, instead of paper-thin.
(For the purists out there: Yes, I am quite aware that this is not Falco’s original version…)
If you are interested in sharing the wonders and intricacies of the kitchen with your seven-year-old dotter, and you want to demonstrate to her that mango pits are hard and woody and stringy and stuff like that…?
Don’t use a dull-ish kitchen knife to jab at the mango pit.
Especially if that dull-ish kitchen knife has a nice sharp point.
Especially if your index finger is somewhere behind the mango pit.
Because what will happen is you will exclaim (loudly) (in front of the seven-year-old), “OH, SHIT!!!” when the knife rebounds off the mango pit and slices through your finger.
And then you will have to send your seven-year-old haring off for your wife, who is blissfully, quietly, peacefully sitting on the front porch soaking in the sun.
There will be a frantic interlude in the bathroom, with blood spurting everywhere and your dotter offering her hand-made first-aid kit as help.
And then the whole fam-damily will spend the next two hours getting you off to an (open) urgent care center, where the doctor and nurse will put you into a surgical room, clean and examine the wound, and let you know (by the way) that you actually went all the way through the finger and you might have severed your flexor tendon. And here’s the number of the orthopedic surgeon you need to call tomorrow morning. And here’s the splint for your finger, which you may need to wear for up to six weeks. And if you don’t wear the splint and bend your finger wrong, and you have harmed the flexor tendon, it will snap and retreat up the inside of your arm and the surgeon will need to stick a wire up your arm and fish around looking for the tendon, and, and, and…
At which point, your wife will flinch and hunker down and cover her ears because, dayum, she so does not want to hear this graphic detail, thankyewverramuch.
And then the whole family will wander off to the nearest pharmacy that is still open to get pain killers and antibiotics ASAP.
And then the whole family will go off to IHOP for dinner and have the worst dinner possible. (I had something that purported to be chicken crepes florentine. There were, somewhere inside these things, small pieces of spinach. There was, on the outside, a drenching of some coagulated yellow gravy stuff. There were many pieces of chicken and onion. Isn’t spinach much cheaper than chicken?!)
Anyway, this is your PSA for the day: Mangoes are dangerous.
Ash fall actually hit us last night; while it was, apparently, pretty dreadful to drive in, when we woke up in the morning there wasn’t a huge amount of it.
Enough for OmegaDad to haul both cars off to the carwash to remove same, but mostly–as the Weather Service said–a “dusting”.
And now it’s time for Stupid Mommy Tricks.
This afternoon, OmegaDotter got on the computer while I was shifting various loads of laundry, and started up Wilber Pan’s Wuha video. When I got back to the office, she was in kung-fu pose wanting to do some “Wuha-ing” of her own.
I got the bright idea to show her a move that I thought might actually work.
I did not have the bright idea to, say, warn her ahead of time.
I just had her give me her hands, took them in mine, reached forward with my right leg, hooked it behind her left ankle, and pulled towards me, pushing her away from me at the same time.
Hey! Guess what?! That trick really works!
And if you’re not expecting it to work, you get yanked off balance and are sent tumbling forward right onto your “opponent”.
In this case, that would be me smashing into OmegaDotter.
She landed on her back. I managed to bash her eyeball and nose with my arm and elbow. It all seemed to be happening in slo-mo; I managed not to get her in the solar plexus with my knee by somehow twisting around and getting my knee off to the side.
Which means, while I was whacking her a good one in the eye and nose, I was also whacking my knee something fierce on the floor.
There’s a particular feeling of oh-my-god-ness to the realization that you may just have really hurt your very own child. I was terrified that I had broken her nose; she was curled in a ball crying, and I was pulling at her going, “Omimgod baby are you all right omigod baby I didn’t mean it I’m so sorry omigod are you all right sweetie talk to me?!?!“
After a twenty-minute bout of crying snuggled in my lap, and me carefully poking at her nose and waiting for a nosebleed or swelling or purpling, I managed to make her laugh somehow, and all was well.
Except for the fact that my knee is now swollen and quite painful. She, of course, is doing fine.
So there’s your PSA for the evening: Don’t play around with faux martial-arts moves when you don’t know what you’re doing; you might actually hurt someone.
I have crawled from my death bed to scrawl this note.
(Okay. It’s not a “death bed”. Really. It’s just a “bad back bed”. An “I can’t bend over” bed. An “If I twist this way, a jolt of fire goes down my leg” bed.)
So yesterday, while congresscritters were voting down the bailout and the stock market was crashing (only to resurge again today), OmegaDad had to have a colonoscopy in Big City. Which meant I had to drive him there and back again. But it was at 2 p.m.–a very awkward time, to be sure, because the dotter gets off her school bus at 3:45 p.m., and there was no way on Gawd’s green earth that we would be back in time. And our next-door neighbor, rescuers of choice in such situations, aren’t there in the afternoons, because Mama Neighbor is now working three jobs. Ack. So I called on M., mother of H., in a panic yesterday morning, and M. agreed to pick up the dotter and help her do homework, have a snack, play with H., all the good things…
And, oh, by the way, was the dotter invited to S.’s birthday party? Because it was that night at 6:30, and H. was going.
Um. Noooo, the dotter was not invited to S.’s birthday party.
But, aside from the “I’m not invited to S.’s birthday party!” woes that this would bring up, no problemo, because we surely would be back home before M. had to drive H. off to the party.
Right?
Wrong.
Because there was an accident. On the other side of the highway. Which caused both directions to close down. Starting at 5:20 p.m., right around the time we were headed towards the highway. Which we got onto at 6:45, because the feeder road we were on was also backed up, because no-one could get onto the highway.
When we drove by the accident site, OmegaDad growled about rubberneckers backing up traffic. I said surely the accident was on both sides of the highway.
Surely?
Nope. When we finally got home, after picking the dotter up and apologizing profusely, up and down and left and right, I bopped onto the local newspaper’s site, and, yup, the accident was on the other side of the road. Grrr.
Which, of course, made me think about a lot of scientific research being done on turbulent flow and the psychology of traffic jams, none of which I feel like researching on the internet right now and posting links about, but trust me, it’s there, and both types of studies are highly relevant.
Anyway, driving all that time with a bad back has ended up making me feel like shit today.
Wah.
Pretzel asks why we don’t see stars here very often. That’s because during the summer we simply don’t have night at all, just a long, bright twilight. And when we do have night, we often have cloud cover, so no stars.
Mrs. Figby (now at Halcyon Mama) accidentally hooked into my self-doubt with her comment “You are such a good mama. Challenging her, and then letting her off the hook.” about the hike. Lemme tell you, I didn’t feel like a “good mama” at all. At the time, I was almost panicking, because I was afraid that me pushing her to try the higher part of the butte was going to End Up Very Badly. It was looking, at one point, like the only way we were going to get the both of us down was by me carrying her. I shudder at the thought (and not just because my back hurts like hell).
And GrannyJ commented that the first pic in the Walk in the Woods post was very similar to one of me at the same age, also in the autumn. Mamasan, I have to say that I took a much more reminiscent photo (and I was thinking of that exact same picture), but, alas, it was blurry. Bah!
Today, I decided to do some squats while the microwave was zapping my popcorn.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.
Because shortly thereafter, my lower back started hurting.
And it kept hurting, more and more.
And if I turn the wrong way, it shoots down through my butt.
Wah!
OmegaDad just informed me, after reading the subject line of this post, “You’re still a hot and sexy young thang to me!” Which garnered him major brownie points. Then he lost them, as he continued in the “llama voice”, “…As I push you in your wheelchair down the hallway…”
(Some day I will record him doing the “llama voice” and post it on the blog.)
Anyway. I’m watching Hurricane Ike worriedly, as it vacillates every which way. It’s supposed to landfall around Galveston. At the same time, it’s pounding the coast around Louisiana. OmegaBro and family are in Louisiana…
And politics goes on. Apparently, the use of simile and metaphor is lost in the U.S. these days, except amongst certain people. There’s a video where Obama essentially starts to say, “What the f…?!” about the whole “lipstick on a pig” hoorah that I thought about showing, but this one from David Letterman yesterday is better, and he avoids any pitfalls with the phrase “what the…”:
I hate to let Carosgram down , but I’m sure it’s no surprise to her that I am actually planning to vote for Barack Obama, and hope to heavens that the Republicans really don’t win. I just feel frustrated that whoever wins the election is going to get stuck with the mess that has been the result of 8 years of Bush policies, and that whoever it is, no matter what kind of job he does, is going to end up being The Mean Mom of U.S. politics and thus voted out of office in the next election.
Name: OmegaMom Home:Southwest Alaska About Me: Middle-aged mom of an 8-year-old adopted from China. Love science, debate, good SF and fantasy, hiking, music of almost every style. Lousy housekeeper. "Good enough" mom.
