Whining

So this weekend I broke a tooth -- a molar that was like 70% fillings.  (Why, yes, I did grow up in Louisiana, a state with no fluoride in the water, because communism, thanks for asking!)

I called my wonderful dentist, who said she could fit me in today at 2:00, but sadly today is the Teaching Day From Hell, when I teach from 8:00 a.m. until 8:30 p.m., so no go on that unless I wanted to cancel classes, and since I've had to cancel classes once already this semester I was reluctant to do that.

Me: "Well, the tooth is hurting.  But not that badly.  Do you have any time tomorrow? Or Thursday?"

(These are my non-teaching days, the days I use for writing. Or, you know, going to the dentist.)

The dentist's assistant: "We can fit you in Thursday afternoon. Are you sure it's not hurting?"

Whining About My Health

So, I've had this stomach issue forever -- a hiatal hernia is the technical term, for those keeping score at home.

Often this sort of thing causes no problems.

Sometimes it causes "mild discomfort," which OTC drugs can relieve.  I've been on those for one billion years now.

Sometimes, eventually, as with me, it causes an ulcer, which is where we are now.  I have a lovely ulcer, and am on some very nice drugs for it -- proton-pump inhibitors and something other drug, they work very nicely, but holy hell the regime is complicated.

I have to take them five times a day, and one of them I can't take with food; and one I must take with food but no other drugs; and meanwhile I have all the other drugs I must take (because I am still, always, a recovering cancer patient); and then today I discovered, looking one of these drugs up, that it can interact with one of the other drugs I'm on -- the levothyroxine for my missing thyroid -- so now I have to call in on Monday and find out what to do about that.

On the other I sold a story last week -- yay! -- and today I received the contract for it and got paid for it.

Nothing like getting paid for writing.  Absolutely the best!

Toxic Ignorance

So a town not far from my town has finally -- finally -- made the decision to add fluoride to its water supply.

This is a big deal for Arkansas.  In 2011, our governor made it a law that all cities and towns with populations over 5,000 people had to add fluoride to their water. (A great many did not, up to then, including my charming city of residence: we're supposed to have it starting in November 2015.)

Giving the appalling lack of dental care in Arkansas -- this is partly due to poverty, and partly due to a serious lack of dentists -- you'd think anything that improved people's teeth would be welcome.

But that just shows you don't know Arkansasans.

Oh, Wow

They passed the bill.

(Re Stupak, btw.)

Oh, Yeah

They're not racist.

The No. 3 Democrat in the House, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, said, “I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus.”

Update:  And here you will find a teabagger making an attempt at defense of the above event.  Note the raving misogyny -- "squeal like frightened schoolgirls"-- as well as the just plain raving.  Sigh.

Right-Wing Thugs

I was holding a conference with a student in my office the other day, discussing the rhetoric of persuasion, and somehow Fox News and talk radio came up.  "Well, yes," I said.  "But really that's not how you want to argue."

She looked dubious.

"No, really," I said.  "It's not effective, in the long run."

She did not seem convinced.

"I know it's very nearly all you hear," I said, and bit my tongue hard to keep from adding, in Arkansas, "but in fact if you move out of that certain realm, talk radio and cable network news, up into serious journalism and academic discourse, you'll find less ad hominem attacks and strawmen and," I managed not to say crap, "fake data, and more, well, more of an attempt, at least, to reach the truth through argument."

She smiled politely:  no doubt remembering everything her preacher had told her, warning her about socialist/atheist professors like me, who would try to lure her away from the paths of righteousness with my wily ways.

I repressed a sigh.  "Anyway," I said, handing her back her draft.  "Find better sources."

Healthcare Now!

This from DailyKos is your MustRead today.

I was at a party last night (I know! Me at a party!  WTF!), about a dozen of us, graduate students, professors, two ornithologists (yes! really! they are part of the team tracking the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!), media specialists, a guy who used have a lucrative career with Cox Cable before he got fucked by downsizing, and we had been drinking and talking birds and universities and politics and our wicked youths, the sorts of things one does discuss in NW Arkansas at this sort of party, but invariably, as usual these days, the party devolved to the discussion of hospitals, doctors, and medical debt. 

Everyone of us at that party, and nearly all of us, mind you, had actual jobs, and all of us had actual insurance, but all of us are up to our chins in medical debt, and most of us have been turned over to collection agencies by various doctors and hospitals: this despite have insurance, this despite paying on the medical bills we have to the best of our ability (not very well, since medical bills and medical insurance are now eating up about a fifth of my take-home income).  We're standing there in a huddle at the party swapping tactics on how to deal with collection agencies and hospital billing departments, desperate as outlaws, people who have, in fact, paid for their health care, because none of us had ever missed an insurance payment, while meanwhile the insurance companies, last I heard, post larger and larger profits, as do the drug companies.

Then?  This year?  I get the fine news from my university that they will be raising our insurance premiums.  Oh yay.

Pass the damn bill.

More On Healthcare

The Free Clinics came to Arkansas.

These are the same folk that take free medical care to third world countries, and took them to LA a while ago.  They went to Little Rock, and, as usual, had people lined up for hours.

No health care crisis in this country, nah.

Bad Economy Blues Part II

Krugman's column in the NYTimes today is worth reading -- well, it almost always is, but today especially.  He's talking about the need for more stimulus.  The bit that's been done already has helped some, and, as Krugman admits in the column, that's nice; but nowhere near enough.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

Of course, we've got the Teabag fringe, wailing (now, not when Bush was running us into debt paying for that useless war) about how our grandchildren will be SADDLED with DEBT!!!1!; but, as Krugman also notes, this is classic pennywise thinking.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

And, as I'll point out, to anyone who isn't living in that Winger alt.world (we'll just make up the planet we want to live in, where global climate change isn't happening, and the Iraq War is being won, and Reagan Was a Great President), things are dire out here in the actual world. Yesterday I had the third student of this semester alone drop out of school b/c she could no longer afford to be a student.  This one was a junior -- the other two had been underclassmen.

Rent and debt and food and health costs and fuel prices are so high these students are not able to stay in school.  It's not tuition.  It's the cost of living.  My freshman who quit mid-semester said he just couldn't spare the time off work.  (He works at Sonic, by the way.)

We're eating our seed corn.  For what?  To pay for a useless war?  To make health insurance executives even richer?  To prop up some demented old white guy's notion of what this country should be?

When will this be enough?

One Way To Save on HealthCare Cost

More Edge of the American West Goodness

(I'm not serious about saving on Healthcare, of course. I've just been watching Rachel Maddow and am totally ticked at the tactics of the Insurance Company lobbies, so I've decided to get healthcare reform into every single post from now on.)

Hack Gack

The end of the semester crash seems to have combined with what I hope is only a cold (the swine flu is supposed to have missed us, right?) to lay me low.  I am huddled under quilts while thunderstorms rage overhead, wishing I had the energy to check the blogs, or even read.  I'm in the middle of two excellent books right now, also: Dennis Lehane's The Given Day and Tony Kushner'sAngels in America, which I know it's like what 20 years old but I never did read that one.  Anyway, both are great and if you haven't read them and don't have a fever of 102 go for it.

Update: Just checked at the CDC and there are no confirmed cases of H1N1 flu in AR.  But man, do I feel awful.  Trying to decide whether to seek medical help.  All the $$ I already owe to medical guys around town is making me think I should just stay in bed and drink more Nyquil.

Yeah, Nyquil.

School's Out!

Done with grading, done with commencement, all done until January 7 -- yay! -- a few blessed weeks now to do my own work.  I have two short stories I plan to revised (I even know how to revise them) and an article to bang into shape.  I might be able to get that done in this amount of time.  What's the odds?

Meanwhile: three days until Hannukah starts and for once I actually have the presents all bought.  (The kid, sternly, last week: "Have you bought the presents yet?  All of them?")  I don't have the house cleaned up; but I do have a really good excuse, that I am broken.

Did my first PT session this morning.  The PT woman told me not to lift.  How can I clean house if I can't lift?  I ask you!

Also my shoulder guy -- or rather his nurse -- is getting stiff about the amount of drugs I am getting through.  Apparently I am eating too many pain drugs.  They have no idea how many pain drugs I would like to eat: that is all.

Weather Report

...metaphorical and otherwise.

My shoulder is repairing itself slowly; the bouncy weather (hot one day, icy the next, as fronts sweep through) is not helping.  I was up most of the night last night in violent pain, this despite taking five of my Vicodin.  (Shoulder guy took me off the Oxycontin, put me back on the lesser pain drugs.)

Mobility is increasing, though: I can lift my arm again, nearly shoulder-high, and type fairly well.

Starting official PT this week (I've been doing at-home PT since just after the surgery).

About halfway through the grading.  One plagiarist so far -- but only one.  Not so bad.

Health Care Blues

I've been ailing lately -- not seriously, mind you.  I damaged my shoulder getting out of the white chair in our front room (the only comfortable chair in the house, it used to be white: we bought it when the kid was four months old, and I told mr delagar it was a bad idea -- we have an infant and you're buying a white chair? I said.  We just won't let her on it with food, he claimed.  Ho ho ho ho ho.) and now, a month and nine or ten bottles of anti-inflammatory meds later, the doctor tells me I have damaged tendons and maybe bursitis.

She gave me the big shot this morning, with the big needle, right into the joint (ow); also a bottle of pain drugs.  (Yay!)  Which this post is not about, how much I love Vicodin.  Y'all know that already.

Nope, it's about this guy standing in front of me while I'm waiting to pick up the Vicodin.  His kid has a drug-resistant staph infection.  The meds to handle that cost, and I kid you not, two thousand dollars for eight pills.  His insurance covers eight hundred of it.

Luckily the guy is rich as shit, and only blinks a little before whipping out his AmX.  My kid would have had to die,  frankly.

Nor am I joking.  Last week that was mr delagar, who is borderline diabetic,  -- the doctor, the same one who gave me the big shot, after trying other things for a month, wanted to put him on a drug which is meant to coax his pancreas back into action. Biata, I think it's called? Only our insurance won't cover it, and it's $270/month, which, as broke as we are, that might as well be two thousand dollars.

So we had to do without the meds.  The doctor is currently arguing with our insurance over whether they should pay for the medication or let his pancreas die (and then they can pay for all the really expensive care that will come from him being a diabetic, which, hey, that makes plenty of sense) and meanwhile he's on meds that don't work, but are really really cheap.

Someone tell me again why socialized medicine is a bad idea.  I keep forgetting.

Doctors

Nothing wrong with the health care system in this country!

This guy, who runs RAM, Remote Area Charity, flies around the world bringing health care to impoverished nations. Guess who gets 60% of his time?

Why, that would be us! As in the U.S.!!

Not Africa, or some abandoned bit of India, nope, Tenneesee, the Ozarks, Georgia.

"You can just go to an emergency room," Bush asserted, speaking like a man who never had to do without healthcare in his fucking life. Stan Brock's RAM, on the other hand, provides vision care, dental care, all sorts of care, which, if Bush had a clue, he would realize you don't get from an emergency room, or any other health care facility unless you can pay up front -- and that's the definition of working poor: can't pay, up front or otherwise.

Why is this a crime? Because we ought to have universal health care in this country, that's why. Stan Brock's resources ought to go to actual poor countries, not to this one. We are not a poor country. Look around! Someone is getting rich as shit off the health care industry: off the misery of others. Is that the American way?

Like torture and wire-tapping, maybe it is.

(Via Unfogged)

Fat Girls 2

Re this post of yesterday: see also this, via Bitch PhD.

Fat Girls

Or, You're not going to eat that, are you?

Which (the above) got said to me by (a) my father (b) my first serious boyfriend (c) more friends in high school than I can count, about things ranging from bowls of cereal, hamburgers, oatmeal cookies, ice-cream sandwiches, bags of Doritos, boxes of raisins -- and here's the deal: I never was fat. Mind you, I wasn't skinny.

Girls are meant to be skinny: five-feet six, one-hundred and ten pounds, winsome and sweet, that's the goal, if you aren't that in America, well! Does it matter what else you are? I will give you the answer: no, it does not. Brains do not matter. Wit does not matter. Talent? Fuck talent. Slender, sweet, chicletness. That is all.

How clear was this made to me?

Stellar.

Which is why this matters so much to me.

It's yet another study, this one published in JAMA, reporting that being overweight is not, in fact, so bad for you -- and in some circumstances protects you.

The most surprising finding was that being overweight but not obese was associated only with excess mortality from diabetes and kidney disease -- not from cancer or heart disease. Moreover, the researchers found an apparent protective effect against all other causes of death, such as tuberculosis, emphysema, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and injuries. An association between excess weight and nearly 16,000 deaths from diabetes and kidney disease was overshadowed by a reduction of as many as 133,000 deaths from all other deaths unrelated to cancer or heart disease. Even moderately obese people appeared less likely to die of those causes.

Why does this matter to me?

Well, because all those folks who are always ragging on young girls, and not so young girls, about how they need to lose that weight, like to pretend it's the girls' health they care about - you're fat! It's a health issue! -- but this is shit, and anyone who listens to the discourse of these folk can see that. It's a class issue, it's a moral issue, it's the patriarchy, it's some form of oppression (which was why that ex-boyfriend of mine was using it to keep me in line) but whatever it is, it is not the girls' health they care about.

Which is why, when these studies showing that it is, in fact, actually healthy to be a bit overweight started showing up, these groups react so rabidly:

It's just rubbish," said Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It's just ludicrous to say there is no increased risk of mortality from being overweight. . . . From a health standpoint, it's definitely undesirable to be overweight."

Or see this: (From our side, I weep to say):

I'm sorry, being fat does NOT make you a minority or victim of discrimination. I'm not saying people don't discriminate against overweight people, but they also discriminate against blondes, bald guys, etc. - calling yourself a minority because you're fat is taking it too far. Unlike your racial status or sexual orientation, you actually CAN control your weight to a very large extent. Yes, genetics plays a part, but most people who are overweight eat too much or exercise too little...it's just a fact. Comparing being fat to being a racial minority demeans the meaning of what it is to be a minority.
How do I know I'm gonna get flamed for saying that?
Posted by: raginfem November 8, 2007 03:43 PM

I'm not really a pro-weight person (I accept that past a certain level health is affected, and I really think anyone past that point should focus on their health for their own good) but...
children with medical disorders and...parents who overfed their children to the point of diabetes or making them bedridden. I've often thought that continuing to feed someone unhealthy food when they were bedridden from obesity and aren't even able to feed themselves should be considered a crime, a bit like bringing razors to a known cutter just because they asked for them, or inducing vomiting in a bulimic. But any such legislation would have to only apply where there is an obvious, overwhelming issue.
Posted by: Basiorana November 8, 2007 03:45 PM

Basiorana, show me one incidence of a child being bedridden from obesity, and unable to feed themselves, and their parents continue to stuff them full of junk food. Just one.
Raginfem, if it was possible to change your race or sexual orientation, would that make discriminating against racial minorities and homosexuals suddenly okay? I hate that line of argument, because it totally comes across as: "Well obviously everyone would choose to be a straight white male if they could, but since they can't, it's wrong to insult them."
Posted by: under_zenith November 8, 2007 03:49 PM

"Is that supposed to be some kind of eugenics program to discourage people who are genetically prone to being overweight from reproducing (or at least living in that state)?"
I'm sorry, but that's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. In the '70s there were not nearly as many obese children and guess what - those people probably had similar genes to what people today have, even in the same families. Most kids I know who are obese stuff their faces all day with absolute crap and don't exercise. When obesity "runs" in families they've found that shared eating habits contribute just as much if not more to the weight than genetics. I'm guessing if you fed these kids who are "genetically prone to being overweight" healthy food for several weeks and had them play outside for a few hours every day, their excess weight would somehow magically disappear...
Posted by: raginfem

(Others on the thread do go on to settle these two! Yay for us!)

So: diets don't work (there are a billion studies out on that one); and if diets did work, skinny isn't healthy; and if skinny was healthy (which it ain't), being a little overweight ain't so bad and might actually be better (my dad, who is underweight, got pneumonia and lost 12 pounds this winter, hah, how good is that at 69? Ask his doctor!); and what is dangerous, by the way? What? Guess what the studies have shown is really bad for you?

Dieting.

Dieting kills.

Does that crack you up or what?

Also? Guess what makes kids fatter? Telling them they're fat. That makes them feel bad about their bodies, so they hate their bodies, and have bad body images, apparently, and -- hey, get this, start dieting, and get into that binge-eating cycle, and end up fat! Kids who have been told by parents or coaches or doctors that they're fat tend to end up five pounds fatter than kids who get left alone. (Don't ask me where they find kids in America who get left alone on this issue, b/c where those kids would be I would like to know.)

My kid started coming home from school when she was seven asking me if she was fat. (We made a concerted effort never to discuss her weight around her, mr. delagar and I both having had the weight issue visited upon us by our parents.) Apparently, all the girls in her first-grade class were on diets. At six and seven years old!

We don't keep a scale in the house. We don't talk about what anyone weighs. When the kid starts on about whether she's fat, I give the fat is a feminist issue rant, and tell her how diets are used to oppress women, and how she needs to eat to keep her brain working, and how dieting will actually harm her and causes the problems it is meant to solve and how she had better never ever ever diet, did she hear me? Did she?

Also no TV and a deal of hiking and other exercise.

They have hour-long recesses at the Montessori school.

She still starts up with the Am I Fat? questions, though*. It's in the rotten culture. It makes me ill.


*And no, she isn't.

Universal Healthcare -- It ain't Evil

Krugman gets it right here:

We offer free education, and don’t worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don’t need, because that’s the only way to ensure that every child gets an education — and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.

(snip)

The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be “to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly.”

But a child who doesn’t receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn’t receive an adequate education, doesn’t have the same shot — he or she doesn’t have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

I have students in my class, here in Fort Smith -- these are 18 and 19 year old students, 22 year old students, 25 year old students -- who can't see the board, who haven't been to a dentist in years, who can't go to a doctor in the winter when they get sick, who can't even afford the Wal-Mart eye-guys, because they haven't got insurance, because it takes every cent of their tiny paychecks to pay their tuition and fill their gas tanks. Do you think they're doing as well on their algebra exams as someone who can see the board? Do you think they're doing as well with their praxis exams as someone whose teeth aren't rotting away?

Do you think this matters? Well, who do you think is going to be teaching your fifth graders in six years? Or mixing your prescriptions, for that matter?

We need universal healthcare because it just makes sense. Why anyone would think we don't, that's what mystifies me, at this point.

Fat Americans!

Here's one everyone should read.

...when I was about 11 years old, and Mom went to see her doctor because of some problem she was having, and he scathingly told her that her problem was she was fat, and not to come back to him until she’d lost 50 pounds...

This one makes me seethe for several reasons -- one is that mr. delagar is a fat guy, which I don't know whether I've mentioned that here; and this is what he gets whenever he goes to see his doctor, and I mean no matter what his issue is -- he could have a damn pimple on his ass, his doctor would say, well, what do you expect, of course you get zits, you need to lose ninety pounds.

This is the same doctor who told him that being overweight was a moral issue.

Right. People are fat because they have poor moral fiber.

Why mr. delagar keeps going to this guy, hey, good question.

Nor is this attitude unique in our fine country -- I cannot count the number of sweet friends and family who have pointed out to me that mr. delagar has a weight problem ("No! Really?") , or who have informed me that he really "should" do something about it ("Magic unicorn dust, maybe?"), or who dismiss every other feature of his life and character as irrelevant: he's nothing else to them. Just fat.

It is, of course, a prejudice like any other: "He's nothing else to them: just black." "She's nothing else to them: just a Jew." "He's nothing else to them: just queer."

People feel freer to indulge in this one, same as they do in the one against gay folk, some of them, because they reckon fat is something people choose. Just put down the ice cream if you don't want to be 90 pounds overweight! Get up off the couch one time!

Because that's all there is to it, right?

Don't we wish. As the NIH tells us, diets have a failure rate of 98%. Tell me some other "cure" with a failure rate of 98% that anyone would endorse. Not to mention that this cure, in fact, often causes harm: many diets increase the risk of stroke, raise the blood pressure, cause organ damage -- you name it.

Exercise? It helps fitness. It doesn't help much with weight loss, in and of itself.

Do doctors know these things?

Ha! Wouldn't that be nice. I've known these things for about 15 years. In that time, I've found, I guess, about 2 doctors who did.

Do doctors need to know these things?

Do you need to ask? A doctor that sees a fat patient and says, oh, it's your weight causing the problem -- and looks no further? Is that an issue?

And will fat patients push the issue?

Most won't. I used to have to go with mr. delagar most of the time, because he had been smacked too hard and too long by our fat-hating soctiety. He'd been taught he was a second-class citizen and he deserved what he got. He fights back now -- well, except he won't quit this doctor and his whole "moral issue" crap -- but I think he's hoping to educate the dude.

Mostly fat patients believe it when their doctors say it's their own fault. Everyone else has always told them the same thing -- why wouldn't they believe it?