Monthly Archives: April 2018

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Eeeeeee

My theme is happy things, though sometimes they are things where I am trying to find the perspective to love what is happening.

When my son was little, I had Dr. Suess’s ABCs memorized: Ear, egg, elephant, E, e, e!

My words today are everybody, embody and evening.

E for Everybody. Everybody in, nobody out! This is one of the calls for Healthcare for all, and I am still a Mad as Hell Doctor, working for single payer.

Our state representative was here a year ago and said that there is not a mandate for healthcare for all. I said, “I politely disagree. We already have a law in place that emergency rooms cannot turn anyone away. They cannot refuse to treat a person. This is a mandate for care. Unfortunately, the emergency room is the most expensive and inefficient care, unless you are about to die. The emergency room cannot do chronic care: it cannot help people stop smoking, help lower blood pressure, help people with chronic illness such as diabetes, do preventative care like pap smears and checking kidney function to stave off renal failure. We have the mandate: now we need the political will to change to a single payer system that gives good care. A patient can see me in my family practice clinic a dozen times for the cost of one emergency room visit.” S o, everybody in, nobody out. The law that insurance companies can ONLY keep 20 cents of every dollar does not comfort me: I want my dollar to go to health care for everyone and not 1/5 to profit!

Embody: what do I embody? What do you embody? Do you treat your body well? Do you thank it? What is it carrying?

I see people so fixed on success and progress and getting goals, that sometimes we don’t pay any attention to our bodies. We treat the body like a tool, like a hammer or a wrench, use and abuse it, try to make it conform to some idea of external beauty, get angry when it breaks down. Fix me back to where I was three years ago, when I could work 12 hours a day and never ever paid attention to my body. Bad food, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, gallons of caffeine, energy drinks, sugar, illegal drugs, no exercise… and then we are surprised when it breaks down? Even exercise is seen as an inconvenient and necessary job, like buying new tires for the car. When people say get me back to where I was, I ask, “Back to working the 12 hours a day that caused this damage? Do you think that is a good idea?

And I include myself in that! I have had pneumonia with sepsis symptoms twice. The second time I thought, how dumb I am! My father died and I did not take any time off. I just kept working and added executor to my jobs and cried daily. Is it any surprise that after a year of that I became ill? Now my goal is to not do medicine for more than forty hours a week and to listen to my body and to take breaks!

Evening: the sunset. I am so grateful for the day, for the night, for the light changing and the world turning, for the stars and the moon and the sun and the glorious, gorgeous, generous world.

E

This is an evening photograph from Mauna Loa last week.

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view

For the Daily Prompt: churn.

This is not a churn. It’s a cat. This is Princess Mittens. Oh, I miss her, but she is gone. I was looking for a photograph of students with a churn. I have one, but I found this instead. It is from my old phone photos and I don’t think that I took it: my son, I suspect.

Churning the internet…. “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”.

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Big D, little d, what begins with D?

Happy things starting with D:

Discrimination, death, delight.

I am happy that slowly, slowly, it feels as if there is change in the world and a decrease in discrimination. It is NOT gone by any means, but I think it is slowly being eroded.

My parents had a party when I was two and they were both in college. The party was raided in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1963 and my father was taken to jail. My mother and I were left alone and she was afraid we would be lynched by the neighbors. The next morning the paper wrote about a MIXED RACE COLLEGE STUDENT PARTY possibly with orgies. My parents were both suspended from the University of Tennessee.

They were both reinstated after a hearing, because there were no drugs, no underage drinkers, and it was not illegal to have a mixed race party. My parents never touched marijuana ever and I think it was because of that party. I don’t remember it, but I still feel cautious at parties and in crowds. My mother refused to return to the U. of TN and eventually finished her undergraduate degree at Cornell. My parents were so notorious that we left Knoxville as soon as my father graduated.

I grew up learning protest songs and work songs and joke songs. My mother joked about the party and it was years before I found out how terrifying it was. My mother joked that they sat at the one liberal table at the University of Tennessee. I hate discrimination and I do not understand it.

Death: is death a happy thing? Death is as much a mystery as life, and we cannot have one without the other. How could we value life if it were eternal? And we’d also get awfully crowded. I have the privilege of caring for all ages in clinic, all genders, any race that comes in the door, age newborn to 104, what joy! I get to be present when someone is dying and try to help the person and the family. There is no single idea about death or about how to “do it right” and often families struggle with multiple opinions and ideas and feelings. Death is as intense as birth and I have had the privilege to attend both.

Delight: there are many things that I find difficult and depressing, but I find delight too! The latest morbidity and mortality report from the CDC on overdose deaths, up from 52K in the US in 2015 to 62K in the US in 2016: Overdose deaths involving opioids, cocaine and psychostimulents — United States, 2015-2016. We have to work harder to prevent addiction, why do we choose addictive substances, why do people think it won’t happen to THEM?

And yet, I still find delight, taking photographs of bird, seeing patients that I know well in clinic, we laugh often, finding joy walking outside, my family and friends.

D

The photograph is from Mauna Loa last week. It is not a giant dinosaur nest, it’s a cinder cone. At least, that’s what a geologist claims….

 

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Croon

Blogging from A to Z, my theme is happy things.

Three happy things with C:

My daughter was home from college this weekend. Something came up about dealing with feeling tired or stressed. “I get cuddles when I feel that way, ” she says. I looked at her. “I’m not sure my office manager would go for that,” I say. “Oh,” says my daughter, “True. That might be sexual harassment.” “It would be a bit weird on a job description, wouldn’t it?” “Yes.”

At any rate, cuddles, appropriate cuddles, are certainly a happy thing for both me and my daughter. She is in college and has a great group of housemates and friends.

Second happy C word: cry.

How can crying be happy? The capacity to cry, I am grateful for that. I am grateful that I can feel love, feel vulnerable, feel loss, feel. How can we love without mourning and how can we mourn without crying? And tears release our grief. The worst grief for me is when I need to cry and feel locked, that I can’t cry, that it hurts so much the tears won’t come. I cry over patients, even expected deaths at 104. And I am glad that I am able to cry.

Third C word: croon.

I am not thinking of the “crooners”. I am thinking about lullabies and the poem Moon Song, by Mildred Plew Meigs:

Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon–
Over the crinkling sea,
The moon man flings him a silvered net
Fashioned of moonbeams three.

The rest is here: http://wenaus.com/poetry/moonsong.html.

I am thinking of mothers and fathers crooning to babies as they slide into sleep….

The photograph is at 9000 feet up on Mauna Kea last week, the moon as night is falling.

C

 

 

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birds, beauty, brains

Three happy things today: Birds!

Not a great photograph, right? I like it, partly because it was such a challenge. Still on the big island of Hawaii, we spot two very small birds building a nest. I am zoomed all the way in and holding the camera up to catch a glimpse when one flies in. They are very quick and there is lots of greenery in the way!

I am happy about brains. No, I am not a zombie, I don’t eat them, I just like that my work engages my mind. I learn new things daily from patients, from specialists, from looking up engaging questions! Medicine is changing continuously and I am grateful to be part of it.Β  (Ok, I am not grateful that insurance companies are increasing prior authorization exponentially.)

I am happy about beauty. Here is another glimpse of our small nest builders and we think we’ve identified them.

DSCN1723.JPG

I think that this is a common waxbill, also not a native bird. Either that or a black-rumped waxbill but neither of us got a good shot of the back. Hooray for spring and nests.

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Mundane Monday #154

Welcome to Mundane Monday #154: Color contrast.

I am continuing Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday photography posts. Add your pingback and I will list submissions next week. My Monday is much later than photrablogger’s, so I am thinking of posting Sunday night, to get things rolling. Opinions?

I am back from Hawaii and work today. I read about the cardinals in Hawaii. They were introduced to the island from the east coast in 1929. They seem to beΒ  thriving and are so bright against the very verdant greens.

Photrablogger put submissions from the previous week up in the new week. While I was still trying to post remotely last Monday, Colette got the theme: angle.

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admire

Three happy things for the letter A:

I am thinking of the women I admire, whose names start with A. Anne, Amelia, Azula, Artemis, Adele.

They run businesses, work at the post office, make gorgeous hats, teach dogs and their owners, work in healing.

I am so happy I have so many women, whose names start with A, who I admire!

That is two happy things: the third is the abstract photograph and abstract art, that encourages me to dream.

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Happy things

This is for the Blogging from A to Z theme reveal:

I choose my theme today: Happy things.

When we first moved to Port Townsend, my mother had recurrent of ovarian cancer. My husband was very unhappy and my son had to switch schools in January, leaving a teacher that he loved in Colorado and all his friends. I was working and finding learning all the new phone numbers, specialists, acronyms and patients difficult.

After a while, I instituted Happy Things. At bedtime I told my son that we each had to say three happy things.

“But mom,” said my son. “I am not happy.”

“Well,” I said, “They don’t have to be very happy.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Just a little happy. Like, only three patients cried today and not four. No one died today in my clinic. I didn’t forget my lunch like yesterday.”

He thought about it. “We didn’t have the awful pizza at lunch today.”

“Good job! What else?”

“I only got yelled at by the teacher twice.”

“Great! How about the other kids?”

“I only got hit on the playground once.”

“Good job. Yeah, stuff like that. A meteor didn’t hit the school and destroy everyone.”

“I’d get out of school then.”

“If you survived.”

So we did happy things every night and sometimes they were very dark and gradually they got better. I will do happy things from A to Z and some days they may only be a little happy….

The rat is for my son. He has pet rats. This rat is loose on Hawaii, which is not a happy thing for the native birds, but I think the rat may be happy. It came down the tree and was then holding very still, trying to convince us that we couldn’t see it. Be careful, rat, because we saw a mongoose there too.

For the Daily Prompt: toxic. Is the rat toxic? An immigrant? I would immigrate if I had to, so how can I scorn others who do?

It is a small picture, because I had my phone zoomed all the way in. Hello, rat. We see you.