Tag Archives: wellness

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Is this a tree?

Is this a tree?

I would not call this a tree. I would call it a cone. It contains seeds. It is not a tree.

A pregnancy is called an embryo until 8 weeks after conception and then a fetus until birth. It is not a baby, any more than a seed is a tree. Here is a link to a picture of the embryo developing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_embryonic_development#/media/File:HumanEmbryogenesis.svg

It’s a bit difficult to call the embryo a baby.

After 8 weeks (10 weeks from the last menstrual period) the developing pregnancy is called a fetus. It cannot survive outside the womb. A term pregnancy is 37 weeks, and the due date is at 40 weeks. The earliest survival, certainly not natural, is around 24 weeks. This takes heavy intervention and technology, a premature infant on a ventilator for months. There is risk of damage to the eyes from high oxygen and risk of spontaneous brain bleed and cerebral palsy, because the newborn can weigh half a pound. Once born, the fetus is termed a baby.

This is important from a medical standpoint and pounded into us as physicians. WHY? Because in a trauma situation, the life of the mother comes first. In Obstetrics and Family Medicine, the life of the mother comes first. In Oncology, the life of the mother comes first. My sister was diagnosed with stage IIIB ductal breast cancer at age 41. She was engaged and it turned out that she was pregnant. She wrote this essay on her blog, Butterfly Soup:

The hardest loss of breast cancer.

She had an abortion and chose chemotherapy, because it was her or the fetus. If she had chemotherapy pregnant, at that time she was told that it would probably kill the fetus or cause terrible birth defects. If she held off on chemotherapy for seven months, her oncologist thought she would die. She had a very very aggressive cancer and she already had a daughter who needed her.

She lived until age 49, with multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, gamma knife radiation, whole brain radiation. And she lived until her daughter was 13. Without the abortion, her physicians thought she would have died when her daughter was 7.

My ethics in medicine are that patients have autonomy. I would NOT have wanted my sister to choose to refuse chemo and try to bring a baby to term while dying of breast cancer. However, it was HER CHOICE, not mine. It was private and no one else’s business and how dare people make moral judgements about another person’s medical choices. I give my patients CHOICES. They can choose not to treat cancer and go into hospice. They can choose surgery or refuse it. They can choose to treat opioid addiction or refuse. They may die of a heroin overdose and I grieve. I try to convince them to go to treatment and I give them nalaxone to try to reverse overdoses. I refuse a medication or treatment that I think will harm my patients, but my patients have autonomy and choices. That extends to women and pregnancy as well.

It is NOT a baby in the womb, however emotionally attached people are to this image. It is an embryo first and then a fetus. And in a car wreck, the woman comes first and the fetus second.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: explain.

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TITANIC

I am doing the three day AAFP (American Academy of Family Physicians) physician wellness conference.

Here: https://www.aafp.org/membership/benefits/physician-health-first.html

I think it’s going to be TITANIC.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: TITANIC.

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I voted

…after I spent about three hours going through paper and throwing it out… ok, like a total numbskull I mislaid my ballot. Have you mislaid your ballot? FIND IT! VOTE!

” …that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.“

When I went across the country as a Mad as Hell Doctor in 2009, we talked to people everywhere. I joined the group in Seattle. I had never met any of them and had only heard about them two weeks before. But we were on the road, talking about health care, talking about single payer healthcare, talking about Medicare for All.

Some people said, “I don’t want the government in healthcare.”

We would ask, “Are you against medicare?” “No!” “Medicaid?” “No!” “Active duty military health care?” “No! We must take care of our active duty!” “Veterans?”  “No! They have earned it!”

…but those are all administered by the government. More than half of health care in the US. So let’s go forward: let’s all join together and have Medicare for ALL! And if you don’t agree… so you don’t think you should vote? Hmmm, I am wrestling my conscience here….

We need one system, without 20 cents of every insurance paid dollar going to health insurance profit and advertising and refusing care and building 500++ websites that really, I do not have time to learn and that change all the time anyhow. How about ONE website? How about ONE set of rules? We are losing doctors. It’s not just me worrying: it’s in the latest issue of the American Academy of Family Practice.

Vote. For your health and for your neighbor’s health.

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Physicians for a National Healthcare Progam: http://pnhp.org/

Healthcare Now: https://www.healthcare-now.org/

I can’t credit the photograph, because I don’t remember who took it…. or if it was with my camera or phone or someone else’s! But thank you, whoever you are!

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Wellness

What is wellness and what is illness?

Many of the people that I see in clinic want healing. But healing is complicated. Many people define healing as “I want to be the way I was six years ago when I felt good.”

I delve into the time when they felt good. Sometimes when I start asking about it, they were very busy. Often very stressed. Often not paying attention to their own care, caring for someone else, a parent, a child, a partner. Or overworking with great intensity. “But I could do it!” they say, “I didn’t feel bad!”

…Maybe not. But the self care was deferred. The body struggled on as best it could, absorbing trauma after trauma, being ignored until a tipping point was reached. Then the switch was thrown and the system crashed…

When my sister died of cancer at 49, the family fought. Lawsuits. I promptly crashed and was out sick for two months. I nearly died too, of sepsis. I thought, I’m not going to be that stupid again. Well, except I was. My father died fourteen months after my sister and I was executor, dealing with a 1979 will. I was sure that I would be sued. I did not cut back work and I didn’t rest. I worked on the estate and cried, evenings and weekends.

After a year, I crashed again. Sepsis, again. I did not die, but this time I was out for ten months and then had to work half time for ten months. And I thought, oh, am I stupid or what? I didn’t take time off when my father died. I just pulled my boots up and kept working, two jobs. Executor and physician.

I made the rounds of specialists. I coughed for six months. Pulmonary. My lungs were slowly improving, very slowly. My muscles were lagging: neurology said they would get better. “When?” I said. “We don’t know,” said the neurologist, grinning. “I hate doctors,” I said. He laughed. On to Ear, nose and throat, then Asthma/Allergy, then Infectious Disease. “We don’t know how to keep you from getting it again.” says the Infectious Disease specialist cheerfully. “No idea.”

Back to work. Half time for ten months. And now my new “full time”. My goal is not to work more than forty hours a week. I spend 4.5-5 hours seeing patients and 3 hours reading and making decisions about labs, specialist notes, ER notes, inpatient notes, pharmacy notes, garbage from insurance companies, medicare’s new and improved impossible rules, continuing medical education, pathology reports, notes from patients and phone calls. And then I go home.

I would have qualified for a diagnosis of chronic fatigue six months into the illness. I didn’t seek it because I didn’t care. I was quite certain that I would get better, though I didn’t know how long it would take. I was quite certain that I would have to behave differently or I would crash again. If I get it again, I don’t think I will be able to do medicine and I like doing medicine. Also, if I get it again, there is a 28-50% mortality rate. Not good odds. So I need to pay attention, rest when the stress reaches the level of stupid, and take care of myself.

It is now thirty months since I got sick. I do actually feel like my muscles are back to normal. My lungs aren’t quite. I can tell when I play the flute that there is some scarring, after three bad pneumonias. But I can play and sing and I am slowly getting back to shape.

But note: I am NOT going back to where I was. I am paying attention. I am changing my job and my life so that I stay healthier. I am not returning to unhealthy levels of work and stress. And if stress in my personal life flips to high, I take time off from work. I have to, to stay healthy.

When I meet a new patient, the ones that are hardest to help are the ones who want to turn back the clock. They want the exact same life back that crashed them. The life that they got sick in. Think of a veteran getting blown up: we don’t expect them to be the same. Think of my 90 year old patient who went through both brain and heart surgery. He was better. He was able to hunt again which was his goal. But he said, “You have not made me feel that I am 20 again.” I laughed and said “And I am not going to. Talk to your higher power.” He was teasing me, but he was also acknowledging that his body and his endurance and his health at 90 was different than at age 20.

We need a new paradigm of wellness. Wellness is not staying the same for one’s entire life. You will not be 20 for 70 years. Wellness is changing as your life changes and paying attention to what you and others need. Wellness is accepting illness and deciding how our life needs to be changed to be well.

I took the photograph of Mount St Helen’s five years ago. The mountain changed too, as we all do.

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quit

I’ve quit

again
stop start

stop
quit

I don’t think I’ll go back
it wastes the days
makes me so sick
takes so little for me to overdo

I resent lost time
and suffering

my body doesn’t want it
and tells me so
ferociously

alcohol you say?

that too

but I was talking about men

 

The photograph is my mother’s father’s mother. I have one of the originals. The back is stamped: Battle Creek, Michigan. So she was having a “rest cure” at Dr. Kellogg’s famous health retreat.