Archive for the 'healthcare' Category

doctor’s visits and somewhat too many bodily fluids

Posted by LK on Jul 01 2008 | Faustina, healthcare, motherhood

I took Faustina for her one-month checkup today. Where she also got the second installment of the hep-B vaccine.

I love her doctor: a young woman, perhaps a couple years younger than me (women her age always remind me of my sister and so I suspect I have a particular fondness for them), an immigrant (like me) if Indian descent (not like me) married to an American (like me, sort of). See how much I focus on things that are “like” for me? I like those. But more importantly: she takes as much time as I need, for questions, reassurance, even to chat, because that is how you make a new mom comfortable.

She was sick at Faustina’s first doctor’s appointment, the one two days after we brought her home from the hospital, and we got an older doctor from the practice. A sixty-something man, very kind, very old-school. I liked him well enough too, except that of the fifteen minutes he spent with us he took five to discuss Faustina and her health issues and ten to talk about where to go fishing in New Jersey with A. He even wrote down some the URLs of some fishing web sites he liked, on a piece of paper that (in hindsight) must have contained the vitamin information that our real doctor gave us again today.

Sure, he also noted that Faustina is beautiful, and completely normal, and has good suction (seriously: she does have good suction) and was clearly not going to worry himself over a baby who is completely fine. So it’s not that I was mad at him. And in a different time and different place, I’d have been very happy with him as our pediatrician. But I don’t live in that time or place and prefer our real pediatrician, who is chatty and young and talks to me about babies and children and is like a girlfriend. I’ve discovered I prefer girlfriend-ish doctors in general.

At today’s visit, Faustina got weighed and measured. She’s smack in the middle of all charts, in terms of both her size and her growth curve: she’s that elusive Completely Average-Sized Baby. Then the minute the weighing was done, when I picked her up off the scale and held her small naked body close so she wouldn’t get cold, she sprung a leak and peed all over me. Fun, isn’t it? Lucky that a month-old baby’s pee is just a clear, odorless liquid that dries within minutes. Because as soon as that was dry, my right boob decided it was time for Faustina to eat and joined her in leakage.

After that, the only thing that remained were being told she’s fine (again), being given the infant vitamin information (again), and Faustina getting a hep-B shot (again). That last part did not go as quickly as last time because right after she got it she began wailing like she’d just experienced the greatest, most unfair betrayal of her young life. Which I suppose is just about right. Except that afterwards it all got better because my right boob won and Faustina got fed in an empty examination room. I’m finding I’m becoming more selfish and demanding as a mother because I totally made the nurse who gave her her shot carry all our stuff over to the empty exam room for us. Because I had to focus on holding only my sweet little baby and nothing else.

no comments for now

exodus

Posted by LK on May 23 2008 | election 2008, healthcare, politics

I love Obama. What’s not to love?

But I’m torn about Hillary Clinton, I feel for her now as she’s being abandoned. And not because it would have been nice to have a woman president. It would have, of course. It’s just that her healthcare plan was much more solid than Obama’s, and what’s more, I think she would really have made it happen.

no comments for now

politics or healthcare

Posted by LK on Apr 11 2008 | healthcare, politics

“In fact, Mrs. Clinton was accurately repeating the story as it was told to her — and it turns out that while some of the details were slightly off, the essentials of her story were correct. After all the fuss, The Washington Post eventually conceded that “Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence” of Mrs. Clinton’s account. And even more important, Mrs. Clinton was making a valid point about the state of health care in this country.


In other words, this was a disgraceful episode. It was particularly sad to see a number of Obama supporters (though not the Obama campaign itself) join enthusiastically in the catcalls against Mrs. Clinton’s good-faith effort to put a human face on the cruelty and injustice of the American health care system.


Look, I know that many progressives have their hearts set on seeing Barack Obama get the Democratic nomination. But politics is supposed to be about more than cheering your team and jeering the other side. It’s supposed to be about changing the country for the better.


And if being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past.” (Paul Krugman in the New York Times)

Yes.

I am more and more firmly convinced that the lack of universal healthcare is the biggest problem of U.S. society today. It exacerbates economic issues - large numbers of small and medium-sized businesses can’t really take off because they can’t afford to provide their employees with health insurance. It’s one of the causes of prostitution. It’s bigger than the Iraq war, or rather, it’s a motivating factor: it gives disproportionate power over the lives of middle-class Americans to employers like the large corporations to whom the war’s been subcontracted, and to the military. And it causes the U.S. to spend more federal dollars on healthcare per capita than any other industrialized country.

Maybe I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s style much these days but I can’t fault her for continuing to point all this out, over and over and over again. Because people, this point needs to be gotten already.

no comments for now