Studio Ruthe

Another week flew by

Mage, I'm just fine. I still have some interesting marks on my face, but they're fading quickly. I've been concentrating on the book so too busy to write. Often I write things in my head as I go through the week. Most of it never gets put in type. Eli thinks some day we'll have a direct hookup from our brains to the computer. I'm not sure I want to see that.

I went to two of my classes last week: stitching and Rachel Carson. Never got to the third one, fabrigami. Instead, I went on an Osher sponsored bus trip to Amish country in Ohio. Spent most of the time on the bus stitching.

Finally got to the plastic surgeon as instructed by both the ER doc and my GP. He was great; looked at my nose, which looks about the same as always, assured me he would fix it if it came out crooked (no age discrimination just because I'm an old lady) and told me he wouldn't do anything in my case--exactly what I wanted to hear. Told me, using other words, this was a 'cover your ass' situation. Ain't American medicine great.

I come away from this experience, as I always do when I encounter our medical system, with many thoughts about it. When I finish the book I'll do another post about health care.

Since this one is for you, Mage, I'll tell you a little about shopping. The most exciting part of it is that I can now get into regular sizes. I'm still under tall, but that's a condition I can never fix. When I was in New York I bought one pair of black pants, two tee shirts, one yellow, one beige, and a jacket I haven't worn yet: white with a black print that almost looks like embroidery, all at Chico's.

Mostly I've been shopping in my own closet. Yesterday I went to Nordstorms with Robin and Charna. I bought, on sale, a very handsome pair of black pants and a black and white print top. This will be for fall. I hate to pay Nordstrom prices, but I like wearing their clothes. The pants are size 16. Years ago, when I was somewhat thinner than now, I would take a 14 or 16 top and 18 pants. That says much more about what's happened to sizes than what's happened to me. Also, the more you pay, the larger the size.

One last thing: I'm back to walking--three miles in Frick Park on Saturday. 

Dear President Obama

What happened to the man I voted for? The man of courage and confidence who entered the election with overwhelming odds against him, and won. What happened to that man who was going to change the world? It looks to me like you have lost the stomach for the fight. By working with what you consider the possible you are giving up the chance to make the world better for all of us.

Thinking it was just an aberration, I didn't write to you when you selected Geithner and Summers. And I didn't know much about finance, although I am certainly learning about it.

I know a lot about healthcare, about fighting with insurance companies, about not being able to get insurance when my husband was made redundant (don't you love that word) at the age of 56. The only real answer to the healthcare mess in this country is to get rid of the insurance companies and institute a medicare-like single payer system.

AND YOU ARE NOT ALLOWING SINGLE PAYER BACKERS TO SPEAK THEIR PIECE.

Does that mean you have chickened out? Or are you now in the pockets of the insurance companies and big pharma?

David Sirota at Salon.com talks about your early support for single payer:

In that speech six years ago, Obama said the only reason single-payer proponents should tolerate delay is "because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.

then asks some of these same questions:

So it's back to why -- why Obama's insurance-industry-coddling inconsistency? Is it a pol's payback for campaign cash? Is it an overly cautious lawmaker's paralysis? Is it a conciliator's desire to appease powerful interests? Or is it something else?

We need you to fight this battle just as you fought to get elected. If this is an impossible dream, your election was an even more impossible dream. Keep that in mind while you fight and win this one for us. Don't let  us down now.

Heart disease technology

I am going to become an expert on technology for diagnosing heart disease. Last month I wore a Holter monitor for 24 hours to see if my heart was behaving properly. It was not. After a stress test I was put on a double dose of the beta blocker, which seemed to take care of the problem until two nights ago. Now I have an event monitor to wear for 30 days. Fortunately it's much smaller than the Holter monitor, although after only three hours with it, I can tell it's not going to be easy to deal with.

The Holter monitor, which records your heart beat (activity) for the entire 24 hours, was huge. You wear it hanging from your neck with straps or clipped on to your bra. I wanted to go out the night I wore it so I wore a long scarf around my neck that covered what looked like my huge, third breast. Fortunately, it was cold out and no one noticed.

This new monitor is the size of a beeper, clips on to my waistband and connects with only two electrodes instead of the five used on the Holter. It records continuously but only keeps the recording when you recognize a problem and hold down the record button. At least, that's what I was told. After recording two events I am supposed to call an 800 number and send the information over the phone.

Evidently it also recognizes arrhythmias that I don't notice and then rings like a telephone. It's rung three times so far, really startling me. I called the number and the tech told me that it's doing it because of my irregular heartbeat. But the recording didn't come through properly. It hasn't rung since so I wonder what is going on. I think I should ask if I'm supposed to press the record button when it rings. I did not do that, but maybe that's why the recording didn't come through properly; there wasn't any.

The Osher term has begun again and I have this terrible feeling about it ringing when I sit in classes. I'll deal with that when it happens.

Some things are never clear

I went to my pacemaker doctor (cardiologist) for a checkup, on Friday. I think he was worried because I was out of the country for such a long time. Everything checked out fine. Under his questioning I finally confessed that I had had a couple of incidents when my heart was beating too fast (one of the symptoms that won me the pacemaker), and another occasion when I felt funny, like maybe short of breath, but I didn't really know what short of breath meant. We had quite a long discussion about all of this, the question being, when should I call him, or when should I go to the hospital. He told me that the fast heart rate wasn't important if it didn't last too long. What is too long? I was thinking three days. He said ten minutes, thirty minutes and I should get to the hospital. He urged me to call and come into the office if I have another "shortness of breath" incident. I guess that makes the whole thing somewhat clearer, but the truth is I still don't understand what constitutes an emergency. Obviously none of these incidents qualifies; it's been many days and he thought I was just fine.

More healthcare

Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By has posted a wonderful article about healthcare. This one, written by AQ, a retired Navy Corpsman and a Red Cross Disaster Services Volunteer who blogs at Always Question, details how costs are figured by the insurance companies for payment by Medicare and, of course, by us. If you are interested in the thorny questions about healthcare, be sure to look at this post along with the New Yorker article I linked to yesterday. One other consideration no one seems to mention: what happens to the economy when we add those insurance company employees and the paper pushers in doctor's offices to the unemployment statistics.

Revisiting the week

This afternoon I went to the fifth lecture in five days. Each one was different, not only in content, but even more in presentation. As a former Toastmaster I found this fascinating. The first lecture, on healthcare, used Powerpoint as a guide for herself, to make sure she covered all of her points. She went so quickly on some of them I didn't have time to finish reading.

BTW, the New Yorker has an excellent article about healthcare by Atul Gawande in the current issue. Even though I have been working for a single payer system his argument makes tremendous sense to me. 

The second lecture, on government regulation, used no visual aids but gave us several handouts: one of her columns; a memo from Rahm Emanuel about regulation sent out on January 20; a diagram of the regulatory process; and information about her book, The Regulators, all interesting and useful.

The third lecture, about our foreign policy, used some very old, stained and faded overhead projector slides, along with bad jokes and lots of sarcasm. A professor who has won several teaching awards probably felt the need to entertain us. Do you get that I hated him, jokes and all?

Friday afternoon, the fourth lecture was given by a retired general. He was wonderfully organized, very pleasant and gave a good lecture about stuff I never thought about. Can't ask for more than that.

These lectures were all part of the Osher program at Pitt. Today I went to a presentation at CMU (Carnegie Mellon), the other big one here. This was about Arthur Szyk, (pronounced shick) an almost forgotten artist who lived from 1894 to 1951, and who created amazing illustrations of books from the bible and equally amazing illustrations responding to events of World War 2. There is an excellent website about him here and more illustrations of his work here.

This lecture was held at the Tepper Business School at CMU in a room with a monitor in front of each very comfortable chair. The illustrations appeared on each of the monitors as well as a large screen at the front of the room. It was a wonderful luxury to be able to look closely at each of the pictures. 

Most people have never heard of Szyk, or never heard his name pronounced so didn't realize who he was. I was always looking for beautiful books, even as a child, and remember seeing his Andersen's Fairy Tales and Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, as well as his Hagaddah. I wish I owned copies of them.

Back to the books

My Osher program began this week with two lectures on Wednesday, one yesterday, which I left a few minutes early to go to my Japanese art history class, (I'm still at it), and there will be another one this afternoon. All of the lectures are about various aspects of our current political and economic situation. They are given by guest experts or experts from the University of Pittsburgh. The first lecture, given by a distinguished professor, was about health care and the Obama administration. In the afternoon the lecture was given by a guest, Cindy Skrzycki, who writes on regulation and the executive branch of the government for Bloomberg, formerly for the Washington Post. Yesterday morning another distinguished professor spoke on foreign policy issues. This afternoon a guest expert will speak on military issues.

I learned a lot from the lecture about regulation, the one in which I thought I had the least interest. She explained how regulation affects all of our lives (and it does); how regulations are promulgated; how they are created or changed by lobbyists and special interest groups; how we can, and should, become aware of pending regulations and voice our concerns. For your information, read more from Cindy Skrzycki here (scroll down), find info about new regulations and how to comment here.

The other two speakers were good, but offered rather bleak views of their topics. Both reviewed the existing situation and what Obama has said and done up to now. After reviewing the healthcare situation in a very pessimistic manner, the speaker, almost in passing, said she was for a single payer system, but didn't think it would ever happen. She is one of many health care professionals I've met who seem to share this same point of view. I hope they are wrong.

Open letter to John McCain

 Dear Senator McCain,

Last night in the debate you said:

Well, I want to make sure we’re not handing the health care system over to the federal government which is basically what would ultimately happen with Senator Obama’s health care plan. I want the families to make decisions between themselves and their doctors. Not the federal government.*

So, Senator McCain, what I want to know is:
How do you reconcile this with your stand against a woman's right to choose?
Do you not consider women part of families?
Or do you think women are not capable of making decisions between themselves and their doctors?

What about providing information about contraceptives? We keep giving men more ability to produce babies. Shouldn't we be giving women the right not to have those babies? And having their health insurance pay for contraceptives just as it pays for Viagra?

I haven't seen anything in the media about this. I know it's not the most important issue facing the country at this time (women's issues are never the most important). But I think it speaks to your judgment when you can blithely make a statement without considering all of its implications. Women want to know what you really mean when you say you want families to make decisions together with their doctors.

*This quote is taken from the New York Times transcript of the debate found here.

Health and the Environment

I took the day off from planning my trip (and writing about the last one) to attend a conference on "Women's Health and the Environment." What a worthwhile day this was. Although I often worry about cancer, my family has an extensive history of it, I never thought much about the part the environment plays, or the part it must play in autism and ADHD. This was really an eye opener for me. Being a lazy writer and reporter I rely on you to follow the links I'm providing. This is an important subject; we should all seek to have a better understanding of what is going on.

The conference was sponsored in part by Teresa Heinz, who also gave the opening address. She was marvelous. I was immediately captivated when she declared: "The more we can ask the more we can make healthy choices, and here's why: ignorance kills and knowledge saves lives. Preventive medicine is part of knowledge." She stressed the importance of preventative medical care for all, and talked about how our healthcare system was broken, one of my favorite topics. For more of what she said go here.

The theme of the conference was: New Science, New Solutions. The keynote speaker, Nancy Nichols, talked about growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, and how, as children, she and her sister played on the shores of Lake Michigan on what later was identified as tons of PCBs and at least three huge superfund sites. Both of them developed rare cancers when they were in their forties, her sister dying from a rare form of ovarian cancer. Needless to say, I was probably drinking the water in Chicago that came down from Waukegan.

An "Air and Water" panel and a "Food and Personal Care Products" panel gave us more information than I really wanted to know, about how our food is produced and how chemicals found everywhere in our lives are never tested for safety. It almost makes me want to stop eating--a very big statement for me.

I'm not going to tell you everything I learned. The conference website will have podcasts of all of the speakers. I'll let you know when they are posted and hope you will listen to them. And I'll talk about this again.

Celebration

I passed my stress test--even impressed the doctor with how well I did. This kind of nuclear stress test--they inject you with something radioactive then measure how much accumulates in your heart while you are on the treadmill--evidently is able to show whether you have any blockages. They assured me I was fine and should be able to do whatever I wanted, including going to China and Japan as I had planned. This is the happiest day I've had since I had the problem in New York a month ago. It's been a hard month, psychologically, especially after Tim Russert's sudden death. My pacemaker required some adjustment, which is probably why I haven't been feeling so wonderful all this month. Pacemakers are supposed to make you feel good.

I've been continuing with my exercise program--leg exercises, walking, and finally got back to the health club yesterday. I haven't been able to do my usual 3 miles, only 2 miles each time this month. I'll try again the next cool morning we get here.

Last week I wrote about a wonderful painted house we looked at on Pittsburgh's North Side. You can read about it and see pictures here.