Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day, 2009. It's a beautiful day weather-wise, clear, sunny and warm, a typical spring day in NE Ohio and perfect weather for a parade, which we had this morning downtown at 10 a.m. It was a short parade, maybe only ten minutes long at best, with the usual ceremony held at the Main Street bridge of firing the now famous "Kent Cannon" which allegedly served in the Civil War, and the VFW firing a volley over the bridge, followed by the playing of "Taps", to commemorate all the war dead over the centuries. Given that we're currently at war and young men and women continued to be killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, it lends a certain poignancy to the whole ceremony as it wouldn't in a time of peace. The parade usually continues to Standing Rock cemetery, where a ceremony is held at the war memorial there by members of the American Legion and the VFW, mostly old, arthritic portly guys squeezed into their uniforms. There's something sort of sad about it all, that younger men and women don't join these groups and the old guys are the ones who keep them going, old WWII and Korean War vets who are in their 70's and 80's now. The wars we've fought since then haven't been supported or popular as the ones that were fought so long ago, where there was a clear and discernable enemy and the cause was just. I guess the vets now just come home from their tours of duty and try to put the whole thing behind them instead of wanting to hang out with a bunch of their fellow veterans and reminisce over past glories. Today's vets also keep getting called back to do more and more tours of duty and usually by the time they're on their third or fourth tour, they end up getting killed or badly wounded. It's so sad that we send our young people to fight our wars for us, when they are just starting out their lives and have so much in front of them for which to live. But I guess when you enter the military, you pretty much know what you're signing yourself up for and are willing to take that risk.

My father served in WWII as a military policeman guarding German POW's who were brought to the U.S. So my father never saw any combat, never went overseas and was never in harm's way during his years of service, 1942 to 1946. But he still did his duty, served in the U.S. Army and received his G.I. Bill to attend college, which he used to attend Kent State University, where he graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor's Degree in sociology. He died as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident on May 29, 1961, shortly after my 4th birthday, so I really don't remember him all that well, if at all. What few memories I do have are shadowy at best and I often wonder how our lives would have been different had he lived. But of course, a question like that can drive you crazy at times, so suffice it to say, I will always very keenly feel his loss, even this many years later. A few years ago, it occured to me that he never got the proper recognition that he deserved for his WWII service. I remember going, every Memorial Day, to his gravesite, where my mom would clean his headstone and clip back the yew trees on either side, and would place the flowers always sent by my paternal grandparents on his grave. I would always notice the flags flying at the graves of the veterans who served during various times of war, and I didn't really know until I was an adult that he was a WWII veteran. So it was either last year or the year before that I contacted the local VFW about getting him a proper grave marker recognizing his service during WWII. I found his enlistment papers on-line but not his discharge records, which may have burned up during a fire in St. Louis during the Vietnam War where many military records were kept. But I was able to successfully obtain a marker, complete with a flag, to place at his grave. So on a cold wintery day in March, I drove out to the cemetery and placed the marker on his gravesite, eased the flag into its spot, stood up, stepped back a few feet, saluted and thanked my father for his service, and then went home and cried the rest of the day, partly out of mourning, but partly out of gratitude that I felt as if I had righted a wrong that had gone on for far too long. It feels good now to drive out there and see a flag snapping in the breeze at his headstone and to know that each and every Memorial Day, he will be remembered for serving his country during a time of war, even if it wasn't in the heat of battle.

Summertime, and the livin' is easy

It's Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning to summer. All of the big blockbuster movies come out about now, amusement parks, ice cream stands, drive-in movies and root beer stands have begun to reopen for the season, and the greatest harbinger of the onset of summer is rapidly rising gas prices, which have shot up considerably since the warmer weather began. Owing to the recession this year, we are told, gas prices won't rise as astronomically as they did last summer, when it peaked at $4.15 a gallon, but I predict seeing it go toward the $3.00 mark before summer's over. Once again, speculation is behind this whole thing. When the stock market crashed last fall, prices plummeted at the pump when the oil bubble that led to last summer's ridiculous prices also burst, sending gas down to levels not seen in years, but as you can imagine, speculators, voracious for rapid profits, leapt on the price drop and began buying up cheap oil futures to jack the prices back up, and OPEC halted production by several million barrels a day as well, also to raise the price back up. On one hand, this is a good thing because it reinforces conservation and the creation of more fuel efficient cars by the automakers, but on the other hand, it puts a real pinch on lower income people who often own older gas guzzler cars because they can't afford newer ones and they need to get to their jobs, so it's kind of a Catch 22 situation, to say the least. If gas gets too high, it will also put the kibosh on travel and tourism, and there are many states who rely on summer tourist travel to make ends meet. Last summer was brutal on states that traditionally bring in big bucks in the tourism industry and that was part of what led to the massive recession we're now encountering. There is also talk in Ohio of lengthening the school year well into July like they do in Europe, because teachers say that they spend the first few months of each school year doing remedial catch up because kids forget what they learned the previous school year. (I don't recall encountering this problem myself whenever I began a new school year. Teachers just dove us into new material without reviewing last year's stuff first.) I don't know if today's kids have shorter attention spans or what, but I don't recall three month long summers doing us any academic harm when I was growing up. The school year now is already longer than when I was young. School starts in August and goes to mid-June, so ending school in mid-July will mean only a few short weeks off for today's kids, hardly enough to allow families to be able to take their traditional summer vacations. But the thinking is that the longer the kids are in school, the more they'll retain year to year and the less remedial catch up will have to be done at the beginning of each school year. So much for long lazy summers of my youth for today's kids......

OWOWOWOW!
Yesterday morning, I accidentally slammed my right thumb in the driver side door of my car while exiting as I arrived at work. Fortunately, being at work meant that I could go right away to the office, to our staff kitchen, grab some ice from the fridge and make an impromptu ice pack, which is what I did, and I kept it on the injury for about 20 minutes, after which I wiped it with an antiseptic towlette and bandaged it. Apparently, it continued to bleed throughout the day, because when I got home from work, the bandage was mighty bloody. I iced it for 20 minutes again, and later in the evening, I soaked it in Epsom salts for about 20 minutes, then iced it for 20 minutes before going to bed, taking a few Aleve tablets as well to dull the angry throbbing pain that wracked it all day. I called a 24 hour nurse line to see what suggestions they had and they urged me to see a doctor immediately, but I didn't feel like going to the ER for something so considerably minor and having to pay such a steep co-pay for an ER visit, so I waited until this morning and went to a nearby urgent care center to get it looked at. The pain was considerably less than last night thanks to taking Aleve, but it still hurt pretty good and was very angry looking as well. My stay at the urgent care was two hours, during which time they had me soak it in an antibiotic solution, gave me a long overdue tetanus shot, since I hadn't had one since I could not remember when, they X-rayed it to make sure nothing was broken and then the doctor pierced the nail to drain out blood that had accumulated behind it to relieve the pressure on it, and thus the pain, as well as to save the nail from falling off. I was glad that the sliced cuticle didn't need stitches, either. He wrote me a prescription for an antibiotic, but I don't think I am going to fill it, because that seems a tad over-the-top to take an oral antibiotic for 10 days because of an injury of this sort. I have some triple antibiotic ointment that I can put on the wound to keep it from getting infected and I plan to continue soaking it in Epsom salts as well, until such time as it shows signs of healing. It already feels better because of the steps I took yesterday, so I think I did the right thing in my own self treatment of it but I am sure glad that the doctor pierced my nail and drained the blood out from behind it. Relieving the pressure sure has done wonders for the pain and throbbing! And I'm glad my thumbnail won't fall off, either. I smashed a finger once in a file drawer and ended up losing the entire nail, which took months to grow back. I just don't want to go there again! So I'm glad that I went to the doctor this morning, even if it did cost me a $50 co-pay, and I will have to pay for the X-rays out of my own pocket because my insurance won't cover them. Hope it doesn't cost too much.

Washington lacks the will

It's become apparent that Washington lacks the political will to bring about real, meaningful and comprehensive health care reform. After all, most politicians there receive large campaign contributions from insurance companies, drug makers and others who have a vested interest in keeping things at their current status quo, so naturally, they're not exactly eager to bite the hand that feeds them. No matter that the majority of doctors and their patients are clamoring for single payer health care, politicians will never have the will to bring about the necessary changes that will ensure that everyone has fair and equal access to health care, which I regard as a civil right, not a privilege or a perk of employment. The very real fact is that on average, employers must pay around $14,000 or so a year for health care for each of their employees. Think of the savings if employers didn't have to do this. Think of the stimulus to the economy if employers weren't saddled with the high cost of paying for health care for their active and retired employees. Unfortunately, even with all the sensible arguments for single payer health care, I don't think that Washington will ever be able to muster enough political will to truly overhaul our badly broken health care system. They are determined to keep private insurers in the picture and the Republicans are doing everything they can to shoot down the public health care option being floated by Democrats, and I'm afraid that they will ultimately succeed in doing so. Even if this were, by some miracle, to succeed, I doubt that it's something that my employer would offer because it'd probably be too expensive anyway and I probably couldn't buy it on my own as an individual policy for the same reason. So I am stuck with minimal insurance that carries a high deductible and high co-pays under a small regional hospital based insurance carrier. Obama has asked several hospitals, medical providers and big insurance companies to lower their charges over a ten year period, but I don't think my carrier will be subject to this because of how small they are compared to big national companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Humana and Anthem, to name a few. So I will continue to either have to pay most of my own medical cost out-of-pocket or stop seeing doctors and stop taking care of myself to save money. It's a shame to have to make these kinds of choices, but in this tough economy, which isn't likely to recover anytime soon, I have to put my health on the back burner in order to be able to keep the roof over my head and food on my table and bills paid. And I am probably in the majority of people out there who've put their health at risk by not seeing doctors because they can no longer afford to. It's all so counterproductive, and yet, without the political will in Washington to create real change, the health of this country will continue to suffer because they are so in the back pockets of insurance and pharmaceutical companies that they won't do anything to jeopardize their big campaign contributions from them. Washington works for those with the loudest voices and the deepest pockets, not the average American who just wants a fair shot at justice. It's a shame that things have developed this way, but that's how it works, and we the people are ultimately made to suffer the consequences.

THE FAT AMERICAN
Part of the very real problem with health care in this country is the obesity epidemic plaguing this country. American waistlines are expanding rapidly, especially among children, putting our people at risk for serious diseases that are expensive to treat. I see this constantly wherever I go and it makes me want to scream. My place of employment has a 56% rate of morbid obesity among our workforce and unfortunately, those who have this problem don't seem intent on doing anything about it. I see serious heavyweights all the time who are costing people like me in the minimal insurance that we currently have. I suppose some of them have honestly tried to lose weight and have failed, and I can just imagine how daunting it must be to try to lose a lot of weight, as witnessed in watching many seasons of NBC's The Biggest Loser. Those folks tried dieting and failed and they regarded being on the show as their last chance at regaining their health. Sure, the show puts those folks through some pretty hellish workouts and challenges, but those who prevail ultimately end up losing weight and keeping it off, because they know the gift that they've been given by being able to work out with the best trainers in America. I'm sure it's tough once they come home and have to face real world temptations, but I was looking at a book today called "Eat This, Not That" that makes it easy to make better food choices, whether in the grocery store, at a fast food restaurant or at the ice cream parlor. I consider a book like this to be an indispensible guide for folks who want to learn how to eat better without having to worry that living in the real world makes losing weight and keeping it off impossible. Of course, food is just a part of the battle. You have to exercise. There is no magic pill to make you thin. You have to get your body burning calories, and most folks hate exercise, but I find it easier working with a trainer who keeps me on track. I'm lucky that I found one that I already knew from the get-go, since he's also my physical therapist who spent months rehabbing my left knee before he became my trainer. Having someone to keep you accountable makes it so much easier to exercise. Sure, I still have a love/hate relationship with exercise, probably always will, but the gals I work out with push me to new heights and we've formed a bit of a bond as "workout buddies", which makes it so much easier when you've got friends you work out with. Working out with women who are so much younger than me both frustrates me and brings out my competitive side and makes me work harder than I would if I were just going at this alone. But I am lucky in that my trainer is very reasonably priced, I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the good fortune to find someone I both really like as a trainer and who I can afford. I know that most folks aren't that lucky, so employers need to step it up and do more to offer wellness and weight loss programs to get their employees to lose weight and get healthy. An ounce of prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of cure. Once our country adopts this old adage as its philosophy, I've no doubt that we will turn things around, but it's going to take our collective will to get it done, because Washington won't do it for us. So we must do it ourselves via a grassroots movement that can overcome the atrophy that so often grips Washington. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.......or the one.

Eh?

Tomorrow I go to an ear, nose and throat specialist for a hearing test, because a few weeks ago I failed a hearing test in my left ear at my primary care doctor's office. I've had some ringing in that ear for some time, which, according to my doctor, is perfectly normal as we grow older, but I don't really know why I had such a hard time hearing the tones in the test. I had a great deal of wax removed and the inner ear was badly irritated, but for a few days prior to the appointment and even a day or so afterward, the hearing in that ear sounded like it was coming from a cave or something. It seems to have calmed down since then but that ear is very sensitive to loud sounds, more so than my right ear. I haven't a clue as to why this is, and I guess I will find out more tomorrow, but I sure hope that I will not require any sort of hearing aid, because that is yet another thing that insurance will not pay for, unfortunately. I don't foresee that happening because for the most part, my hearing is quite normal and if anything, I've probably lost a wee bit of hearing in that ear, but nothing to write home about. Probably nothing more than what can be expected of a 52 year old, that's all I am hoping I will be told tomorrow. I've had problems for many years with excess wax build up because my ear canals are too small and I have to have regular treatments to cope with this problem, and it's never fun to endure, but it feels great when it is finally done and overwith. So hopefully the problem a few weeks ago was nothing more than a bad case of irritation caused by wax that, once removed, allowed it all to heal up nicely. Guess I'll know a whole lot more tomorrow afternoon.......

MY FAVORITE TIME OF THE YEAR

May is just about my favorite month of the year, because that is when the lilacs finally bloom, and there is no scent that says "spring" like that of lilacs. I have a hardy little bush in my driveway underneath an aging pear tree that seems to have endured a lot of abuse in recent years, having been damaged by wind storms and a truck that re-gravelled our driveway some years ago, but that little lilac refuses to go away. This year, unfortunately, it seems to have only a few bunches of blossoms and they are too far up to smell, but there is a pathway on the KSU campus lined with lilac bushes that is most pleasant to walk along this time of year and to take in the heady scent of the blossoms. Sadly, their life is all too short and they wither and die only a few short weeks after blooming, so you have to enjoy it while you can. The daffodils have already come and gone, so now it's the lilacs time to shine and to fill the air with their unmistakeable perfume. They are by far my single favorite flower, even though I love roses, tulips and daffodils a great deal. If I had the room, I'd plant a few more lilac bushes at my house, but we're already becoming a bit of a miniature forest on the north side of the house, and the south side has the driveway on it. The front part of our lot is very small and populated by some trees and we have no back yard because that's the parking lot, so there isn't really anywhere to put in a garden, my fondest desire. So I have to settle for what we have and walk to the places where lilacs bloom so I can bury my face in their perfumed flowers and take in that scent that so lifts my spirits. I am forever reminded of the Whitman poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" when I smell these wonderful flowers, despite the sorrowful tone of that poem, which commemorates the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln about the time that the lilacs came into bloom in Washington, DC. It is said that for years afterward, residents couldn't smell the lilacs without remembering that awful time, but I still love that poem and always will, because of a special memory of a friend who read that poem to a Civil War round table gathering while in the midst of a lilac garden in the month of May. The blossoms bring back that magical night each year for me and probably always will.

More hoops to jump through

Friday afternoon, I went to my orthotist to get the 1½" lift for my new Birkenstock sandals. My thinking was that if I went to the local office, which is in the same place as my orthopaedic surgeon's practice, that I wouldn't have to concern myself with the issue of getting a prescription for it, since I'd be right there where I could ask my doctor to write me one for the lift. Turns out my doctor wants the orthopaedic surgeon who treated my injured Achilles tendon last summer to be the one to write the prescription for my lift, only this made almost no sense to me at all. The Achilles injury was to the right ankle. The shoe needing the lift is the left one. I failed to see the relationship between these two things, other than the fact that the last time I saw the orthotist was to get a one eighth inch lift made for under the insole of my right shoe to help treat my Achilles tendonitis last summer. But that prescription was written by my normal orthopaedic surgeon who I regularly see, not the ankle doctor who treated me last summer. Well, it turns out that the thinking is that the ankle issue is the result of my shortened leg, so that is why the one doctor wanted me to have the other doctor write the prescription, which meant having to pull out my cell phone and call the ankle specialist to see if he'd be willing to write my prescription for the lift. If this is always going to be the case every time I buy new shoes, then I may as well go to the orthotist clinic at the ankle doctor's office in Akron instead of going to the local Kent office to save on having to make a million phone calls just to get a shoe lift done and paid for by insurance. Most regular cobblers won't even do lifts without a doctor's prescription anymore, so afraid are they, like just about everybody these days, of lawsuits. It's so crazy that I have to get a new prescription with every pair of shoes and then verify the doctor's authorization with the insurance company before I can even hope to get one dime of insurance coverage for my orthotics, and even then, there's no guarantee that they will even cover it in the first place because they may well throw this under my "deductible" for the year and make me pay the full cost of the lift. Why they have to make everything so complicated is beyond me, but that's the new way of things now in the 21st century with health care. The patient has to go through a whole song and dance before getting any kind of treatment, and the doctors have to negotiate with insurance companies before they can prescribe any kind of treatment or tests. It's all so wrong and unfortunately, any changes in our health care system under the Obama administration are going to be negligible compared to what ought to be done. Keeping for-profit providers at the table as players in the health care reform debate and excluding single payer advocates can only assure that we won't see any significant changes in our broken system any time soon.

SCHOOL'S OUT!
This weekend is commencement at Kent State University. Most of the graduates received their diplomas yesterday and I think there is still another ceremony yet to go today, but the 2008-09 school year at Kent State is over, meaning the students have packed up and gone home for the summer. This always results in far less traffic and far quieter nights here in Kent, something I welcome yearly. It's always tough on business in our area since so many of them rely on student money to stay afloat, and in this tough economy, that can be a really difficult thing. But it's nice to have fewer cars on the road, quieter nights, fewer parking problems, less trash on front lawns and a return to a more residential feel to the neighborhoods during the summer months when the students are gone. Naturally, things get pretty rowdy at the beginnings and ends of school years, and this year was no exception. It seems to go with the territory and when the students return in August to still warm nights and summery weather, I predict some out of hand nights when things get crazy and the cops come in droves to break up big loud parties or to crack down on DUI drivers coming home from the bars at night. Since the drinking age has been raised to 21, house parties become basically unregulated bars where underage students can drink with impunity. Since you typically don't turn 21 until your junior or senior year in college, that means that for the majority of your college career, you can't go to a bar and drink, something that is an essential part of college life. If the drinking age were lowered to 18, at least they could drink in a more regulated environment and if they got out of hand, the bouncer at the bars would kick them out. But with house parties, there are no regulations and people can act stupid and disrupt entire neighborhoods and put more strain on safety forces who have to beef up every weekend to keep the peace. I'm tired of my street having unregulated bars at every single house, meaning that hundreds of students come streaming down my street on warm summer nights to go to these nefarious house parties where they can drink until they're falling down drunk and act like fools and trash people's property without any consequences. I think that the legal drinking age ought to be lowered to 18 with a specification that you can only drink "low beer", 3.2, which is what we were allowed to drink when I was 18. I don't know if it would cut down on house parties, but it would give a big boost to liquor stores and bars and would prove to be a bit of an economic stimulus package for college towns like ours, and that can't be a bad thing, after all.

Cat deprived

I often wish that I could afford my own house so that I could have a cat. Where I live now, I can't have any pets, and having been raised in a house filled with them as a child, I've felt so utterly deprived in the 25 years I've lived in my apartment. In particular, I love cats, because they are so comforting, especially when they purr. I remember when I was young and every time I was sick, our family cat Dooney, a half siamese cat who was black with white paws and a white stomach, would stay with me through my entire illness. He was such a motherly cat and took care of us kids through our entire childhoods, finally dying on Palm Sunday of 1970 of sudden kidney failure at age 15. It was a devastating blow and I can't remember crying so hard because it felt like losing a sibling or something. I desperately miss having a cat now but I know how easily I become too attached to pets and find losing them to be utter heartbreak. The cat pictured, Dupree, my brother's cat, is getting up there in years. I think he turns 15 this year himself and he's slowed down just a bit from his younger days, but still shows some kitten-like spunk from time to time. However, he's the most curmudgeonly cat I've ever met. He doesn't like to be held, touched or even spoken to, unless, of course, it's on his terms. He adores my brother, but then, it was he who rescued him when he was just a kitten, abandoned in the woods somewhere down in Southern Ohio. He'll jump up on my brother's lap, sleep on his bed and rub against him and even sit in his lap and purr, but he doesn't seem to like me for some reason. Maybe it's because I want to pay attention to him and he doesn't really relish a lot of being petted or talked to. However, there are a few neighborhood cats who have, of late, begun hanging around my mom's house who seem starved for attention, so I go over there to get a cat fix from Herman, a brown tabby who seems upset with his owners for getting some pit bulls, and a sleek black short hair cat that my nieces named "Satine" who doesn't really seem to belong to anybody in particular, but my mom's next door neighbors feed him, so he does get taken care of after a fashion. He's extremely affectionate but drools like crazy when you pet him. Maybe that's why nobody seems to want him, because he does have that drooling problem. But he is a beautiful and loving cat who I would proudly give a home to if I could. So for the past quarter century, I've been deprived of having a cat of my own to love and to keep me company and comfort me when I am down. I've so missed it and I wish I could have my own house where I could have a cat and a yard and a place to call my own. Maybe someday............when I win the lottery........(sigh)

MEMORIES OF CATHOLIC SCHOOL DAYS

Something I saw in a recent newspaper article spawned some old Catholic school memories, which I attended from 1963 to 1966. Back in those far off days, you learned to live in mortal fear of the nuns, because they would unashamedly whack you upside the head for the smallest offense. There were several that I was extremely afraid of and learned to steer clear of if I had anything to say about it, but sometimes, you could not avoid an encounter with one of them. Such was the case in communion and confirmation instruction. Everything had to be just so. You had to hold your hands a certain way, walk a certain way, sit a certain way and even pray a certain way, and heaven forbid if you did it wrong. That would earn you a stiff rebuke and a good whack from one of the nuns. For a very young child, this could prove to be traumatic at times. Struggling to remember prayers (quick, all you ex-Catholics out there, can you still remember how to say your old Rosary? Or sing the "Veni Creator Spiritus" from memory?) and trying to learn the Latin liturgy of the Mass could prove to be quite daunting when you're only six or so years old. Having segregated playgrounds at school was also tough because I often wanted to play with the boys, but that was forbidden turf. There was a big white line painted across playground sections, girls on one side, boys on the other, and you did not dare cross the line for fear of ending up in the principal's office, and that was a very scary proposition at Catholic school. To get to ours, you had to go to the second floor of the old section, and then open this door and climb this narrow little stairwell into this little cubby-hole of an office, where sat our school principal, who I was perfectly terrified of because she was a nun and a strict one at that. Those old habits made them look very intimidating and far taller than they actually were, and I wonder if that was done for effect to scare young children or what. And it always seemed like I drew the really mean teachers in Catholic school, not the nice ones my older sister kept getting. I don't know why this was the case. Bad luck, maybe. OK, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Bauer, was really nice, but I have little memory of that school year because I seemed to spend so much of it sick at home, with mumps, chicken pox, rubella, scarlet fever.....and on and on and on. So it felt like I spent most of that year at home recuperating from illness. But I can honestly say that the lion's share of my Catholic school days were ones filled with fear and loathing. So yeah, I'm one of those Unitarian Universalist ex-Catholics who still has occasional baggage from those days, but not like I used to. Still, I wonder if I would have stayed a Catholic had I not had so many bad experiences in those first three years of school? Thinking back now, probably not. Too many other issues that took me away from my childhood faith, but I still wear my St. Brigid's cross necklace and keep a St. Christopher medallion on my car keychain, so I suppose the old Jesuit saying is true: "Give me a child unto the age of seven and he's mine for life."

The great health care debate

This week the Obama administration announced the first steps they are taking in the health care reform debate. I can't say that I am at all impressed with the steps taken so far, asking health care providers, insurers and Big Pharma to reduce their costs by $2 trillion in 10 years, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Still, I can't say that I trust those making those promises to carry through with them. They are, after all, in the business of making a profit, and they'll do whatever it takes to satisfy their shareholders. So I'm disappointed at these steps because I don't feel as if it's enough of a step in creating real and lasting health care reform. I'm in favor of a single payer system myself, but the drawback to that is the fact that we don't have enough health care providers and hospitals to accomodate every single person in this country, and my fear is that it would take even longer to see my doctors than it already does. Typically, I can get an appointment with my primary care doctor within a few days of calling, but a specialist typically takes a few weeks to see as it stands right now. So if we had every single person in this country able to see a doctor, it would take that much longer even to see my primary care physician and that bothers me. Sometimes, I don't even like having to wait a few days as it is. I recently had a painful ear situation over a weekend that meant waiting a few days to see my doctor and it drove me nuts wondering what was wrong until I could get to my doctor's office. I could have gone to an urgent care, but we no longer have one in Kent and the nearest one is in Streetsboro. Urgent care co-pays with my insurance are $50 so I wanted to save $30 by going to see my primary care doctor instead. If we had single payer insurance, it might have taken me weeks just to see a doctor, so that is a problem with that system in that we currently don't have enough doctors, in particular, primary care physicians since everyone wants to go into specialties where you can make that much more money. So I don't know what to think, but all I know is that my deductible is too high and my co-pays can really add up after a while and get very costly. So I don't know what the answer is, but trusting insurance and pharmaceutical companies and health care providers to lower their costs over ten years is just too slow a way to enact real and comprehensive health care reform. I can't afford to wait ten years for affordable health care. And neither can the rest of us aging boomers.

WORKOUT NOTES

My fitness trainer is in the process of completing his Master's Degree this week so he wasn't available last night at the gym. His brother worked with us instead and it was a pretty brutal workout overall. I'm dismayed at how weak my upper body remains and how much more work I need in strengthening in particular my chest, shoulders and upper back. I also find myself feeling increasingly risk averse doing anything with my knees because the glucosamine and chondroitin I've been taking for almost two months has made my knees feel so good for the first time in forever that I am almost afraid to try doing anything that I fear might injure one of them, so I still tend to go easy on things like squats and lunges, which we did a lot of last night. I tend not to bend down as far as I probably could because I don't want to reinjure a knee and send myself back to yet another round of rehab. So I still don't know what all I can do and what I cannot do and what I should be trying to do. It's a tad frustrating not to know what I am capable of doing when I live in such fear of yet another knee injury and yet I also know that I need to strengthen my leg muscles if I am to prevent any more injuries. So knowing just how far I can go becomes an exercise in frustration at times. But I am going to try to get in some running on my own time to both build up my cardio strength and to build up my leg muscles. A few days ago I tried running around the block and became winded by the time I got to the end of my street. The same thing happened at the end of each street I ran, and that was truly maddening, so I obviously need to work on that. If I do a little each day, I'll build up to where it's not such a big deal, but again, there's that little voice of fear inside me wondering about the wisdom of even trying to do simple things like running around the block. I just changed my insoles in my shoes and it makes a huge difference in shock absorption, so that should help a lot. My goal this year is to stay out of rehab and to strengthen my joints enough to where I don't have to live in fear of doing things that in the past have caused me to get hurt. If I can do that, then I will feel very good about myself and what all this working out has accomplished.

My hand, one year later

One year ago today, I had surgery on my left index finger to remove a painful ganglion cyst. Today the surgical scar is almost unnoticeable and while the incision still feels a little funny at times, there is no impaired function whatsoever. I have full range of motion in that finger and it feels - and looks - good without that nasty cyst on it. In retrospect, I can honestly say that I am extremely glad that I did the surgery instead of a cheaper alternative, which would have been to aspirate the cyst and remove the fluid in it. Chances are, it probably would have come back and continued to bother me as it had for so long. This way, it's almost a guarantee that it will not come back again. The hardest part about the entire experience wasn't the surgery itself - it was the recovery afterward. I thought I'd never get full range of motion back in that finger again. The physical therapy was pretty grueling and painful at times and seemed to take forever. Fortunately, I made a full recovery and am glad that it's all overwith and that I had good medical personnel working with me throughout my entire experience with this thing. I had a very good surgeon who I really like who, should I ever have any more hand problems, I will most definitely see again. Hard to believe it's been a full year, but it has, and I am extremely glad that I did this in spite of the fact that insurance wouldn't cover the cost of the operation, yet another gripe about our growing health care crisis in this country. May this year be the year we finally rectify that situation!

UNDERSTANDING CHRISTIANITY

I've been reading this book called "Saving Paradise: How Christianity traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire" by Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker and I am coming to realize that I really know nothing of Christianity beyond what we were taught in Catholic school, and even that was laden with far more guilt than I can cope with. I always hated how Mass seemed to focus on mourning Jesus's death instead of celebrating his life and what he did. Mass is a weekly re-creation of the Last Supper and I always found that confusing. Why focus on tragedy instead of celebrating life and all its gifts? Catholicism - and mainstream Christianity, for that matter - seem to focus so much more on preparation for death instead of focusing on celebrating life and living for today, here and now. I suppose that's why I ultimately went the way of the Unitarian Universalist Church, because I saw that as a way to seek a faith that taught me best how to appreciate the life we live here, today and now and how to best make it count. I've always been a tad obsessed with making a lasting impact on things because I will have no descendents, having never married or reproduced, meaning once my life is over, that's it. One hundred years from now, no one will know who I was, because I won't have any grandchildren to remember me, so I need to know that I can make a difference now so that someday, someone will recall who I was. I know it seems silly to obsess over this fact, but that's just something that has been important to me for a very long time now, especially as I grow older and watch my friends pass away too young. Getting back to the book, though, one of its premises is that early Christianity didn't focus on the crucifixion, death and all that modern Christianity entails. Rather, it focused on paradise, the here and now, making this life paradise. Early Christian art didn't depict the crucifixion and the dead Christ. It showed a living, breathing Christ in pastoral surroundings, reminding people of the message of the early faith before things changed in the Mediaeval period and depictions of the crucifixion became more prevalent. I'm not terribly far into the book yet to give a comprehensive review, but suffice it to say that I am learning far more than I expected to and I'd recommend it to anyone who has ever questioned modern Christianity's message. Trust me, this book will serve as a serious eye opener!

Jumping through hoops

It never fails to amaze me how tough health insurance companies make it for people to get anything done. Last week I bought a new pair of Birkenstock sandals to replace my aging 16 year old pair that are on their last legs, so naturally, this means that I have to get the 1½" lift put on the left shoe that I need before I can consider wearing them. I decided to call an insurance approved provider to get the work done, but in the process, I found out how many hoops I will have to jump through to get this done and get it all covered - IF, in the end, they decide to do so, which they sometimes won't, making the excuse of it going under my nefarious "deductible" of $1000 a year. So what I had to do was to call the insurance approved provider, Yanke Bionics, and it turns out that I needed to make an appointment to come in and work with the orthotist. OK, fine, I've done that before, but I chose to go to the Kent office, located in my orthopaedic surgeon's office because my thinking was that if there was any question regarding the necessity of even having a lift done, Dr. Mineo, my doctor, would be right there to approve it without having to have all kinds of faxes and phone calls like I do with their Akron office just to get approval for my lift work to be done there. So I called my insurance provider to talk to them about it and they asked me if the work had been properly authorized. I asked, by whom? They said that my orthopaedic surgeon would have to authorize the work for them to even consider covering it. OK, so this meant calling my orthopaedic surgeon's office. My hope was that I would not need to make an additional appointment just to see my doctor just to get the authorization, costing me another $20 in co-pays just to do so. Turns out I don't have to do that, but I did have to ask his physician's assistant to make a phone call to the insurance company to get the work authorized by Crystal Clinic. Never mind that I've had this leg problem since I was 14 and have been wearing a corrective lift since 1998 - I still have to jump through a million hoops and make tons of phone calls just to get the lift work done by an insurance approved provider, and even then, I suspect I'll still be out a fair amount of money anyway if my provider sticks it under my deductible. Is it any wonder that America's health care system is so broken when you're forced to deal with all this nonsense?

THE POWER OF MUSIC
Right now I am listening to a recording of the Requiems of Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Durufle, both of which I have sung with the Akron Symphony Chorus in years past. They are both such beautiful pieces of music and a change from big bombastic Requiems like that of Berlioz or even in some ways, Verdi. These two pieces of music in particular provided me with a great deal of comfort a few years ago when a close friend of mine died very suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive stroke. Other friends have passed away suddenly in recent years but none has hit me harder than my friend Mike's in November of 2006. I had a very hard time accepting that he was gone so quickly like that. We'd been girlfriend and boyfriend for many years in the late 1980's and early 90's and it was he who introduced me to Irish Week at the Augusta Heritage Arts Center in Elkins, WV. We went down there together for several years and met many wonderful people and I still go each and every summer and have a wonderful time there. Since Mike's death, it's been a bit bittersweet, though. Somehow, knowing that he's gone and I will never see him again and be able to share my Augusta experiences with him lessens the experience just a little bit. Admittedly, after we broke up, we didn't see each other much because we sort of traveled in different circles, but we'd occasionally run into each other at concerts and festivals and chat about what was going on in our lives and we'd send occasional e-mails back and forth as well. These two requiem masses of Fauré and Durufle became mainstays in the months after Mike's death and I listened to them a great deal to find some sort of way of trying to make peace with his death. I grew up Catholic and although I have not been a practicing one since about 1972, still, these two masses provided a real tonic to my grief because they are more peaceful requiems instead of ones that emphasize "the trumpets shall sound" and all that other "Dies Irae" stuff about the day of judgement. I can do without all that, thank you. I in particular love the"Pie Jesu" and "In Paradisum" movements of the Fauré requiem because I'd rather see death as a peaceful thing than with dread and fear like the Dies Irae of so many requiems makes it all seem. Music truly can prove to be quite therapeutic, as I found out a few years ago, and I still love listening to these two pieces of music for their lyrical and peaceful approach to passing on.