Adventures in health care

I am very, very happy to report that I've finally discovered what's been making me sick lo these many months and I'm feeling dramatically better. I think I really did start out with a virus that wouldn't go away, and which the acupuncturist helped clear (I should write to him and let him know, as he fired me several weeks ago and sent me back to Western medicine. I'm sure he'd like to know the final outcome and that he did likely play a role in my improving.)

At some point, possibly aggravated by some bitter chinese herbs I was drinking at bedtime, I developed a pretty good case of acid reflux, the symptoms of which I either minimized or mis-attributed -- some felt like anxiety, some felt like the cough and lung inflammation of the earlier virus.

After $600 of blood work, lung x-rays, EKGs, lung function tests and urinalyses at the friendly, affordable urgent care place and a cardiologist consult ($280 for 10 minutes with the nurse and 10 minutes with the nice young cardiologist-- nothing like having your doctor looking like a college student to make you feel middle aged), I finally decided to go to a family practitioner, who listened interestedly, suggested I might have GERD and asked if I'd be willing to take an acid inhibitor for 10 days and see if I felt better. At home that evening I was utterly chagrinned to notice how obvious the symptoms were, once she'd suggested it.

So, I'm back to walking for exercise and more vigorous housecleaning and building up my stamina and if the roads would stay clear I'd start biking to errands again. The bed's propped up on several volumes of the encyclopedia I thought that we were least likely to reference until alternate blocking can be arranged, and I'll have to research and test out the best diet for me (apparently triggers can be different for everyone and will have to be tested once I'm off the meds).

I find it interesting that the urgent care clinic folks, apparently trained to eliminate the worst case scenarios first, uncovered a heart arhythmia (increasingly common in people as the decades accrete and harmless in and of itself, but potentially dangerous if heart disease is present) that they wanted to pursue with thousands of dollars of cardio stress tests just to be sure it was benign. Had I not found relief with the GERD avenue, I would have pursued the tests, but without health insurance or a family history of early heart disease or alarming cholesterol readings, I can't justify the expense.

I see, in my experience, several contributors to the high cost of health-care in our country. When we first moved here, I actually called this doctor's office to get an appointment and after hearing we were self-pay, the scheduler directed me to the urgent care clinic. Having been rebuffed as a new patient at another recommended doctor's office after being asked only two questions -- who referred you and who's your insurance provider -- I was beginning to think that physicians were unwilling to see self-pay clients. So I ended up getting treatment from the urgent care place, which worked fairly well, except for the worst-case-scenario glasses they wear, which ended up costing me a lot of money. If I'd had health insurance, I'm sure I'd have gone forward with the expensive cardio tests and found out I'm just fine, at a cost to the system of thousands of dollars.

I also spent hundreds of dollars at the acupuncturist, which probably helped but I can't swear to it (the only absolute example of the effectiveness of acupuncture I've had is the clearing up of my prolapse in Harry's pregnancy; that was dramatic and irrefutable and it's what draws me back to Chinese medicine when I can't find solutions in Western medicine, for better or for worse.)

All in all, an expensive but interesting experience and I'm tremendously grateful to feel mostly well again.

Facebook killed the blog

The story of a New Year, compounded by the idea of a New Decade, has me energized to pick up old projects and new. Facebook, for all its intriguing tidbits, leaves me hungry for more substantial news from family and friends, I notice.

Looking back, the fall seems like a huge washout for me. Between the snows and cold that began in October and never looked back, and the virus I picked up about the same time as the first snow, I had a season of enforced rest -- gardens under snow, immune system under attack. I still have the virus, but I'm getting better about not over-reaching with my activities and when I do overreach, the setbacks are less unpleasant. I hope to kick it completely in the next month or so. I notice a pronounced improvement with the acupuncture and Chinese herbs (It was also tremendously helpful to hear from the acupuncturist that other people have the same virus this fall. The physician's assistant who could only suggest a lung x-ray and heart tests was freaking me out.)

In the meanwhile, I can putter about and organize closets, start some flowers under grow lights and do various projects and games with the kids. Maddie's on a math kick, at the moment, Harry's working on spelling and the kids have both been having fun with codes and secret messages. Maddie's planning submissions for an art contest the city is having. We're attending this cool acrobatic dance performance later this month, so there's still plenty to do, should the weather continue to be frigid.

We had a lovely visit to Fallbrook just after Christmas, it was wonderful to lounge at my folk's house and take advantage of the sun and their hospitality, with some trips to the zoo, Legoland and the resort pool to which they belong. We got to visit with a few of the folks we miss, but not enough. I kept crashing after outings and having to sleep the next day to fend off feeling cruddy. It was tough tearing ourselves away from the 70-degree weather, but we had a fun return ride, listening to Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series and staying at a hotel with pool in Provo. And it felt right to get home and fire up the woodstove again. What a game-changer that stove has been, turning winter from scary to cozy!

The chickens have been taking the winter weather with much more aplomb than I (but what's new? Maddie's New Year's resolution was to be more like a cat. I could stand to be more like pretty much any animal, taking what comes with aplomb and saving one's energy for when it's actually useful.) I moved them into the garage for a couple of sub-zero nights but they're back in their coop, regrowing feathers from their molt and generally on their way to handsome hen-ness once again. And they've started laying some eggs again!

Maddie wants her own room for her birthday, so much rearranging and decluttering to do, which is a perfect New Year Project. I'm inspired to do some painting and other nesting projects, which I'll take slowly but am looking forward to (what I really want to do is tear out kitchen counters and backsplash, which are way overdue for replacement, but I'll have to see if Steve is up for it -- it's more work than I can take on at the moment, not to mention my lack of skillset.)

Hope all of you are feeling energized and happy and looking forward to the year. I have a completely unsupported and mysterious sense of optimism about 2010 -- all that I read points to an economy under massive and irreversable strain, but like the Aughts, the decade in macro may have been horribly traumatic, but in the personal, we had a wonderful time raising kids and expanding ourselves through our own learning. So 2010 could well be a wonderful year for us, regardless of what happens in the story of the world at large. I hope it is for everyone.

I'm dreaming of a white birthday....

Here's what we did on Steve's birthday today:

Animal comings and goings...

We've had an animal-intensive time of late, starting with the squirrel babies we accidentally separated from their mother with a roof hole-patching (two we successfully reunited, two we are hand rearing), and an unexpectedly quick milk goat acquisition (we're actually just the co-milkers, as it were, our friend Rosemary traded her five Boer (meat) goats for two yearling milk goats this week, and we've agreed to share feed costs and milk production, once they kid, which may be mid-winter if their time with a buck over the last week was productive. If not, Rosemary will have them bred again).

This morning, Steve took one of our two rats in to the campus veterinary school to be put down -- Remy's tumor had grown larger than she was, and while she was still alert, eating and seemingly undistressed, the tumor had just grown too large.

And while we've found a foster home for the squirrels, I'm hesitant about giving them over just yet. We'll see how Harry is taking all this.

But we have some exciting weekend getaways planned, first a UU Church camp in the mountains this weekend, then mountain lake camping with some fellow unschoolers next weekend, and raising baby squirrels doesn't fit into those all that well.

Here's some pics that I've already posted to facebook of the various critters.

Long summer, no posts!

We've been surprisingly busy for unscheduled folks, but all is well and we've been having a great time. I'll wade through the photos on our digital cameras and post them next, but for now, a quick recap:

Late June we headed back east and did a whirlwind tour of DC (Smithsonian museums, Washington Monument, White House, National Zoo) before heading to Great Grandma Shirley's 99th birthday party on July 3. Wonderful to see her again, and Jack, Jennifer, Alison, Sarah, Ava, Nick, Ellen, Jeff, Becky, Jay and Warren too. What a fun houseful of cousins!

We came home and got to see JeffBeckyJayWarren the following weekend -- so cool to have family to bike and tube down the Poudre River with. Pics to come.

Then visits from Grandpa Russell and Uncle Ray (they were driving bulls around the Midwest and stopped in for the night) and my folks came for a great visit as well, with a 9th birthday party for Owen capping it off.

That was followed by a weekend camping in the gorgeous mountains here with a couple of families in our neighborhood, then the New West Fest over the weekend -- saw the headliner, Melissa Etheridge (hey, she's thoroughly middle-aged! How did that happen?! Makes me afraid to look in the mirror...), and wandered around downtown in the dark, goggling at the carny rides (which seemed too frightening to the kids to try at night, but the next day they rode the giant revolving swings several times, shrieking and whooping the whole time. I was much quieter, preferring to spend my energy focusing on the horizon until I could get off the damn spinning thing...)

Back to work for Steve, who has not only Nexus' next edition heating up, but who is also designing a dozen or two new toys for this outfit , everything from sewing boards to puzzles to bookends. An interesting new sideline for him.

I've been, yes, tending the gardens, harvesting and processing carrots, onions, potatoes, tomatillos, chard, raspberries (okay, we're just eating those out-of-hand, haven't managed to actually preserve any yet), shredded zucchini and pureed beets (mmmm red devil cake is sooo good), learning how to make enchilada sauce with the tomatillos that are coming in, and generally expanding my homestead-y skillset. We now make our own butter from the cream skimmed off the top of our raw milk. I made my first soup stock from a chicken carcass (no, not one of ours. They're doing fine and laying mightily.) And I made my first batch ever of custard with some extra milk -- ohhhh, that was heavenly.

Steve scored a brand-new, 14-year-old Jotul woodstove (sat in someone's garage with the tags still on it all that time) on Craigslist for $700, and he's now scouting free wood there too and waiting for the next break in his Nexus schedule to install it. Next post-deadline project is to install the woodstove, which should be able to heat the top half of the house very well.

Crops are coming in at the farm, some better than others. Maddie and I picked 10 pounds of beautiful Swiss Chard this week, which I blanched and froze for winter soups, and we also froze several batches of basil in olive oil for later pestos.

Heading back out there today to do battle with the fearsome weeds that have to be wrestled mightily out of the soil. Makes me *very* glad I'm doing raised bed and mulched gardens at home, where I hardly have to weed at all....

Paul Hawken's commencement speech

The full text is here Actually, I don't know if this is the full text, but it's where I found the speech. It moved me enormously, but I won't rhapsodize too much. Here it is (and don't forget to visit Maddie's blog (link's on the right sidebar), she's been quite prolific of late. She's doing a much better job of updating the world on our doings than I am.)

The Unforgettable Commencement Address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food, but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit.. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

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Gardens grow

Between helping out with Home Grown Foods, organizing homeschooling physics field trips, working at our friend Rosemary's mini-farm in her co-op garden (I'm a field laborer now! From journalism to massage therapy to working in the fields, what an interesting career path I've taken :P ) and taking care of our own back 40, it's been a busy six weeks or so.

Steve's in Pennsylvania right now, for Grandpa Jack's 70th birthday celebration (that's a video of him paddling to shore from the sailboat, where he spent the night Friday night, taken by his brother). We miss him, Harry especially, but we've been keeping busy while he's been gone, visiting all the baby animals on Rosemary's little farm (kittens, kids, a lamb and a piglet), digging up perennial flowers and herbs from a homeschooling friend's garden and building an herb garden in the backyard.

Here's some photos of life on the homestead, as of this morning...

One corn patch is in the foreground, covered with straw, then there's the strawberry and greens beds, another corn bed where we're planting the four sisters (corn, beans, squash and bee balm) and our raised no-dig bed behind it.





Here's the 36-foot long bed, outfitted for plastic row cover in case of frost, or these days, hail, with our winter greens going to seed (I'm going to collect the mustard seed, in case it will be useful for pickling cucumbers.)





These are the raspberries on the upper level, and you can see below them a trench of potatoes that are just starting to sprout above the surface.








At the other end of the raised bed are the potatoes I planted under the protection of the hoop in March. They're ready to be partially buried again and start forming tubers on the buried half of the vegetation.







Some tomatoes and rhubarb in the upper corner of the yard....







And our chicken run, with the four laying hens inside and one of the pullets (almost ready to lay!) wandering in freedom next to them. The pullets don't eat the garden greens yet, so they're free to wander. They're not quite as big as the hens yet, so I"m putting off that fateful day of flock integration a bit longer. I've tried it once already, and it wasn't pretty. Much pecking, flapping and squawking. That, by the way is Hawk, a.k.a. survivor chicken. You can barely tell she was grabbed by a fox and stuffed under a woodpile!


Here's our big strawberry bed, which we covered with plastic starting in February. It's giving us a bowl of berries a day now, though it's a pitched battle between us and the robins. Theres' a second smaller bed on the level above it that's still setting fruit.












Here's a view of the south side of our yard. You can see the new herb spiral (closeups to follow), a trashcan full of last night's rain, and in the foreground, tomatoes, basil and chives and one of our greens beds.








Here's another south side view, with the chicken coop under the deck, the herb garden again, and you can see our solar heat collector, that big triangle sticking out of the south side of our house. I think it would be more efficient with some new, more translucent paneling, it's on our list of things to do.



Steve's bed of snappeas and greens is looking good.
















And here's some closeups of the herb spiral I built yesterday, with rocks from around the yard and herbs from my friend's garden and from the nursery.















In the front yard, our south-side berm of raspberries and pear trees is doing well...





In the foreground is an elderberry bush, and on the other side of the mulched berm are some serviceberries, part of our edible perennial landscaping out front (yes, those are onions on the berm, between the sticks of bare-root raspberries. I ran out of room for onions in the backyard!)


And finally, my big digging project of early spring, the permaculture-inspired berm to retain water. Under that pile of dirt and bark mulch is an 18-inch deep trench filled with more mulch, which will hold moisture for the raspberries planted above, and the whole thing should keep water from running off our slanted front yard. After we finished it, I realized that I really should have bermed up by the sidewalk in front of the house, as most of the water retention benefits flow downhill underground from the berm, but I'm going to plant perennial flowers in the strip between the berm and the road, so they should be happy and well watered, at least! Oh, and in the driveway you see how we've been spending the occasional hot days we get -- in the purple canoe at the nearby fishing ponds.







Oh, and I can't forget that other growing project we've been working on...




eta: we just got our first egg from our buff orpington pullet! She laid this afternoon without much fanfare, so now we're up to 5 layers! Our poor americauna might be a bit behind the laying curve, what with having to heal up from those fox bites...