bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • What the dental hygienist told me while I was in the chair.

    This is really the first time you’ve ever had novocaine?  No cavities at all at age 33?  You’re doing pretty good.

    I actually work on a lot of people that it’s the first time they ever had novocaine.  Sometimes the first time they ever had dental work too.  A lot of recent immigrants.  People who don’t speak much English.  Makes it hard to communicate sometimes.  I remember this one guy, he brought in his elderly father.  After his shot, while we were working on him… well, I never saw anyone in the dentist’s chair with such a big smile!  The whole time we were working he had this big grin.  The son was interpreting for him.  They were from Ethiopia originally, I remember that.  The son told me that his father thought it was magic that it didn’t hurt.  Can you imagine that?  Magic.

    But we don’t let family members be interpreters anymore.  We used to, but I brought it up in a staff meeting once and said it made me uncomfortable.  And so now we use non-related interpreters.  Ever since that staff meeting.  It was after just about the worst day I ever had.

    This man and his wife came in.  The wife didn’t speak English at all, and the husband was interpreting for her.  Well, the cleaning was causing her a lot of pain, and I mean a lot.  I could barely work on her, she kept jumping out of her skin, like you were before your shot, but much worse.  Tears were just running down her face.  And I suggested that we give her some anesthetic, you know, a shot.  And the husband said, "I’ll talk to her."  And he spoke to her.  Really sternly.  And then he said to me, "She does not want the painkiller.  Go ahead."

    Well, I went on with the cleaning, but she was still flinching and jerking a lot.  It was really hurting her.  So I stopped and I told him that I really thought she would be more comfortable if I could give her a block.  And he spoke to her again, really harshly again, and then he told me "She will be fine.  She says she does not need a pain killer."

    And I started to feel really bad about it.  I couldn’t ask her what she wanted.  I only had his word for it.  But she was crying so badly.  I felt like I was abusing her.  And I couldn’t really do my work with her jumping and flinching and crying in pain.  I have refused to work on people who refused to take a painkiller, because you just can’t if they’re jumping every time you touch them.  So I told him that I would not be able to work on her anymore unless she received anesthetic.

    He said, "Give me a moment."  And he spoke to her for a long time.  Very harshly.  And when it was all over he said to me, "She will be still now."  And… she was.  I finished the cleaning, and she didn’t.  Move. A. Muscle.  Not one more peep out of her the whole time.  I was so glad when it was over.

    And I just felt sicker and sicker about it all day.  I should have refused to treat.  I should have refused to treat her without her getting some anesthetic.  But, you know.  I could have gotten in trouble for that too, maybe.  And at the end of the day I brought it up at the staff meeting, and I said I didn’t want family members to serve as sole interpreters anymore.  And so, now they don’t. 

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    7 comments on What the dental hygienist told me while I was in the chair.

  • More on in-store health clinics.

    From the New England Journal of Medicine. 

    I didn’t know that the "Minute Clinics" we were discussing in an earlier post about them being banned in Boston had debuted here in Minnesota. 

    The article says that the menu of services offered at "typical" in-store clinics is "strikingly small," but if you look at the "sample menu" you will notice that they diagnose or treat conditions that are also strikingly common.   Apparently, my family of five could have replaced every doctor’s visit we’ve had this year, except my routine gynecology exam, with a visit to a "typical" in-store clinic.  Bladder infections, ear infections, strep throat, vaccinations, cholesterol screening, it’s all there.

    Here is a quotation that sums up well why the model appeals to me:

    Second, in-store clinics place patients in a new role, as they become responsible for sorting their medical problems according to their complexity. Because some menu items are diagnoses, there is an implicit assumption that patients can make their own clinical judgments, relying on clinics only to confirm the diagnosis and deliver the treatment. The clinics’ highly engineered business and operational models are very sensitive to misclassification. Attracting patients for whom the clinic is not configured — for instance, someone with an acute, life-threatening disease — would cause a serious delay for others in the queue and weaken the customer value proposition of speed and convenience. Clinics, however, say that such occurrences are less common than one might fear; Michael Howe, the chief executive officer of MinuteClinic, notes that less than 10% of patients are turned away at his company’s clinics, which have never had a patient present with chest pain, for instance. With regard to the circumscribed set of conditions on the menu, patients have turned out to be capable diagnosticians. Moreover, some patients — and not just those in higher socioeconomic groups — seem to be happy with this role and comfortable arranging their own care.

    I think it’s about time we shift the perception of responsibility and capability for medical decisionmaking back just a little bit onto the patient.   That physicians have to make risk-based decisions under the constant threat of unreasonable malpractice lawsuits is good for nobody.

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    1 comment on More on in-store health clinics.

  • Slow morning.

    Often I do a bigger chunk of blogging on Saturday mornings, because that’s the time of the week I can slip out before anyone else is awake, take myself out to breakfast, and then hit the coffee shop for a few hours while Mark and the kids sleep in and then go to the grocery store.   

    Today I only have about two hours.  I’m checking in from the coffee shop, but… what I really want to do is just some mindless busy work.  So I’m going to generate lists of spelling words.  I find this kind of activity relaxing and absorbing and peaceful.  I would say it’s like knitting, except that I don’t knit, so instead I will say it’s like writing code.   Pick the metaphor simile that appeals most.

    Anchor, anger, angle, angry, ankle, anxious, bangle, bank, banquet, bingo….

    —————————————–

    * (Because someone will ask:  I’m drawing them from comprehensive word lists, organized by phoneme, given to me by a curriculum-developer friend.  Each list has hundreds of words, and I’m scanning each list for a few dozen words that are appropriate for my second-grader.  I instruct the second-grader to read the whole list and choose twenty words or so. He’s tested on those twenty.) 

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  • I hear they make money off hungry and thirsty people too.

    Boston mayor tries to ban in-store health clinics.

    I’ve never been to one of these limited-service clinics — the kind that treat minor illnesses, offer flu shots, etc., inside grocery stores and pharmacies — and so I can’t comment much on the quality of care.  Still, assuming that they follow relevant regulations, are clear about their limitations,  and employ staff that are trained to spot bigger problems and recommend followup care… why not?     We already have a problem where loads of people are uninsured, seek primary care in the emergency room, and don’t get continuity of care.  Why not have some of that care be cheap and convenient, at least?  It’s another story, of course, if the in-store clinics offer care that is actually worse than the status quo for the average underinsured patient, but do they?

    I won’t come down on either side of this issue without knowing more about it, but I will name the most ridiculous quote of the story:  "Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."   It’s even more ridiculous when you remember that the retailer in question is a pharmacy.

    ADDED:  From the comments:

    It sounds like this plan would rectify a major problem in Massachusetts – we have no urgent care. You have to get all care from either your PCP [primary care provider] (translation = make an appt) or from the ED ([emergency department] translation = pay a high co-pay)…

    The other problem is that you can’t really find a PCP anymore – certainly not a good one (unless you’re in the medical field). Former Gov Romney’s health care plan mandated that everyone have insurance in the state. This meant that there was a sudden influx of people with new insurance who had to choose a PCP. As a result, PCPs quickly stopped taking new patients. And those of us that do have PCPs have trouble seeing them, due to the high number of patients.

    Nobody should come to the health care debate without facing the fact that every resource is finite.   (Who said "There are no solutions, only tradeoffs?")  And not every limit can be raised quickly by spending more money on it — the number of available slots for primary-care patients is only one example.

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    2 comments on I hear they make money off hungry and thirsty people too.

  • Local color.

    I’m trying to put together our American History reading for next year.  I’m requesting books from the library about a dozen at a time to review them.  Most are written between 1940 and 1980.  I pulled them off lists of engaging, well-written read-alouds.  Given the subject matter and the dates, I have to vet them, or at least take a look to see whether their flaws are few enough to deal with via on-the-fly word substitution.   Overly p.c.?  Um… no, I don’t think they need to hear words like "savage" quite as frequently as they turn up in these older books. 

    Even though one must select passages with care — discrimination even! —  I find the population of older books to have more specimens that are well-written by someone who loves the subject, books that assume the reader has an interest too.  Most of the pleasant read-aloud nonfiction seems to come from the depths of the Central Stacks.  Often there’s a yellowed pocket pasted in the back, a "Date Due" card tucked inside. Newer juvenile nonfiction has its good examples, but the library shelves are choked with glossy, photo-packed volumes that appear to be written by the Committee for the Propagation of Book Reports. 

    Anyway, I was flipping today through a 1959 book about pioneers in the Northwest Territory.  I’m only looking for stuff up to 1803 or so, and so was just about to toss it on the "not this year" pile when a proper noun caught my eye.  It referred to a small settlement, but it had the same unusual name as a road I remembered driving past more than once.

    I went back and looked closer.  Following a typical family from Connecticut over the hazardous trail to Ohio, said the dust jacket.   I flipped forward to where the family buys their quarter-section in the Cincinnati land office, and then forward some more to the scene where they reach their claim, one side of which is bordered by a particular creek.   

    I clicked around for a few minutes in Google Maps.  Well, we’re going to have to read this one at some point, because the (fictional) land claim is, as far as I can tell, a few miles at most from my kids’ grandparents’ house.  The creek mentioned in the story runs through their town.  I think that retracing the fictional family’s (approximate) route from the Ohio River to their claim could be a fun project to undertake by car sometime during a visit, that is, if the kids enjoy the story when we get around to reading it.

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    2 comments on Local color.

  • You know, I only get a break like this once every three to five years.

    NURSE PRACTITIONER (warming speculum under faucet): So, three children, huh. Who’s taking care of them for you this morning?

    ME (on my back with my feet in the stirrups): Um, my husband stayed home from work this morning.

    NURSE PRACTITIONER (cheerfully): Well! Lucky you! (rolling chair over between my ankles and adjusting lamp) Sounds like you’re getting a nice break today!

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    2 comments on You know, I only get a break like this once every three to five years.

  • Alone.

    Last night Oscar and his fellow second-graders lined up to be interviewed for First Confession.  (Margaret posted about the same event here.)    He did fine, passed the "test," and he is cleared to confess next week.

    His dad had practiced the interview with him for three evenings straight, and he knew the answers back and forth.  Still, yesterday morning he came downstairs, head rumpled from sleep, and crawled into my lap, folding those long legs up and curling into a ball.  "I’m scared," he told me.  "I don’t want to be interviewed.  I don’t want to go to Confession."

    These are the times when I have no prepared scripts.  I was never a seven-year-old preparing for First Sacraments.  I went through RCIA (and a feel-good version of it, I might add).  I held him, glad that the other children were still asleep.   I thought about telling him that I am sometimes scared to go to Confession too.  I decided not to, at least not until I understood his feelings a little bit more.  Maybe they are entirely different from mine, maybe I shouldn’t impose my own experience on his.  "What about it scares you?"

    "I don’t know."

    "Let’s go through it step by step and you tell me which part is scary."  One of the questions they had to learn is about the steps to making a confession, so I began with the first step.  "First you’re supposed to ‘go into the confessional and kneel.’  Think about going into the confessional.  Does that worry you all by itself?  If I said to you, ‘Oh Oscar, I left my purse in the confessional, can you go and get it,’ would that be scary to do?"

    He smiled, averting his eyes.  "Noooooo."

    "OK, so going into the confessional isn’t scary by itself.  How about kneeling?  Are you afraid to kneel?  Maybe you think it will hurt your knees."

    He smiled again.  "Nooooo."

    "The next part is to wait until Father is done with the person on the other side of the confessional.  You wait until he opens up the little door and you can hear him.  Are you afraid about waiting?"

    And then he surprised me by saying "Yes." 

    "It’s the waiting that scares you?"

    "Yes."

    I questioned him carefully.  To my surprise he didn’t seem to be afraid of Father, afraid of confessing, afraid of what Father would say to him, or afraid of the penance.  Any or all of those would have been my guess.  I had expected that.  I knew what I could say about any of those things.  But no… it was the waiting.

    "Tell me what scares you about the wait."

    He was very, very quiet and then told me:  "Because I’ll feel very alone in there."

    He nestled his face into my neck and I squeezed him a little more tightly, thankful that I had resisted the impulse to make this conversation about what I do with my confessional hangups.  The solitude and privacy of the confessional, to me, is a refuge. 

    I tried:  "There’s a crucifix inside the confessional booth.  While you are waiting, you can look at it and pray and remember that Jesus is with you.  Do you think that might help?"

    I could tell he was considering that possibility carefully.  "No," he said at last.  "A crucifix won’t help me be not lonely."

    "I can understand that."  Worth a try.  Another few minutes passed and I rocked him gently.  Then I said, "It’s okay to be scared about waiting.  Lots of people are."  Some more time went by.  "When you’re scared about waiting, you could remember the story about when Jesus was scared and sad.  You know — in the garden."

    He nodded.  "But it won’t help me be not lonely."

    "No," I said.  "It won’t help you be not lonely."  More time. "But it might help you all the same."

    He stayed there for a while and I listened to his breathing, thinking of all the things I might add, rejecting them one by one.  Any more from me would be too much.  In the end this is something he does on his own.  In the end he has to go into the confessional and kneel; to look around at the close, acoustically lined walls, at the blind and closed grille, at the painted plastic crucifix gazing mutely down;  to hear the muffling whir of the fan; to wait for the grille to open and the sound of a human voice.  We prepare them, we set it all up.  We tell them what we expect them to do.  We throw a lot at them and we hope that some of this sticks.  That it sticks in the heart and not in the craw.  I never felt the peculiar impotence of this knowledge as much as I do this week leading up to First Penance.  In the end they do it on their own.   

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    2 comments on Alone.

  • If you’ve ever done something that made you feel like a Horrible Parent ™, you must…

    …bookmark this post at finslippy, and then maybe follow the link to the original comment thread.

    Put down your coffee before you go.

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  • Manger.

    I never laid any of my babies in a crib, not even once.  I never bought a crib, never had one in the house; I never had a stroller either.  Each newborn, each infant, slept in my arms, in the warmth of my own bed, or snugged next to my heart.  That is the natural, normal, place for mother and new, tiny infant:  together, skin on skin, all the time at first; as the weeks and months and years go by, other arms are fine for a time, other beds; but the littlest ones and their mothers are by human design meant to be together. 

    Once we all knew it, right?  It’s modern culture that has us putting babies in cribs, right?

    Sunday was Epiphany.   What’s up with the manger then?

    I know about the symbolism.   He who was to be Bread of Life, Food for the world, is found in a food bin.  On the practical side, it made him easier for the shepherds to locate.  "Wrapped in swaddling clothes" isn’t very specific when you’re looking for a baby in a crowded city.   Adding the manger detail really narrowed it down.

    Still, though, what with Mary being the feminine ideal in Catholic culture, the scene is maybe a little disconcerting to attachment parents.  She gives birth to God and then she goes and puts the baby in a crib.  What are we supposed to think?  It seems almost like a repudiation of what we know, that the natural place of a baby is in his (or His) mother’s arms.  It is their nature to be together.

    Except.  This is not an ordinary Baby.   Christ has two natures, and His mother has two relationships to Him.   One, her natural relationship, her motherhood to His human nature.  With it He is rightfully in her arms:

    Mt 2:9-11. And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.   They were overjoyed at seeing the star,  and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

    Two, her destiny as mother to Him in his divine nature:  to let go, to give up, to place Him upon the wood in adoration and holy awe:

    Lk 2:15-17.  When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us."  So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.  When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child.

    Mothers who have had newborns, who have kept them close, who know the peculiar rightness of the feeling of the baby in your arms and the peculiar wrongness and emptiness when the baby’s not in your arms — however much I needed to sleep, however welcome the words "Here, let me take her for a while and let you rest," I always felt that emptiness for an instant — for you there is a special contemplation in the words laid him in a manger.   It is not the natural place for her to put her son, and Mary knows it, and we know it too.

    UPDATE.  I received an e-mail pointing out that Jesus was swaddled, not skin on skin, and that swaddling was the norm.  I don’t know if swaddling has ever been universally the norm, or indeed if it was specifically the norm for first-century Palestine, or not.  Anyway, this post is about the manger, not really the swaddling clothes.  Though I’m sure there’s some fruit for contemplation there too.

    UPDATE AGAIN:  Okay, okay, judging by the volume and general tone of my e-mail on this one (where are you all coming from?) clearly I am going nowhere with this one (okay, one person said she liked it).  Many of you have made very good points (not counting the people who say I think I’m a better mother than the Blessed Virgin — that’s just ridiculous), and I hereby withdraw it from the category of "something for everyone to contemplate" and place it back into "well, it helped ME, but YMMV."

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    11 comments on Manger.

  • RSS feed.

    Fixed, I think.  Give it a try if that’s your thing.

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    1 comment on RSS feed.

  • Info.

    I actively avoided listening to any presidential election coverage until the primary season began. 

    Politics in the abstract is a fascinating arena for considering morality, ethics, the relationship between the individual and the society, and the human condition.  Politics in the concrete makes me feel irritable and cynical.  I have many things and people who are dear to me to occupy my time.  At this point in my life I am not an opinion-maker.  I’m not a political blogger. It’s simply not worth it to me to spend time or brain cells deciphering the yammering of candidates of any stripe until the field has narrowed.  Even when I do start paying attention, I can’t help filtering everything they say through a focus-group sieve:  "He phrased that statement in that way because his handlers know that he has to connect his image to the image of such-and-such." 

    I don’t watch TV and I get most of my information online, which means that I am my own information gatekeeper.  I have not seen a single political ad. 

    I take that back.  I did click a link that took me to the Hillary Clinton one ("Merry Christmas, I took your credit card and bought you some gifts").  I didn’t mean to watch it.  It was an accident.  I have helpfully omitted linking to it so that the same thing won’t happen to you.

    Anyway, Mark and I decided that one or both of us will go to one or both of the parties’ caucuses this year.  (Why "one or both?"  Because I refuse to disenfranchise our nation’s babysitters.)  To our surprise, we discovered that this year Minnesota’s caucus is on Super Tuesday.  We’ve voted in primaries before, but neither of us has ever attended a caucus.  So we don’t exactly know what we’re doing. 

    You’d think that the state political party websites would contain easy-to-find helpful information thoroughly explaining the process and telling you where to show up in order to make your voice heard.     I was all set to write "You’d be wrong," but now I have to write something different, at least halfway.  The Minnesota DFL didn’t have any information three days ago that I could find.  It does now.   Good for them.   The Minnesota Republican website told me what building we’re supposed to show up at, but doesn’t appear to cover what we should expect when we get to the caucus, if we decide to vote in the Republican one (I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but here you can decide at the very last minute which caucus to attend). 

    This annoys me.  I have come to have an attitude of information entitlement.  Everything I want to know should be available for free on the internet.  Maybe they’re too busy trying to plan the convention.  Fortunately I have a friend who’s active in the Ron Paul campaign — she can probably explain it to me.  Hope they don’t mind if I show up with three kids.

    UPDATE FOR MINNESOTANS:  Commenters Derek and Greg suggest some links to information about Minnesota’s caucus here, here, and here.

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    5 comments on Info.

  • Brand name.

    We just got back from visiting Mark’s parents in the rural area northwest of Cincinnati.  Just before we left, an acquaintance of my father-in-law dropped off a Christmas present.  Dad carried the silvered-plastic insulated bag in from the porch.  "He said it’s a Virginia ham." 

    "Ooh, what a nice present!" I said.  (He knows I wear my appetite on my sleeve.)  "That’s a treat.  They don’t have those in Minnesota.  At least I’ve never seen one sold up there." 

    "You want it? I don’t care for that salt-cured kind." 

    I agreed enthusiastically.  It went, still wrapped, into our cooler along with a frozen package of Mark’s grandma’s homemade goetta.  We drove all day and threw the ham into the fridge and the still-frozen goetta into the freezer when we got home.

    Sunday night I thought I’d fry up slices of the ham for dinner, along with baked squash and collard greens and sauteed apples, and we’d wash it all down with a couple of cold beers.  But when I picked up the package I found it surprisingly light and, um, squishy. 

    Upon opening the silvered bag I called out to Mark, "Hey, who was it that gave this ham to your dad again?" 

    Mark named the gift-giver, somebody from Dad’s neighborhood whom I hadn’t ever met.  "Why?"

    "Tell me about him."

    "Um.  He’s not the sharpest tack in the barrel.  Why?" 

    I showed him the contents of the pouch: a four-pound log of boned, chopped, cooked, pressed, flavoring-solution-injected, pre-sliced, pale pink lunch meat, heat-sealed in plastic.  Brownish speckles, no doubt intended to signify "spice," floated in the liquid in the package, which was graced with a shiny gold sticker bearing the prominent label, "VIRGINIA BRAND delicatessen-style ham." 

    And me with only ten minutes or so before the squash was done!  After some discussion of the evidence for the refrigeration history of the ham log (the gift giver had called ahead and announced he was dropping off a "perishable" gift, and had gone to the trouble of wrapping it in an insulated bag, and the frozen stuff in the cooler had stayed frozen), we carefully and thoroughly fried up some of it for dinner anyway, ate about four bites each, and then, I’m sorry to say, threw the rest of it out.   

    We did enjoy those cold beers…

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